3. The μC and Code Development

The μC that we are going to study throughout this course is RP2040 which is designed and manufactured by Raspberry Pi. As discussed in previous chapter, a μC on its own is not sufficient to run a program. It for sure needs a clock signal, components that would help provide required power, maybe an external flash and some resistors and capacitors that might be necessary for a proper functioning of the μC.

Rather than dealing with all this on our own, we’ll use a board known as Raspberry Pi Pico which is built around RP2040 μC. We could have also used any of the following boards, which also uses RP2040, with none to minimal change in our code.

• Adafruit Feather RP2040

• Pimoroni Pico LiPo

• SparkFun Pro Micro RP2040

• Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect

Note

We’ll refer to the Raspberry Pi Pico board as the μC from here on out unless stated otherwise.

The appendix on the Software Installation provides steps to install all the software necessary to write and compile code/program that can run on the μC. At the end of the appendix, the steps to compile a code/program are also provided. In this chapter, we’ll go over a simple program and discuss how the code development process works.

• 3.1. RP2040 and Raspberry Pi Pico
• 3.2. Code Development Process
• 3.3. μC-Laptop Communication