Maker board specialist Waveshare has quietly been selling a development board that crams the beefier Raspberry Pi RP2350B microcontroller into the exact footprint of the official Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W, and it looks like the first board to pull off that particular combination. The RP2350B-Plus-W keeps the familiar 51 x 21 mm dimensions while swapping the Pico 2 W's micro USB port for USB-C, bumping flash from 4 MB to 16 MB, and finding room for 41 GPIOs instead of the official board's 26.
That extra GPIO count comes from the QFN-80 packaged RP2350B, which exposes more pins than the smaller RP2350A used on the official Pico 2 W. Because the Pico form factor only has 40 header positions to work with, Waveshare routed the additional 15 signals to solder pads on the underside of the PCB, exposing up to 15 extra GPIOs along with additional SPI, I2C, ADC, and UART lines (many muxed with the header pins). The rest of the spec sheet mirrors the RP2350 family: dual-core Arm Cortex-M33 or dual-core RISC-V Hazard3 at 150 MHz (two cores active at a time), 520 KB of on-chip SRAM, three PIO blocks with twelve state machines, and the HSTX high-speed serial interface. Wireless is handled by the same Raspberry Pi RM2 module found on the Pico 2 W, providing 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi 4 and Bluetooth 5.2.
Waveshare also added a footprint for an optional PSRAM chip, a reset button, and a second user LED. The trade-off is the loss of the dedicated SWD debug header, and the PCB antenna pushes total length out to 55.92 x 21 mm. The board is programmable through the standard Pico C/C++ SDK, MicroPython, and the rest of the RP2350 toolchain, with setup notes available on the Waveshare wiki. The open-source credentials of the RP2350 run deeper than the toolchain. The Hazard3 RISC-V cores are an open design authored by Raspberry Pi's Luke Wren and published on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license, and official MicroPython firmware for the RP2350B Core family (v1.28.0, April 2026) ships directly from micropython.org. The PSRAM footprint is also of interest to experimenters, as developer Jesse Taube demonstrated a minimal NOMMU Linux build booting on the RP2350's Hazard3 cores via a project documented on Hackster.io that requires both PSRAM and ample flash, hardware the RP2350B-Plus-W can accommodate once the optional PSRAM footprint is populated. The closest comparable design is the Olimex RP2350-PICO2, which exposes even more GPIOs but in a longer board.
The RP2350B-Plus-W is available now starting at around $11 (€10) direct from Waveshare, with the same board also resold in Thailand as the INEX Pico-2350W bundled with local educational materials. Operating range is -20°C to +70°C (-4°F to +158°F), making it a straightforward drop-in upgrade for anyone already designing around the Pico 2 W footprint who wants more pins and flash without leaving the ecosystem.
