Running an RP2350 project off a single Ethernet cable is now straightforward. Waveshare's new RP2350-POE-ETH pairs Raspberry Pi's dual-architecture microcontroller with a WIZnet W6300 Ethernet controller and optional 802.3af Power-over-Ethernet, all on a board measuring just 6.3 x 2.1 cm (2.5 x 0.8 inches). The W6300 connects over QSPI and includes a hardwired TCP/IP stack with dual IPv4/IPv6 support, which offloads network processing from the MCU and has been shown to push throughput past 80 Mbps on a 10/100 link.
At the core is the RP2350A, which can run two Arm Cortex-M33 cores, two RISC-V Hazard3 cores, or one of each at 150 MHz. The board carries 520KB of internal RAM and 2MB of SPI NOR flash, with two 16-pin headers (through-hole and castellated) breaking out up to 20 GPIO, four 12-bit ADC channels, and the RP2350's HSTX high-speed serial transmit peripheral. A USB-C 1.1 port handles programming and power when PoE is not in use. The PoE module plugs into a 6-pin connector on the board and is sold as an optional add-on, keeping the base price low for projects that only need wired networking without cable-powered deployment.
Waveshare publishes documentation and schematics on its wiki and provides a GitHub repository with firmware and an MQTT-over-Ethernet sample in MicroPython, C/C++, and Arduino, all released under the Apache License 2.0. Beyond Waveshare's own samples, WIZnet's WIZnet-ioNIC organization maintains a parallel open-source C SDK for the RP2350 and W6300 combination, with example repositories covering lwIP networking, FreeRTOS, Modbus, and cloud IoT integrations for AWS and Azure. The board ships in four variants, from a bare PCB without PoE starting at $14 (€13) up to $19 (€17) for the version with PoE module and pre-soldered headers.
