Arduino-Pico

Arduino-Pico

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Raspberry Pi Pico Arduino core, for all RP2040 and RP2350 boards

This is a port of Arduino to the RP2040 (Raspberry Pi Pico processor) and RP2350 (Raspberry Pi Pico 2 processor). It uses the bare Raspberry Pi Pico SDK and a custom GCC 16.1/Newlib 4.6 toolchain and supports ARM and RISC-V cores.

Documentation

See arduino-pico.readthedocs.iohttps://arduino-pico.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ (opens in a new tab) along with the examples for more detailed usage information.

Contributing

Read the Contributing Guide (opens in a new tab) for more information on submitting pull requests and porting libraries or sketches to this core.

Supported Boards

• Raspberry Pi Pico
• Raspberry Pi Pico W
• Raspberry Pi Pico 2
• Raspberry Pi Pico 2W
• 0xCB Helios
• Adafruit Feather RP2040
• Adafruit Feather RP2040 SCORPIO
• Adafruit Feather RP2040 DVI
• Adafruit Feather RP2040 Adalogger
• Adafruit Feather RP2040 RFM
• Adafruit Feather RP2040 ThinkINK
• Adafruit Feather RP2040 USB Host
• Adafruit Feather RP2040 CAN
• Adafruit Feather RP2040 Prop-Maker
• Adafruit ItsyBitsy RP2040
• Adafruit Metro RP2040
• Adafruit QT Py RP2040
• Adafruit STEMMA Friend RP2040
• Adafruit Trinkey RP2040 QT
• Adafruit MacroPad RP2040
• Adafruit KB2040
• Adafruit Feather RP2350 Adalogger
• Adafruit Feather RP2350 HSTX
• Adafruit Floppsy
• Adafruit Metro RP2350
• Adafruit Fruit Jam RP2350
• Amken BunnyBoard
• Amken Revelop
• Amken Revelop Plus
• Amken Revelop eS
• Architeuthis Flux Jumperless
• Architeuthis Flux Jumperless V5
• Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect
• ArtronShop RP2 Nano
• BIGTREETECH SKR-Pico
• Breadstick Raspberry
• BridgeTek IDM2040-7A
• BridgeTek IDM2040-43A
• Cytron IRIV IO Controller
• Cytron Maker Nano RP2040
• Cytron Maker Pi RP2040
• Cytron Maker Uno RP2040
• Cytron Motion 2350 Pro
• Cytron Maker Sumo RP2350
• DatanoiseTV PicoADK
• DatanoiseTV PicoADK v2
• Degz Robotics Suibo RP2040
• DeRuiLab FlyBoard2040Core
• DFRobot Beetle RP2040
• L'atelier d'Arnoz DudesCab
• ElectronicCats HunterCat NFC RP2040
• EVN Alpha
• ExtremeElectronics RC2040
• GeeekPi RP2040 Plus
• GroundStudio Marble Pico
• iLabs Challenger 2040 LTE
• iLabs Challenger 2040 LoRa
• iLabs Challenger 2040 SubGHz
• iLabs Challenger 2040 WiFi
• iLabs Challenger 2040 WiFi/BLE
• iLabs Challenger 2040 WiFi6/BLE
• iLabs Challenger NB 2040 WiFi
• iLabs Challenger 2040 SD/RTC
• iLabs Challenger 2040 NFC
• iLabs Challenger 2040 UWB
• iLabs Connectivity 2040 LTE/WiFi/BLE
• iLabs RPICO32
• iLabs Challenger 2350 WiFi/BLE
• iLabs Challenger 2350 BConnect
• iLabs Challenger 2350 NB-IoT
• iLabs Challenger ZP 2350 LoRa
• iLabs CPico 2350
• Makerbase MKS THR36
• Makerbase MKS THR42
• Melopero Cookie RP2040
• Melopero Shake RP2040
• METE HOCA Akana R1
• MyMakers RP2040
• MyMakers RP2350B
• Neko Systems BL2040 Mini
• Newsan Archi
• nullbits Bit-C PRO
• Olimex Pico2BB48
• Olimex Pico2XL
• Olimex Pico2XXL
• Olimex RP2040-Pico30
• Pcbcupid GLYPH 2040
• Pcbcupid GLYPH MINI 2040
• PicoLume Transceiver
• Pimoroni PGA2040
• Pimoroni PGA2350
• Pimoroni PicoPlus2
• Pimoroni PicoPlus2W
• Pimoroni Plasma2040
• Pimoroni Plasma2350
• Pimoroni Plasma2350W
• Pimoroni Servo2040
• Pimoroni Tiny2040
• Pimoroni Tiny2350
• Pimoroni Explorer
• Pintronix PinMax
• RAKwireless RAK11300
• redscorp RP2040-Eins
• redscorp RP2040-ProMini
• Generic Sea-Picro
• Silicognition RP2040-Shim
• Solder Party RP2040 Stamp
• Solder Party RP2350 Stamp
• Solder Party RP2350 Stamp XL
• Soldered Electronics NULA RP2350
• Soldered Electronics NULA Ethernet W55RP20
• Soldered Electronics NULA Node
• SparkFun IoT RedBoard RP2350
• SparkFun MicroMod RP2040
• SparkFun ProMicro RP2040
• SparkFun ProMicro RP2350
• SparkFun Thing Plus RP2040
• SparkFun Thing Plus RP2350
• SparkFun IoT Node LoRaWAN
• SparkFun XRP Controller (Beta)
• SparkFun XRP Controller
• Seeed INDICATOR RP2040
• Seeed XIAO RP2040
• Seeed XIAO RP2040 Plus
• Seeed XIAO RP2350
• uPesy RP2040 DevKit
• VCC-GND YD RP2040
• Vicharak Shrike-Lite
• Viyalab Mizu RP2040
• Waveshare RP2040 Zero
• Waveshare RP2040 One
• Waveshare RP2040 LoRa
• Waveshare RP2040 Matrix
• Waveshare RP2040 PiZero
• Waveshare RP2040 Plus
• Waveshare RP2040 LCD 0.96
• Waveshare RP2040 LCD 1.28
• Waveshare RP2350 Core
• Waveshare RP2350 Zero
• Waveshare RP2350 PiZero
• Waveshare RP2350 Plus
• Waveshare RP2350B Plus W
• Waveshare RP2350 LCD 0.96
• Waveshare RP2350-POE-ETH
• WeAct Studio RP2350B Core Board
• WIZnet W5100S-EVB-Pico
• WIZnet W5100S-EVB-Pico2
• WIZnet W5500-EVB-Pico
• WIZnet W5500-EVB-Pico2
• WIZnet W55RP20-EVB-Pico
• WIZnet W6300-EVB-Pico
• WIZnet W6300-EVB-Pico2
• WIZnet WizFi360-EVB-Pico
• Generic RP2040
• Generic RP2350

