I feel like the flaws of the Pico 2/RP2350 should be advertised better. The Pico is great. I waisted half of an extremely frustrating day with a Pico 2 before suspecting the board itself was the problem, and confirming it with very specific searches that brought up threads about the issue. The internal pull-downs don't work.
Maybe it's my fault for not making it to page 1357 (!) of the datasheet, where the issue is described as "RP2350-E9".
> Guess I'm not moving on from the RP2040 anytime soon...
Doesn't matter what you move to, there's still going to be 2000 pages of datasheets+errata, and one line in the middle of all of that will tell you "This does not work".
That's why for hobbyists it's best to stick to devices with a large community around them, who surface niche problems in community forums.
However, with everyone moving to Discord, this will no longer be useful too...
This is unfortunately not emphasized with many breakout boards. It pays off to skim errata sections at the start of a project. All hardware has errata, and it ranges from incorrect details and minor malfunctions all the way through to broken peripherals and all manner of critical malfunctions.
To be clear, this isn't a problem with the breakout board. The issue is inside the microcontroller itself, which, iiuc, is why there is such a long lead time on fixing it.
While I agree that reading the errata absolutely should be on the "mandatory TODO before you start" list for any project (esp with new/unfamiliar hardware), one should be equally aware that manufacturers aren't always transparent about the defects in their products, sometimes failing to note that entire subsystems, frankly, don't work.
Something is just not right in the Raspberry Pi design team if at this point ESP32 have less unpleasant surprises. New RP micros always turn out have disappointing bugs that make them just shy of considering using for actual embedded projects.
Maybe it's my fault for not making it to page 1357 (!) of the datasheet, where the issue is described as "RP2350-E9".
https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/rp2350/rp2350-datasheet.p...