Iroh ports secure mesh networking to Raspberry Pi RP2350

Raspberry Pi has highlighted an experimental Rust port that runs secure iroh networking on RP2350 hardware, with public code for the Pimoroni Presto and Pico 2.

Quick summary: Raspberry Pi highlighted a working iroh networking port for the RP2350PriceAliExpress price microcontroller on 6 November 2026. The open-source demonstration runs the Rust-based stack over Wi-Fi on Pimoroni’s Presto, but it remains an experimental proof of concept rather than a new RP2350PriceAliExpress price revision, a Raspberry Pi SDK feature or a production-ready Pico 2PriceAliExpress price package.

Close-up of a circuit board and jumper wires, illustrating embedded networking development
Illustrative circuit-board photograph; it does not show an RP2350 board, Raspberry Pi Pico 2 or the iroh demonstration. Photo by Tim Käbel on Unsplash, used under the Unsplash Licence.

The announcement is new; the engineering work is earlier

Raspberry Pi’s report is dated 6 November, while iroh published the underlying engineering account on 14 September. That distinction matters: the fresh development is Raspberry Pi formally highlighting the port and its public example repository, not a newly launched chip or development board.

Iroh is a modular networking stack written in Rust. It is designed to let applications create secure direct or relayed connections across IP links such as Wi-Fi and cellular, with the wider project also targeting non-IP transports. The RP2350 demonstration currently uses Wi-Fi; it does not establish Bluetooth LE or LoRa support on Pico hardware.

How iroh was made to run on RP2350

The main obstacle was not the RP2350’s processor performance but iroh’s dependence on Rust’s standard library. Rather than maintaining a large no_std fork, the developers built an experimental standard-library environment around a custom Cortex-M33 target. It combines Raspberry Pi Pico SDK 2.1.1, FreeRTOS, Newlib, lwIP and a small amount of ESP-IDF pthread and Newlib glue.

The working demonstration uses Pimoroni’s Presto, a touchscreen product based on RP2350. Its wireless path uses the Raspberry Pi Radio Module 2 and the same Infineon CYW43439 family found in Pico W boards. Eight megabytes of external PSRAM provide the heap needed by Rust allocations and the networking stack, while internal SRAM remains available for FreeRTOS task stacks and kernel objects.

The project also had to work around the Presto display’s bandwidth demands. Its 480 × 480 framebuffer sits in PSRAM, but the second RP2350 core and DMA channels prefetch display lines into internal SRAM so the screen does not compete directly with networking allocations on every read. The resulting example runs the panel at about 31Hz while an iroh echo endpoint exchanges data over Wi-Fi.

Important limitations for makers

The public repository is unusually candid about its status: it calls the work experimental and describes the Presto setup as a hack that may not behave identically for everyone. The tested scheduler runs FreeRTOS on ARM core 0; core 1 is used explicitly by display examples rather than as a second application core. Builds use nightly Rust and a custom target, and the documented host setup was tested on Apple Silicon macOS.

There are also hardware and deployment caveats. The bare Pico 2 completed a basic “hello” test, but the team did not have a Pico 2 W available for testing. The full iroh example depends on Wi-Fi and substantial PSRAM, so it should not be assumed to fit an unmodified Pico 2 W configuration. Wi-Fi credentials are embedded in the firmware image, and the current example stores its endpoint key in the final 4KB flash sector.

Why the port is interesting

For embedded developers, the useful result is broader than one mesh demo. The work shows that a conventional Rust std environment, sockets, TLS-related allocations and a modern peer-to-peer networking stack can coexist on RP2350-class hardware when the board supplies enough external memory. That could support device-to-device control, remote access and synchronisation without forcing every application through a central cloud service.

It is still a starting point, not a support commitment. Makers can inspect and build the examples now under the repository’s MIT and Apache-2.0 licences, but products would need their own memory budget, radio validation, credential handling, update strategy and long-term maintenance plan.

For related hardware context, see our RP2040 versus RP2350 comparison, Pico 2 W pinout and wireless guide and Pico 2 W versus ESP32-C6 comparison.

Sources

Raspberry Pi: “iroh comes to our RP2350 microcontroller” (6 November 2026).

Iroh engineering report: “iroh on Raspberry Pi Pico 2 RP2350” (14 September 2026).

Iroh RP2350 example repository on GitHub.

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