Features

• Adafruit TinyUSB Arduino (USB mouse, keyboard, flash drive, generic HID, CDC Serial, MIDI, WebUSB, others)
• Bluetooth on the PicoW (Classic and BLE) with Keyboard, Mouse, Joystick, and Virtual Serial
• Bluetooth Classic and BLE HID master mode (connect to BT keyboard, mouse, or joystick)
• Generic Arduino USB Serial, Keyboard, Joystick, and Mouse emulation
• WiFi (Pico W, ESP32-based ESPHost, Atmel WINC1500)
• Ethernet (Wired WizNet W6300, WizNet W6100, WizNet W5500, WizNet W5100, ENC28J60)
• HTTP client and server (WebServer)
• SSL/TLS/HTTPS
• Over-the-Air (OTA) upgrades
• Filesystems (LittleFS and SD/SDFS)
• Multicore support (setup1() and loop1())
• FreeRTOS SMP support
• Overclocking and underclocking from the menus
• digitalWrite/Read, shiftIn/Out, tone, analogWrite(PWM)/Read, temperature
• Analog stereo audio in using DMA and the built-in ADC
• Analog stereo audio out using PWM hardware
• Bluetooth A2DP audio source (output) and sink (input) on the PicoW
• USB drive mode for data loggers (SingleFileDrive, FatFSUSB)
• Peripherals: SPI master/slave, Wire(I2C) master/slave, dual UART, emulated EEPROM, I2S audio input/output, Servo
• printf (i.e. debug) output over USB serial
• Transparent use of PSRAM globals and heap (RP2350 only)
• ARM or RISC-V (Hazard3) support for the RP2350
• Semihosted serial and file system access
• GPROF profiling support

