Challenger+ RP2350 WiFi6/BLE5 Review - No Need to Wait for the Pico 2 W

The Challenger+ RP2350 WiFi6/BLE5 is a microcontroller board with the new dual core Cortex-M33/RISCV RP2350 from Raspberry Pi. It has 8MByte of FLASH memory and 8MByte of PSRAM plus WiFi/BLE via an Espressif ESP32-C6 chip.

It supports the the following development environments:
Raspberry Pi Pico C/C++ SDK
Arduino
MicroPython
CircuitPython
---

Earle Philhower's Arduino-Pico

Buy the Challenger+ RP2350 WiFi6/BLE5:

#garyexplains

[MandoRick]

£23.60 here in the UK. Not gonna happen Gary. New Pico 2 is £4.80. New Pico 2 W should be around £6 to £7. Hardly a comparison.

[M.EdwardBorasky]

In case you missed it, there's a Linux kernel running on the RISC-V cores of a SparkFun Pro Micro RP2350.

[richsadowsky]

Another great rp2350-related video. One comment on this new Challenger board is it seems a little bit expensive. At 249kr that's about $24.31 USD. I will order one anyway because the feature set is desirable. I will add that I had bought two Challenger NB RP2040 WiFi boards last year and one of them failed. That's why I buy two of most dev boards especially new releases. I'm currently the Pimoroni line of 2350 products and so far none have failed. Of course, none have WiFI/BLE support yet either.

[MandoRick]

Hey Gaz, cheers for the videos man. Gary, can we give Earle Philhower III some love? I am so super appreciative for his work. I liked the Pico, but the Philhower core made me love the Pico.

[jeffschroeder]

These micro-controllers are becoming so incredibly capable - it is difficult to utilize them to their full potential.

[RichardNobel]

Nice! I've been looking into *ESP32-C6* because of its support for the *Zigbee* protocol.

According to the Espressif product page:
> _"ESP32-C6 combines 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g/n/ax), Bluetooth 5 (LE), and IEEE 802.15.4 radio connectivity, which is vital for making the Thread and Zigbee protocols available in a variety of cases of application development."_
That's quite a lot of connectivity!

This Challenger+ board sounds like a winning combination together with RP2350. 🏆✨

Interesting how the ESP32-C6 has a 32-bit RISC-V processor and the RP2350 also includes RISC-V cores. 🤓

[john_hind]

Any third party boards that bring out all the IO from the larger version of the chip package yet? Only one I could find was the Pimoroni Stamp, but that is really a pure breakout without even a USB connector. Trouble seems to be everybody is using established form factors that do not have sufficient pins (including the Pico 2 itself!).

[johnwilson]

If you're in a rush to have WiFi and BT on your RP2350 - there is a cheaper alternative. I bought a few ESP32-C3 Super Mini from Aliexpess for £1.30 each and used one of them on my Pimoroni Pico 2 + to give that networking capability. It was a case of blowing the Expressive AT firmware onto the C3 and using a MOSFET with a couple of resistors to reset (power cycle) the ESP. I also had a Pimoroni Wireless Jetpack in my spares box and WiFi works a treat over SPI using one of these. Unfortunately, Pimoroni no longer sell these boards.

[Механизм-жя]

I like the idea of universal connector for i2c, spi, uart.
Or maybe we should popularize i3c as a modern interconnect solution.

[bertblankenstein]

Yhea at 6:00 you talk about the RPi Pico 2 W having an ESP32 C6. Similar to the Arduino 4 w wifi. I'm a bit more on the ESP32 controllers so .. I will wait for the Pico 2 W and get some of those. Raspberry Pi has pretty good products and I'll stick to that line.

[JoshFisher]

The ESP32-P4 doesn't have WiFi or Bluetooth either, they released their first development board and it uses a C6 for WiFi/BT/Zigbee/Thread. It can decode h264 at 1080p30fps, has over 50 usable GPIO pins and dedicated pins for Ethernet (100Mbps).

[gabecgeo]

Pico 2W is here, the Challenger+ has more flash and esp32 as wifi for which I'd be even willing to pay. Yet the post fee from ilabs (Sveden) cost almost as much as the board itself :/

[tuesss]

I'll be honest, I was hoping for an actual review and some crucial information like:
- What is the power consumption?
- Can the ESP32-C6 chip wake up the RP2350 from deep sleep, for example after receiving some data over network?

[hstrinzel]

I'm finding it amazing that NOBODY has posted ANY projects yet with the Pico 2, or am I just too impatient? For the original Pico there are TONS of projects, but not for the Pico 2.

[milel]

Another great video, thanks. Would like to have seen an arduino inatall on vscode though.

[skipperbanks]

This is all nice however I have a 1 acre property and I want to communicate between any controller on that property. Someone needs to support Lora or something out of the box. I may need to use ESP Now on a different controller. By the way I have communicated with Gary in the past, one of the best guys on earth ( and perhaps Mars also ) :)

[Simple-Circuit-Projects]

Gary, enjoy your informative videos. Sorry this comment is off topic but it will be a while before I get my hands on a Pico 2. I have not been able to find any linearity test data on the ADC. I was wondering if you could do a short video on the ADC performance.

Thx

[maarkkk]

There is another aspect - using two uC instead of one means more power used. And being used to specific programming environment is not good excuse in such applications :)

[freddyvretrozone]

Hi,
Is there a library for pico sdk and esp32 ? C6 or C3 ?

[perditaolio]

you know about the issues with the internal pull-down resistors?