Introduction to C Development Environment for Raspberry PICO

Building an Efficient Development Environment

The Raspberry PI Foundation has released the Raspberry PI Pico and Pico-W as powerful and cheap microcontrollers (RP2040). You can develop for these microcontrollers using Python or C/C++. Only with C and C++ can you get the full power of the device including access to the dual cores and the programmable IO capability.

Getting going can feel hard and you are all thumbs. The bootsel loading strategy (like a USB key) can feel tedious within the development cycle. There are better ways to set up your environment to support an efficient Raspberry Pico development environment. So you can stop worrying about the tools and start focusing on your project.

Join us on this course to find out how to set up a working environment to:

• Easily build and deploy code quickly to the Raspberry Pico or RP2040 boards

• Reuse other libraries as building blocks for your own work.

• Debug your work through GUI debugging environment

• Use of Eclipse or VSCode IDEs for the Pico

• Build projects for the Raspberry PI Pico 2 and RP2350 boards

• Build using the VSCode Pico Extension or a natively installed Toolchain

The course requires students to have:

• Raspberry PI Pico or Pico-W, which will be our target

• Windows, Mac, or Ubuntu desktop environment to develop through, and install tools on

• Optionally Raspberry PI 4 running Ubuntu or Raspberry OS, which can be used as a build and debug probe

• Either a Raspberry PI Debug Probe or a Second Pico to act as a Probe for flashing and debugging

• Awareness of CMake or ability to self-study this utility

The skills you will learn and the development environment you will set up will work for both the Pico and Pico W . Example projects for both boards are provided for the course.

Prerequisite experience:

The course is focused on the set-up of environments for Raspberry Pico C/C++ development. Some knowledge of C/C++ is expected though the examples used are all very basic.

For Pico, some soldering is required to attach header pins to the Pico and familiarity with soldering is desirable. Or you could buy the Pico-H or Pico-WH which are pre-soldered.

In the libraries section, some simple external electronics are used (5mm LED and 75ohm resistor). Beginner knowledge of electronics or willingness to do some external reading is required. Very straightforward though.