The RP2040 PIO state machines (SMs) are used to generate jitter-free:

• Servos
• Tones
• I2S Input
• I2S Output
• Software UARTs (Serial ports)
• Software SPIs

Installing via Arduino Boards Manager

Windows-specific Notes

Please do not use the Windows Store version of the actual Arduino application because it has issues detecting attached Pico boards. Use the "Windows ZIP" or plain "Windows" executable (EXE) download direct from arduino.cchttps://arduino.cc (opens in a new tab). and allow it to install any device drivers it suggests. Otherwise the Pico board may not be detected. Also, if trying out the 2.0 beta Arduino please install the release 1.8 version beforehand to ensure needed device drivers are present. (See #20 for more details.)

Linux-specific Notes

Installing Arduino using flatpak (often used by "App Stores" in various Linux distributions) will mean it has restricted access to the host. This might cause uploads to fail with error messages such as the following:

Scanning for RP2040 devices
...
No drive to deploy.

If you encounter this, you will need to either install Arduino in a different manner, or override the flatpak sandboxing feature using the following command, then restarting Arduino.

flatpak override --user --filesystem=host:ro cc.arduino.IDE2

Installation

Open up the Arduino IDE and go to File->Preferences.

In the dialog that pops up, enter the following URL in the "Additional Boards Manager URLs" field:

github.comhttps://github.com/earlephilhower/arduino-pico/releases/download/global/package_rp2040_index.json (opens in a new tab)

Hit OK to close the dialog.

Go to Tools->Boards->Board Manager in the IDE

Type "pico" in the search box and select "Add":

Installing via GIT

Windows Users: Before installing via git on Windows, please read and follow the directions in this link (opens in a new tab). If Win32 long paths are not enabled, and git not configured to use them then there may be errors when attempting to clone the submodules.

To install via GIT (for latest and greatest versions) under Linux or Mac:

mkdir -p ~/Arduino/hardware/pico
git clone https://github.com/earlephilhower/arduino-pico.git ~/Arduino/hardware/pico/rp2040
cd ~/Arduino/hardware/pico/rp2040
git submodule update --init --recursive
cd tools
python3 ./get.py

For Windows, you need have Python already installed and git clone in a different path:

mkdir %USERPROFILE%\Documents\Arduino\hardware\pico
git clone https://github.com/earlephilhower/arduino-pico.git %USERPROFILE%\Documents\Arduino\hardware\pico\rp2040
cd %USERPROFILE%\Documents\Arduino\hardware\pico\rp2040
git submodule update --init --recursive
cd tools
python .\get.py

Uploading Sketches

To upload your first sketch, you will need to hold the BOOTSEL button down while plugging in the Pico to your computer. Then hit the upload button and the sketch should be transferred and start to run.

After the first upload, this should not be necessary as the arduino-pico core has auto-reset support. Select the appropriate serial port shown in the Arduino Tools->Port->Serial Port menu once (this setting will stick and does not need to be touched for multiple uploads). This selection allows the auto-reset tool to identify the proper device to reset. Them hit the upload button and your sketch should upload and run.

In some cases the Pico will encounter a hard hang and its USB port will not respond to the auto-reset request. Should this happen, just follow the initial procedure of holding the BOOTSEL button down while plugging in the Pico to enter the ROM bootloader.

Uploading Filesystem Images

The onboard flash filesystem for the Pico, LittleFS, lets you upload a filesystem image from the sketch directory for your sketch to use. Download the needed plugin from

• github.comhttps://github.com/earlephilhower/arduino-pico-littlefs-plugin/releases (opens in a new tab)

To install, follow the directions in

• github.comhttps://github.com/earlephilhower/arduino-pico-littlefs-plugin/blob/master/README.md (opens in a new tab)

For detailed usage information, please check the ESP8266 repo documentation (ignore SPIFFS related notes) available at

• arduino-pico.readthedocs.iohttps://arduino-pico.readthedocs.io/en/latest/fs.html (opens in a new tab)

Uploading Sketches with Picoprobe/Debugprobe

If you have built a Raspberry Pi Picoprobe, you can use OpenOCD to handle your sketch uploads and for debugging with GDB.

Under Windows a local admin user should be able to access the Picoprobe port automatically, but under Linux udev must be told about the device and to allow normal users access.

