Arduino Core for the Raspberry Pi Pico

Question

I recently bought a Raspberry Pi Pico to play with, and am attempting to upload my first program to it the Arduino way, as my own operating system rather than a c++ program over an existing operating system (meaning to replace the built-in Raspberry Pi Pico operating system which runs MicroPython, not in the sense of running Linux, Windows, Mac, or any derivative or fork). I have not found any record of people hacking it like that - is it possible? If so, how would I go about it? Sorry if this is in the wrong Stack Exchange.

Answer 1

Official support.

Apparently there's official support for it, now anyway.

I was digging around in the Arduino-mbed core, trying to help someone else, specifically in the boards.txt and spied the line:

pico.name=Raspberry Pi Pico

Unfortunately, I don't have any way to give it a proper test as I don't have one of these. But I did go so far as to install the core and compile a simple hello world program.

In boards manager

Search for "mbed rp2040"; these names sometimes change, but those terms work well now. You can see in the lower item, I have version 2.0.0 installed.

Board menu selection

Tools/Board/Arduino Mbed OS RP2040/Raspberry Pi Pico

Seems to work.

As you see it at least builds without error. As I said, I'm unable to give it a real test. But that at least looks promising.

Answer 2

Here is the library for the Arduino IDE and a Raspberry Pi pico.

https://github.com/lrusak/Arduino-Core-Pico

Just install normally as a .zip.

Answer 3

It is worth mentioning this excellent alternative to the Arduino one from Earle F. Philhower. It seems well-maintained and doesn't depend on Mbed OS, so it leaves more space (ram and flash) for your application.

Here an informal comparative list.