Raspberry Pi Pico 2 Projects (RP2350)

Have you tried to learn the new RP2350 chip and felt the gap between blinking an LED and building something real?

The Raspberry Pi Pico 2 is one of the most capable low-cost microcontroller boards available today. Dual ARM Cortex-M33 cores with hardware floating point. Twelve programmable I/O state machines. A second core architecture you can boot into. Hardware security features that used to require chips ten times the price. The Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W adds Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on top of all that. The hardware is remarkable. The hard part is figuring out what to do with it.

Most tutorials cover the basics: install the SDK, blink an LED, read a button. Then they stop. You can find official datasheets that go hundreds of pages deep into register-level detail, but they assume you already know how everything fits together. The middle ground - the practical, project-driven, here-is-how-you-actually-use-this knowledge - has been missing.

This book takes you from that first blinking LED all the way to designing custom RP2350 boards ready for manufacturing. Twenty-five chapters cover every major peripheral on the chip: GPIO, ADC, PWM, I2C, SPI, UART, timers, PIO, DMA, multicore, the FPU, interpolators, USB device and host modes, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, motor control, audio, displays, sensors, and the security features that make the RP2350 unique. Three appendices give you a glossary, a complete pin reference, and a curated guide to further resources.

Are you new to embedded programming and want a path that does not require reading a massive datasheet first? The first four chapters cover the workshop you need, your first programs in both C and MicroPython, and how to read schematics and datasheets when you do need them. By Chapter 5 you are reading sensors and driving real circuits.

Already comfortable with microcontrollers but new to the RP2350 specifically? Skip ahead to the parts that matter for the new chip: PIO programming with the new RP2350 instructions, the floating-point unit, the hardware interpolators, the dual-architecture ARM-and-RISC-V boot flow, and the security peripherals that did not exist on the older RP2040.

The writing is direct and practical. No filler. No hype. Each chapter opens with a real problem, walks through the patterns that solve it, shows the code you would actually write, and ends by setting up the next step. Code examples are annotated for both ARM and RISC-V where it matters. The tone assumes you can think for yourself and simply want the right information, organized well.

By the end you will have written code that talks to sensors over I2C and SPI, generated waveforms with PWM and PIO, moved megabytes per second with DMA, run code on both cores in parallel, decoded quadrature encoders in hardware, used the floating-point unit for real-time DSP, built a captive portal for Wi-Fi configuration, sent sensor data over MQTT, controlled DC, stepper, and brushless motors with closed-loop feedback, driven OLED and TFT displays at sixty frames per second with DMA, and produced audio with both PWM and external I2S DACs.

Every chapter includes complete examples in C using the official Pico SDK and in MicroPython where it is the better tool. Chapter projects build on each other, so by the second half of the book you are combining peripherals into real systems - a multicore graphics dashboard, a small two-wheel robot with PID-controlled motors, a Wi-Fi-connected weather station, a USB MIDI controller, and a custom RP2350 board ready for manufacturing.

If you want to stop skimming datasheets, start building with confidence, and understand how to turn the RP2350 into something genuinely useful, this book will help you get there.