rp2350

32 Articles

Is This The Only Instrument You Need?

October 29, 2026 by 14 Comments

When working on an electronic project it’s likely you will find yourself working with a variety of different instruments, be they logic analysers, oscilloscopes, or whatever. These can take up a lot of space, not to mention cost a bundle of cash. [Max.K] came up with PicoLab as a solution, it’s an all-in-one box containing a four-channel oscilloscope, eight-channel logic analyser, GPIOs, a data logger, and serial, SPI, and i2C interfaces. There’s even an adjustable power supply!

Behind it all is an RP2350, in its larger package with more pins, coupled to some custom interface and protection circuitry. Perhaps the cleverest part is its interface, which it serves as a web site on the network card it exposes through the USB port. Any OS that supports a web browser and USB networking can thus use this thing. You can find all the code in a GitHub repository, should you wish to have a go at building one yourself. We like this idea.

Does It Run… Duke Nukem 3D?

October 13, 2026 by 16 Comments

When id Software released DOOM back in 1993 it helped define the genre, but it was hardly the only hit first-person shooter of that decade. There was also 3D Realms’ 1996 Duke Nukem 3D, a game which added some humor to the genre. Here’s [PicoPlus-devel], with pico-duke3D. It’s Duke Nukem 3D, on an RP2350.

Before reaching the conclusion that this might be obvious and easy, the three years between the two releases saw quite significant movements in the world of gaming PCs. DOOM’s minimum spec in 1993 was a 386 and 4 MB of memory, and would have been playable on a basic VGA card in an ISA slot. By contrast three years later Duke Nukem 3D required at least a 486DX2 and 8 MB, which would inevitably have had VESA local bus or PCI graphics. It’s a Quake competitor rather than a DOOM competitor, thus the power required to run it has stepped up a notch or two.

The RP2350 then is up to the job, and runs the game on a DVI equipped Pico clone. It can be controlled via either SNES or USB controllers given the right hardware, making it the perfect one-game console. The shareware game works, as does the full version if you own a copy. Having been around in the ’90s then, we’re curious. Could it be made to run Shadow Warrior as well? You no mess with Lo Wang!

Taking A Nokia 3310 Game Jam To The N’th Degree

October 11, 2026 by 3 Comments

Game jams are a fun competition in which the aim is to write a game under a particular theme while under a time constraint, usually a weekend.  [Hoani] entered one where the aim was to write a game within the constraints of the Nokia 3310’s user interface: a 94 by 48 pixel grey LCD, a buzzer, and a keypad. His entry was Trick Shot II, a ball-bouncing game running on his game engine, which is cool enough, but making a custom PCB for a Nokia 3310 case to run it on? Next level.

Look away if you don’t like restomods, for a real Nokia 3310 is gutted to take this board. On it is a Pi Pico, the Nokia LCD, which has outlasted the original phone as a part by decades, and a Nokia keypad layout. The first prototype was not a perfect fit because it had a 1.6mm board rather than 1mm.

The engine meanwhile is written in Go, and has both graphics and sound APIs. Considering that the Pico’s power exceeds whatever CPU the phone had by many orders of magnitude, we’d imagine it has no problems with such a tiny screen.

We like the attention to detail of this project, and that such a limited interface can still deliver gaming fun. Meanwhile, if you would prefer to use a 3310 as a phone, you can charge it the 21st-century way.

Solve Your TTL Video Woes With An RP2350

October 7, 2026 by 7 Comments

Before HDMI and DVI there was VGA, and before that? TTL RGB, in which instead of analogue voltages, the connector carried TTL logic voltages. TTL monitors used to be ten a penny because nobody wanted them in the VGA era, but the decades have not been kind to the TTL video aficionado. Stuck with a TTL card and no compatible monitor? Never fear, for [Charlysan] has your back with a TTL-to-DVI converter using an RP2350. The PIOs are used to sample the TTL input to a framebuffer, and the rest of the 2350 does the DVI magic using PicoDVI.

It requires a bit of level shifting hardware, which at minimum can be a set of resistors, and it targets the Waveshare RP2350-PiZero which comes with a handy ready-made HDMI socket. There’s a USB serial terminal to manage the thing, for which there’s even a TK GUI script.

This is the type of project which may never be center stage, yet performs such a vital function that it becomes indispensable. It’s not the first such project we’ve seen, a previous one did the same for VGA.

The RP2350 Does 1080p

September 21, 2026 by 16 Comments

Coaxing a DVI signal out of a microcontroller to drive a DVI or HDMI screen has been possible for a while now, but limitations in what the devices can do has, in turn, placed a limit on the resolution that can be delivered. Now [Aaron Gayle] has broken through a barrier by generating 1080p video from an RP2350. The previous best from Raspberry Pi Pico-class microcontrollers was 720p, which an RP2040 could deliver. The 2350 is faster and has faster peripherals, but even then, to reach this resolution he had to overclock it to 372 MHz. For all the impressive achievement, there’s still a limitation. Lacking space for a framebuffer, he generates scanline by scanline, a technique we associate more with 8-bit computers from the 1980s.

The 1080p video code is part of a package called TVtop, a board game in which the game board is displayed on the TV and whose players interact from their phones via Wi-Fi. For that reason, there’s an ESP32 in the project too, though it has nothing to do with the video hack.

Continue reading “The RP2350 Does 1080p” →

Laser Your Way Into Debug Mode On The RP2350

September 19, 2026 by 24 Comments

The RP2350 is actually a pretty secure chip, all things considered. It has secure boot, ARMv8’s TrustZone to split secure and non-secure execution, and you can permanently disable debug — the Pi Foundation even included glitch detection, meaning the traditional ‘zap the chip until it obeys’ technique is blocked. That’s why the [Ledger Donjon] security team went full Bond Villain and strapped everyone’s favourite fruit-flavoured microcontroller to a table with a slowly-approaching laser beam.

Continue reading “Laser Your Way Into Debug Mode On The RP2350” →

Every ZX81 Expansion Card You Ever Wanted, All At Once

September 15, 2026 by 25 Comments

The Sinclair ZX81 was a masterpiece of Sir Clive’s desire to get the most out of the least hardware, being about as minimalist as it was possible to get and still be a home computer in 1981. As such it has a keyboard, a Z80, TC and cassette interfaces, 1K of memory, and that was it. There were any number of add-ons for it, but if you were a 1980s kid the chances are you couldn’t afford them. So 45 years later here’s [adam.klotblixt] with OpenSpand — every ZX81 expansion you could think of, all in one!

For a start there’s a RAM expansion. Not the paltry 16K of old, this is user-configurable and has the whole 64K address space minus the ROM to play with. Then there’s SD card storage, hijacking Sinclair BASIC’s LOAD and SAVE commands. It’s got high-res graphics, emulated sound chips, a joystick port, serial ports, a choice of ROMs, and a composite video output. Perhaps the only thing it doesn’t have from back in the day is a printer interface, but we’re sure the serial port could be pressed into service somehow.

It does this all as you might expect these days, with an RP2350 emulating the real parts. The microcontroller disables the onboard RAM and ROM and emulates those too, such is the disparity in power between it and a Z80. We would have done anything for this expansion, back in the day.

The ’81 features here quite often, most recently in a look at Sinclair’s own RAM expansion.