Waveshare RP2350B-Plus-W: A Pico 2 W-Sized Board With WiFi and 41 GPIOs

If you have ever wished the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W had room for just a few more pins, the Waveshare RP2350B-Plus-W is the board you have been waiting for. Announced on June 1, 2026 (with an update the following day), this tiny maker board crams Raspberry Pi's larger RP2350B microcontroller and the official Radio Module 2 into a footprint that matches the beloved Pico 2 W. The result is a wireless, dual-architecture microcontroller that breaks out a frankly delightful 41 GPIOs while staying small enough to drop into your tightest enclosure.

What the Waveshare RP2350B-Plus-W brings to the bench

At its heart sits the RP2350B, the bigger sibling in Raspberry Pi's RP2350 family. The headline trick here is dual-core, dual-architecture flexibility: you can run it as two ARM Cortex-M33 cores or, when you want to experiment, switch to two Hazard3 RISC-V cores, both clocking up to 150 MHz. That RISC-V option alone makes this a fantastic playground for anyone curious about open instruction sets without leaving the comfortable Pico toolchain.

Wireless comes courtesy of Raspberry Pi's Radio Module 2 (RM2), the same module powering recent first-party boards. It delivers WiFi 4 (802.11n on 2.4 GHz) and Bluetooth 5.2, so your projects can phone home, host a small web UI, or pair with sensors and phones out of the box. No bolt-on ESP modules, no fiddly UART bridges, just connectivity baked into a board that measures 51 x 21 mm excluding the PCB antenna.

The GPIO count is the real story

Here is where makers should lean in. Because the RP2350B ships in a larger package than the chip on the standard Pico, Waveshare can expose a whopping 41 GPIOs: 26 along the familiar header rows plus 15 more on solder pads around the board. For context, that is a meaningful jump over what the Pico form factor usually offers, and it happens without growing the board.

Those extra 15 solder-pad pins are the kind of detail that changes what you can build. Driving a big addressable LED matrix, wiring up a multi-axis motion controller, reading a dense array of sensors, or fanning out to several I2C and SPI peripherals all become easier when you are not rationing pins. Keep the surface-mount pads for compact builds, and use the headers for breadboard prototyping.

Memory, storage, and the PSRAM door left open

The board pairs 520 KB of on-chip SRAM with 16 MB of QSPI flash, giving you generous room for code and assets by microcontroller standards. Even better for the tinkerers among us, Waveshare reserved solder pads for optional PSRAM. That means if your application grows hungry, framebuffers, larger data buffers, or more ambitious workloads, there is a clear upgrade path rather than a dead end.

Connectivity to your computer runs over a modern USB-C connector, supporting USB 1.1 host and device modes. It is a practical, reversible-cable detail that keeps the board feeling current.

Programming it: SDK or MicroPython, your call

The software story is reassuringly familiar. You can program the RP2350B-Plus-W with the official Raspberry Pi Pico C/C++ SDK when you want maximum control and performance, or reach for MicroPython when you want to iterate fast and keep things readable. Both paths are well documented across the Pico ecosystem, so existing tutorials, libraries, and community projects largely carry over.

Why this combination matters

What makes this launch notable is the pairing itself. By Waveshare's account, this is the first board to marry the compact Pico 2 W form factor with the beefier RP2350B package. In plain terms, you get the small size and wireless convenience makers already love, plus the pin abundance that previously meant stepping up to a physically larger development board. That is a genuinely nice sweet spot.

At roughly $10.99 from Waveshare, it also lands at a price that makes stocking a couple for your parts drawer an easy call. Whether you are building a connected sensor node, a RISC-V learning rig, or a pin-hungry controller for your next gadget, the RP2350B-Plus-W looks like a versatile little workhorse worth a spot on the bench.

Sources: CNX Software, June 1, 2026; Waveshare, June 2026