Plasma 2350
by Pimoroni
An all-in-one, USB-C powered controller for WS2812/Neopixel and APA102/Dotstar addressable LED strips.
Plasma 2350 is powered and programmable by USB-C and, because USB-C is capable of drawing up to 3A of power, that’s enough to power a healthy chunk of LEDs. There’s a useful button that you could use to switch between effects, plus a reset button and an onboard RGB LED. We’ve also popped a QW/ST connector on there, to make it super easy to plug in Qwiic or STEMMA QT breakouts.
You can buy a Plasma 2350 on its own, or in a kit with a USB-C cable and some super-cool LED stars, so you can get started lighting stuff up right away.
Features
- Powered by RP2350A (Dual Arm Cortex M33 running at up to 150MHz with 520KB of SRAM)
- 4MB of QSPI flash supporting XiP
- Compatible with 5V WS2812/Neopixel/SK6812 and APA102/Dotstar/SK9822 LEDs
- Screw terminals for attaching your LED strip.
- USB-C connector for power and programming (3A max)
- Qw/ST (Qwiic/STEMMA QT) connector
- Intriguing new SP/CE connector
- Reset, BOOT and a user button (the BOOT button can also be used as a user button)
- RGB LED
- Fully-assembled (no soldering required)
- Measurements: approx 61 x 22 x 12mm (L x W x H, including connectors)
- Programmable with C/C++ or MicroPython
About RP2350
The RP2350 chip is the Double Quarter Pounder & Fries to the RP2040’s Double Cheeseburger and can have one or more RISC-V burgers instead of either of the M33 ARMs, to stretch the metaphor.
In addition to the modern M33 ARM cores, there are sides of: more PIO capability, a variety of low power states for sipping electrons, a whole security system and some sprinklings of specialist digital video circuits to offload DVI/HDMI output.
You can expect a tasty boost in performance - our “real world” MicroPython tests are running up to 2x faster compared to RP2040, and floating point number crunching in C/C++ is up to 20x faster. The extra on-chip RAM will make a big difference when performing memory intensive operations (such as working with higher resolution displays) and even more can be added thanks to external PSRAM support.
RP2350 comes in two flavours - A (standard) and B (all the pins). The B chip has a stonking 48 usable GPIO pins, including 8 ADCs and 24 PWMs, and features on some of our new products.
Purchase
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CircuitPython 9.2.0-alpha.2351
This is the latest development release of CircuitPython that will work with the Plasma 2350.
Alpha development releases are early releases. They are unfinished, are likely to have bugs, and the features they provide may change. Beta releases may have some bugs and unfinished features, but should be suitable for many uses. A Release Candidate (rc) release is considered done and will become the next stable release, assuming no further issues are found.
Please try alpha, beta, and rc releases if you are able. Your testing is invaluable: it helps us uncover and find issues quickly.
Release Notes for 9.2.0-alpha.2351
Built-in modules available: _asyncio , _bleio , _pixelmap , adafruit_bus_device , adafruit_pixelbuf , aesio , analogbufio , analogio , array , atexit , audiobusio , audiocore , audiomixer , audiomp3 , audiopwmio , binascii , bitbangio , bitmapfilter , bitmaptools , bitops , board , builtins , builtins.pow3 , busdisplay , busio , busio.SPI , busio.UART , codeop , collections , countio , digitalio , displayio , epaperdisplay , errno , floppyio , fontio , fourwire , framebufferio , getpass , gifio , hashlib , i2cdisplaybus , i2ctarget , imagecapture , io , jpegio , json , keypad , keypad.KeyMatrix , keypad.Keys , keypad.ShiftRegisterKeys , keypad_demux , keypad_demux.DemuxKeyMatrix , locale , math , memorymap , microcontroller , msgpack , neopixel_write , nvm , onewireio , os , os.getenv , paralleldisplaybus , pulseio , pwmio , qrio , rainbowio , random , re , rgbmatrix , rotaryio , rp2pio , rtc , sdcardio , select , sharpdisplay , storage , struct , supervisor , synthio , sys , terminalio , time , touchio , traceback , ulab , usb , usb_cdc , usb_hid , usb_host , usb_midi , usb_video , vectorio , warnings , watchdog , zlib ,
Absolute Newest
Every time we commit new code to CircuitPython we automatically build binaries for each board and language. The binaries are stored on Amazon S3, organized by board, and then by language. These releases are even newer than the development release listed above. Try them if you want the absolute latest and are feeling daring or want to see if a problem has been fixed.
Previous Versions of CircuitPython
All previous releases of CircuitPython are available for download from Amazon S3 through the button below. For very old releases, look in the OLD/ folder for each board. Release notes for each release are available at GitHub button below.
Older releases are useful for testing if you something appears to be broken in a newer release but used to work, or if you have older code that depends on features only available in an older release. Otherwise we recommend using the latest stable release.