Getting picotool on Linux?
seamusdemora opened this issue · comments
I've located my Pico C SDK development platform on my Ubuntu 22.04. I'm worried that I'll wear out my USB port with all of the plugging and unplugging. I understand that picotool offers a solution for this - allowing one to build & upload without the plugging, un-plugging & button-pushing (a la arduino-pico & Arduino's IDE). I've looked in at the README here & Appendix B in the Getting Started Guide, but I am still unclear on how to get picotool installed. Have I missed that??
Here's my directory setup... if someone could tell me where I need to insert the required directory, I think I can go from there.
~/pico$ tree -L 1
.
├── ina260_i2c
├── MyProjects
├── pico-examples
├── pico-extras
├── pico-playground
├── pico-sdk
Please ask this on the forums, in the meantime, read Appendix A of this document again, it should all be in there, you need PicoProbe, not Picotool. https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/pico/getting-started-with-pico.pdf
I can't use the forums because I'm "banned for life"! An exchange with someone on the forum a few years ago resulted in a lifetime ban. More recently, Elwell told me he checked & I was not banned. So I went back to the forums until the "gatekeepers" discovered me there, and double-banned me - they accused me of trying to "cheat" their original ban (not true!!). Therefore, I don't think I'm welcome there at all. Perhaps not here, either? If you want to check into this on my behalf, please feel free.
Anyway - the documentation I read said that PicoTool would allow me to upload my files on the Pico
- without the extra cabling need for SWD
- without wearing my USB connector out
Did I mis-read that also? Willpicotoolnot do this??
And as I said, I did read Appendix B in the Getting Started Guide, but it fell a wee bit short of helping me. I think all I need to know is what directory to begin the process outlined in Appendix B - a relative directory location is given (../) instead of a fixed one.
the documentation I read said that PicoTool would allow me to upload my files on the Pico
- without the extra cabling need for SWD
It will, if every UF2 you run on your Pico uses USB-STDIO, as that enables an extra USB end-point that picotool uses to flash binaries to the Pico and/or reset it. (at least that's the gist of things, I might not have got the terminology 100% correct)
As soon as you flash a UF2 that doesn't use USB-STDIO, this extra USB interface that picotool uses will no longer exist.
without wearing my USB connector out
If you're worried about wearing out your USB connector, and you don't want to use SWD, have a look at https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/how-to-add-a-reset-button-to-your-raspberry-pi-pico/
Thanks - but can you tell me which directory directory I should use to install PicoTool? The instructions in the documentation seem confusing - but perhaps I'm dense - or missing something. To be clear:
Getting picotool
The picotool utility is available in its own repository. You will need to clone and build it if you haven’t ran the pico-setup
script.
$ git clone https://github.com/raspberrypi/picotool.git --branch master
$ cd picotool
Question: what directory should I be in when I run git clone? That determines where the repo will be located, and it would seem that it must be in the proper location to work. Am I wrong?
Building picotool can be done as follows,
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ export PICO_SDK_PATH=~/pico/pico-sdk $ cmake ../
$ make
This is confusing me because from my ~/pico dir (where everything "pico-related" is housed there is already a build directory. A tree of ~/pico is as follows, and build is under pico-examples:
~/pico$ tree -L 1
.
├── ina260_i2c
├── MyProjects
├── pico-examples <=== a `build` directory is under pico-examples
├── pico-extras
├── pico-playground
├── pico-sdk
If I can get the required directory location from which to clone the PicoTool repo, and where the build directory must be located, I think I can manage it from there. Again, I'm using an Ubuntu box as my development machine, so I wasn't able to run the RPi installer script.
Thanks!
Question: what directory should I be in when I run git clone?
It doesn't matter.
and build is under pico-examples
That also doesn't matter. You typically don't have a single build directory, but one build directory per repo (or sometimes multiple build directories per repo, if you're building projects individually rather than all-at-once).
Ah! Thank you muchly & Merry Xmas!