Grab whatever RP2350 board is sitting in your parts drawer — Adafruit shipped CircuitPython 11.0.0-alpha.1 on September 24, and it's a solid weekend flash if you've been putting off the jump from the 10.x line.
The headline change is a new alarm module for RP2350, the chip inside boards like the Pico 2. It adds light sleep, deep sleep, and both time-based and pin-based wake alarms, plus sleep memory that survives a deep sleep cycle. That's the piece battery-powered sensor projects have been missing: park the chip in deep sleep, wake it on a GPIO pin change or a timer, read a sensor, go back to sleep. On the USB side, the RP2xxx port picked up isochronous IN support through an updated Pico-PIO-USB fork, which matters if you're streaming audio or HID data over USB instead of polling it.
What else changed
- Espressif boards (ESP32, S2, S3, C3, C6) get new
hmacandhardwarekeymodules for keyed-hash authentication without exposing the key in your code. - Nordic nRF52840 and nRF52833 boards now use the "turbo" machine-code
.mpyloader for faster library imports. - Two new boards join the list: the ELIO Eliobot S3 and the Espressif ESP32-S3-BOX-3.
- The
broadcom,litex, andrenodeports were dropped, so check the port list before you flash unusual hardware.
Parts and cost reality: zero. You don't need new hardware — six port families (SAMD21/SAMx5x, Sony Spresense, the Espressif ESP32 line, Nordic nRF52840/nRF52833, RP2040/RP2350, and STM32F4) are already marked stable for this release. Your existing 10.x CircuitPython library bundle still works on 11.0.0 builds, so a library swap isn't required either. Grab the .uf2 for your board from circuitpython.org/downloads, hold BOOTSEL, drag the file onto the drive that mounts, and you're on 11.0.0-alpha.1.
Full changelog and known issues live on the GitHub release page. It's an alpha, so back up your code.py and libraries before you flash, and expect rough edges on the six ports still marked alpha (MAX32690, ESP32-P4, i.MX RT10xxx, Silicon Labs MG24, non-F4 STM32 chips, and Zephyr). Found a bug? File it against the 11.0.0 milestone on GitHub — that's how a release like this gets to stable.
Originally published on blog.circuit.rocks.
