So I’ve just gotten one of the new raspberry pi picos version 2, and since it’s been a long time since I’ve been working with proper emdedded devices I wanted to take stab at getting a blinky program up and running. This is a good way to get started and familiarizing myself with the development environment.

So since I’m using Fedora linux I need install some other packages than what’s listed on the SDK description. I already have a bunch of “development stuff” installed, such as git, cmake etc.

I wanted to be able to write in C or C++, so I figured that the pico-sdk would be a good starting point for me. This requires arm compilers to be available. These can be installed with

sudo dnf install gcc-arm-linux-gnu \
                 arm-none-eabi-gcc-cs-c++ \
                 arm-none-eabi-gcc-cs \
                 arm-none-eabi-binutils \
                 arm-none-eabi-newlib

Afterwards you need to clone the SDK and you can also clone the examples. This would be

git clone --recursive https://github.com/raspberrypi/pico-sdk.git
git clone --recursive https://github.com/raspberrypi/pico-examples.git

Just as an example you can copy the blinky code example to a new directory

cp -r pico-examples/blink my-blinky
cd my-blinky

The pico SDK readme lists a couple a ways to use the SDK, and I’ve kind of done a mixture of a couple of ways. Edit the CMakeLists.txt using the steps descibred by the pico SDK readme. Prepend the CMakeLists.txt with the following lines

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.13)

include(/home/kotte/workspace/pico-sdk/pico_sdk_init.cmake)

project(blink)

pico_sdk_init()

Finally, remove the example_auto_set_url(blink) line at the end of the file, as this seem to be tied to the examples build system, and at the moment I don’t care about that.

Finally, given that this board is a raspberry pi pico 2, build with the following commands

cmake -B build -DPICO_BOARD=pico2
cmake --build build

This should have produced build/blink.uf2, which is the binary file expected by the Raspberry pi pico bootloader.

To program the raspberry pi, hold the BOOTSEL button, and connect it to the computer.

Mount the image using

udisksctl mount -b /dev/disk/by-label/RP2350
# This will print the mount point, which for me is /run/media/$USER/RP2350
cp build/blink.uf2 /run/media/$USER/RP2350

Now, if everything is done correctly, the board should now be blinking!