To set up user-level access to Picoprobes on Ubuntu (and other OSes which use udev):

echo 'SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="2e8a", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0004", MODE="660", GROUP-"plugdev"' | sudo tee -a /etc/udev/rules.d/98-PicoProbe.rules
echo 'SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="2e8a", ATTRS{idProduct}=="000a", MODE="660", GROUP="plugdev"' | sudo tee -a /etc/udev/rules.d/98-PicoProbe.rules
echo 'SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="2e8a", ATTRS{idProduct}=="000f", MODE="660", GROUP="plugdev"' | sudo tee -a /etc/udev/rules.d/98-PicoProbe.rules
sudo udevadm control --reload
sudo udevadm trigger -w -s usb

The first line creates a device file in /dev matching the USB vendor and product ID of the Picoprobe, and it enables global read+write permissions. The second line causes udev to load this new rule. The third line requests the kernel generate "device change" events that will cause our new udev rule to run.

If for some reason the device file does not appear, manually unplug and re-plug the USB connection and check again. The output from dmesg can reveal useful diagnostics if the device file remains absent.

Once Picoprobe permissions are set up properly, then select the board "Raspberry Pi Pico (Picoprobe)" in the Tools menu and upload as normal.

Debugging with Picoprobe, OpenOCD, and GDB

The installed tools include a version of OpenOCD (in the pqt-openocd directory) and GDB (in the pqt-gcc directory). These may be used to run GDB in an interactive window as documented in the Pico Getting Started manuals from the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Use the command line ./system/openocd/bin/openocd -f ./lib/rp2040/picoprobe_cmsis_dap.tcl or ./system/openocd/bin/openocd -f ./lib/rp2350/picoprobe_cmsis_dap.tcl from the git installation directory.

Licensing and Credits

• The Arduino IDE and ArduinoCore-API (opens in a new tab) are developed and maintained by the Arduino team. The IDE is licensed under GPL.
• The RP2040 GCC-based toolchain (opens in a new tab) is licensed under under the GPL.
• The Pico-SDK (opens in a new tab) is by Raspberry Pi (Trading) Ltd and licensed under the BSD 3-Clause license.
• Arduino-Pico (opens in a new tab) core files are licensed under the LGPL.
• LittleFS (opens in a new tab) library written by ARM Limited and released under the BSD 3-clause license (opens in a new tab).
• UF2CONV.PY (opens in a new tab) is by Microsoft Corporation and licensed under the MIT license.
• Networking and filesystem code taken from the ESP8266 Arduino Core (opens in a new tab) and licensed under the LGPL.
• DHCP server for AP host mode from the Micropython Project (opens in a new tab), distributed under the MIT License.
• FreeRTOS (opens in a new tab) is copyright Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates, and distributed under the MIT license.
• lwIP (opens in a new tab) is (c) the Swedish Institute of Computer Science and licenced under the BSD license.
• BearSSL (opens in a new tab) library written by Thomas Pornin, is distributed under the MIT License (opens in a new tab).
• UZLib (opens in a new tab) is copyright (c) 2003 Joergen Ibsen and distributed under the zlib license.
• LEAmDNS (opens in a new tab) is copyright multiple authors and distributed under the MIT license.
• http-parser (opens in a new tab) is copyright Joyent, Inc. and other Node contributors.
• WebServer code modified from the ESP32 WebServer (opens in a new tab) and is copyright (c) 2015 Ivan Grokhotkov and others.
• Xoshiro-cpp (opens in a new tab) is copyright (c) 2020 Ryo Suzuki and distributed under the MIT license.
• FatFS low-level filesystem (opens in a new tab) code is Copyright (C) 2024, ChaN, all rights reserved.
• TLSF memory manager for PSRAM from Espressif fork (opens in a new tab) of original (opens in a new tab) by Matthew Conte is copyright Matthew Conte and licensed under the MIT license.
• ESPHost library (opens in a new tab) is LGPL licensed by its maintainers.
• iLabs_ESP-NOW library (opens in a new tab) is licensed under the MIT license by iLabs Electronics.
• iLabs_Hearth library (opens in a new tab) is licensed under the MIT license by iLabs Electronics.
• PicoCamera (opens in a new tab) camera library is licensed under the MIT license by umeko.

-Earle F. Philhower, III
earlephilhower@yahoo.com (opens in a new tab)