I got almost all of my wishes granted with RP2350

Gross, the dev board uses micro-USB. It's 2024! Otherwise amazing work. Exactly what's needed to compete with the existing giants.

Perhaps the unfortunate choice of micro USB is to discourage real consumer products from being built with the dev board.

I wonder if it is more about simply shaving a few cents off. Full USB-C protocol implementation may be much more difficult.

It saves cost and none of the features of USB-C (speed, power delivery etc) are supported. Makes sense.

USB-C doesn't require anything special USB wise as it's decoupled from the versioned standard. It just has more pins and works with all modern cables. Ideally the cables won't wear out like Mini and Micro and get loosey goosey in the ports.

FWIW the Pimoroni Tiny 2040 and Tiny 2350 use usb-c, but as mentioned by other commenters, the cost for these usb-c boards is higher.

I love having usb-c on all my modern products, but with so many micro-usb cords sitting around, I don't mind that the official Pico and Pico 2 are micro-usb. At least there are options for whichever port you prefer for the project you're using it in.

Yep, a USB-C connector is more or less a drop in replacement for MicroUSB if you don’t need USB3 or USB-PD. With one aggravating exception: it requires adding two 5.1kΩ pulldown resistors to be compatible with C-C cables. Thus signaling to a charger that the sink is a legacy non-PD device requesting 5V.

Which is apparently an impossible ask for manufacturers of dev boards or cheap devices in general. It’s slightly more understandable for a tried and true dev board that’s just been connector swapped to USB-C (and I’ll happily take it over dealing with Micro) but inexcusable for a new design.

My hope is Apple going USB-C only on all their charging bricks and now even C-C cables for the iPhone will eventually force Chinese OEMs to build standard compliant designs. Or deal with a 50% Amazon return rate for “broken no power won’t charge”.

As someone who just picked micro USB over USBC for a development card, there is a significant price and footprint size difference between the two.

For the microcontroller however, the use in commercial products is encouraged.

There are one-time programmable registers for Vendor, Product, Device and Language IDs that the bootloader would use instead of the default. It would be interesting to see if those are fused on the Pico 2.

For a device, USB-C requires two resistors that older USB ports don't.

Declaring yourself as a host/device is also a bit different: USB-C hardware can switch. Micro USB has a "On-the-go" (OTG) indicator pin to indicate host/device.

The USB PHY in RP2040 and the RP2350 is actually capable of being a USB host but the Micro USB port's OTG pin is not connected to anything.

I would assume it's in order to maintain mechanical compatibility with the previous Pico.

USB-C is way more complicated, even if you're not trying to push 4K video or 100W power through it. The interface chip ought to be more complex, and thus likely more expensive.

You can still find a number of cheap gadgets with micro-USB on Aliexpress. Likely there's some demand, so yes, you can build a consumer product directly on the dev board, depending on your customer base.

Chinese boards are both cheaper and have usb type c implemented correctly and in spec, so that's no real excuse for raspberry pi

Hm, I've used mine as a USB host with an adapter? Not sure of the details, I suppose OTG is the online/runtime switching and I was just running as fixed host?

How are they "way more complicated?" You have to add two resistors and short another pair of DP/DM lines?

You can use a USB C connector with standard USB, no interface chip required. It's simply a connector form-factor change.

Yes, indeed, I've checked, and apparently you don't need anything beyond this if you don't want super speed or power delivery (past 5V 3A).

I did not realize how many pins in a USB-C socket are duplicated to make this possible. (For advanced features, you apparently still need to consider the orientation of the inserted cable.)

the price difference from usb to usb-c is less than 2 cents

You would be surprised at the amount of effort and success $0.01 represents at BigCo. Even when projected sales are in 6 figure range.

How about connections not becoming flaky after you've plugged in the cable a few times. Micro USB was horribly unreliable. USB-C isn't great either, but it's an improvement. Maybe they will get it right some day.

I always hear that but I never had a micro usb fully fail on me but my phone's usb-c are lint magnets and get super loose and refuse to work. When that happened on micro it was usually the cable tabs a bit worn but the cable always worked.

devil's advocate: cables for an average user is a different story. also not to forget the vast range of cables already existing out there.

also "proper" usb-c support is another can of worms, and maybe sticking to an older standard gives you freedom from all that.

You're confusing USB C and USB 3.1+. USB C is just the physical spec. You can design a cheap device that will only support USB 2 if you just connect ground, Vbus, D+ and D- and gasp add two resistors. It will work just as well as the micro-usb plug.

The Pico 2 Plus[1] has USB-C, and seems quite reasonably priced to me given you get 16MB of Flash and 8MB PSRAM.

[1]: https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/pimoroni-pico-plus-2

A USB-C port that only supports USB2 data and power only needs a few resistors across some pins to trigger legacy modes and disable high current/voltage operation. All the extra bits are the things that jack up the cost.

USB3 and altmodes require extra signal lines and tolerances in the cable.

High-voltage/current requires PD negotiation (over the CC pins AFAIK)

Data and power role swaps require muxes and dual-role controllers.

That's all the stuff that makes USB-C a pain in the ass, and it's all the sort of thing RPi Nanos don't support.

completely valid, but i would like to think the org is still designing for accessibility for newbies in mind.

like you said, the connector does not have to follow the standards. i have seen hdmi ports being used to carry pcie signal (not a good like but here is one such device https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/cards_adapter/pce164p-no6-ver...) amgon other things. it is still non-standard behaviour.

Using an USB C port to carry an USB 2.0 signal is perfectly within the standards.