Raspberry Pi Pico Arduino core, for all RP2040 boards
This is a port of the RP2040 (Raspberry Pi Pico processor) to the Arduino ecosystem. It uses the bare Raspberry Pi Pico SDK and a custom GCC 10.2/Newlib 4.0 toolchain.
See https://arduino-pico.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ along with the examples for more detailed usage information.
- Raspberry Pi Pico
- Adafruit Feather RP2040
- Adafruit ItsyBitsy RP2040
- Adafruit QTPy RP2040
- Adafruit STEMMA Friend RP2040
- Adafruit Trinkey RP2040 QT
- Generic (configurable flash, I/O pins)
Windows Users: 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 https://arduino.cc. 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.)
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:
https://github.com/earlephilhower/arduino-pico/releases/download/global/package_rp2040_index.json
Hit OK to close the dialog.
Go to Tools->Boards->Board Manager in the IDE
Type "pico" in the search box and select "Add":
To install via GIT (for latest and greatest versions):
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
cd pico-sdk
git submodule update --init
cd ../pico-extras
git submodule update --init
cd ../tools
python3 ./get.py
Tom's Hardware presented a very nice writeup on installing arduino-pico on both Windows and Linux, available at https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/program-raspberry-pi-pico-with-arduino-ide
If you follow Les' step-by-step you will also have a fully functional CMake-based environment to build Pico apps on if you outgrow the Arduino ecosystem.
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.
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
To install, follow the directions in
For detailed usage information, please check the ESP8266 repo documentation (ignore SPIFFS related notes) available at
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 'SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="2e8a", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0004", GROUP="users", MODE="0666"' | sudo tee -a /etc/udev/rules.d/98-PicoProbe.rules
sudo udevadm control --reload
The first line creates a file with the USB vendor and ID of the Picoprobe and tells UDEV to give users full access to it. The second causes udev to load this new rule. Note that you will need to unplug and re-plug in your device the first time you create this file, to allow udev to make the device node properly.
Once Picoprobe permissions are set up properly, then select the board "Raspberry Pi Pico (Picoprobe)" in the Tools menu and upload as normal.
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.
- Adafruit TinyUSB Arduino (USB mouse, keyboard, flash drive, generic HID, CDC Serial, MIDI, WebUSB, others)
- Generic Arduino USB Serial, Keyboard, and Mouse emulation
- Filesystems (LittleFS and SD/SDFS)
- Multicore support (setup1() and loop1())
- Overclocking and underclocking from the menus
- digitalWrite/Read, shiftIn/Out, tone, analogWrite(PWM)/Read, temperature
- Peripherals: SPI master, Wire(I2C) master/slave, dual UART, emulated EEPROM, I2S audio output, Servo
- printf (i.e. debug) output over USB serial
The RP2040 PIO state machines (SMs) are used to generate jitter-free:
- Servos
- Tones
- I2S Output
Here are some links to coverage and additional tutorials for using arduino-pico
- The File:: class is taken from the ESP8266. See https://arduino-esp8266.readthedocs.io/en/latest/filesystem.html
- Arduino Support for the Pi Pico available! And how fast is the Pico? - https://youtu.be/-XHh17cuH5E
- Pre-release Adafruit QT Py RP2040 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfC1msqXX0I
- Adafruit Feather RP2040 running LCD + TMP117 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKDeqZiIwHg
- Demonstration of Servos and I2C in Korean - https://cafe.naver.com/arduinoshield/1201
If you want to contribute or have bugfixes, drop me a note at earlephilhower@yahoo.com or open an issue/PR here.
- The Arduino IDE and ArduinoCore-API are developed and maintained by the Arduino team. The IDE is licensed under GPL.
- The RP2040 GCC-based toolchain is licensed under under the GPL.
- The Pico-SDK and Pico-Extras are by Raspberry Pi (Trading) Ltd and licensed under the BSD 3-Clause license.
- Arduino-Pico core files are licensed under the LGPL.
- LittleFS library written by ARM Limited and released under the BSD 3-clause license.
- UF2CONV.PY is by Microsoft Corporation and licensed under the MIT license.
- Some filesystem code taken from the ESP8266 Arduino Core and licensed under the LGPL.
-Earle F. Philhower, III earlephilhower@yahoo.com