A Look Back at the Raspberry Pi Ecosystem in 2025
If 2024 was the year Raspberry Pi flexed its mainstream muscle, 2025 proved it still knows how to surprise the embedded crowd. Between new silicon, industrial modules and a premium desktop Pi that doubles as a love letter to mechanical keyboards, the platform showed it’s not just keeping pace, it’s shaping the edge computing scene.
Here’s a look at some highlights.
Major Hardware Releases
16GB Raspberry Pi 5
The year kicked off strong: the Pi 5 finally maxed out its RAM with a 16GB variant, rounding out the family lineup (2, 4, 8 and 16GB). More headroom for container-heavy dev setups and larger AI inference workloads.
5” Touch Display 2
In August, Raspberry Pi released a 5-inch version of its Touch Display 2, a compact and surprisingly affordable ($40) option with the same 720×1280 resolution as the 7-inch model. It’s perfect for embedded HMI or portable projects that don’t need full tablet real estate.
Raspberry Pi 500+
In September, Raspberry Pi released the Pi 500+, a sleek all-in-one system built into a mechanical keyboard. It packs a 2.4GHz Cortex-A76, 16GB of LPDDR4X and a 256GB NVMe SSD. The keyboard itself runs QMK firmware on an RP2040, complete with Gateron KS-33 Blue switches and per-key RGB lighting you can actually hack.
Software, Silicon & Ecosystem Updates
RP2350: Open-Security Initiative and Standalone Challenge
The RP2350 isn’t just a microcontroller — it’s the centerpiece of a bold “security through transparency” experiment by Raspberry Pi Ltd.. With the RP2350, Raspberry Pi laid out a public invite: if you think you can break its security protections, here’s your shot.
Raspberry Pi OS and Tooling
The October release of Raspberry Pi OS (2025-10-01), built on Debian Trixie, continued the steady march of polish and performance. The rpi-image-gen is a new tool that makes crafting custom images painless.
Neuromorphic Vision Arrives
Also in October, the release of the Prophesee’s GenX320 Starter Kit brought event-based, neuromorphic vision to the Pi 5, giving developers access to true event-based sensing for edge-AI work. Instead of capturing full image frames, the sensor reports only brightness changes as they happen, delivering ultra-low-latency, low-power vision ideal for robotics and real-time detection tasks.
Industrial and Commercial Adoption
The SECO Pi Vision 10.1 CM5 launched in October – October was an especially busy month in the RPi ecosystem – delivered an IP66-rated 10.1-inch HMI system with native support for SECO’s Clea IIoT software, ready to deploy straight into factory environments.
Official Handbook
Rounding out the month was the October release of the Official Raspberry Pi Handbook 2026. It includes 200 projects, hardware deep dives and a detailed feature on the Pi 500+.
A Breakout Year for Raspberry Pi
From beefed-up RAM and industrial CM5 deployments to neuromorphic vision and QMK-powered keyboards, 2025 showed that Raspberry Pi is evolving in every direction at once. So whether you’re building edge-AI demos or hacking your own secure MCU firmware, the Pi ecosystem in 2025 had something for you.
For more on Raspberry Pi, read Smarter EEPROM Programming with the Raspberry Pi Pico 2W.