I have installed the pico c++ SDK tool chain on win10 platform using the following link which I got from the raspberry pi documentation - I cannot remember how I got there:
It is supposed to work out of the box, but did not ask the questions it is supposed to ask even though I deleted and re installed again multiple times. After spending several days I cannot get it to work.
I am not familiar with using the visual studio platform and do not know how I am supposed to compile c++ code and download.
I have looked for some YTube help and they are all about 2 years old and seem to have a different way of operating. For instance the CMake file looks completely different.
I note that the example folder contains many examples but none of them have been compiled and they are supposed to be compiled - so something has consistently gone wrong.
Can someone please help me to get the blink example and hello world example to work.
Hi Clem, to what end to you want to get to here - are you specifically trying to use C++ in VS Code?
You can still program in C++ using Arduino for Pico which might be a friendlier way to start.
If you’re dead-set on VS code we can still work harder on that too
Hi Michael,
If you are asking for my ultimate wish list:
I want to program the RP2040 using C in an easy to use platform.
I have a lot of small experiments that I need to do which includes interfacing to hardware and running fast code involving the precision timer etc.
I have used the arduino platform before but wanted a 32 bit processor like the RP2040 and so I went away from the arduino platform. I want to work with the RP2040 processor initially in the pico environment and later I may make my own, for purpose, board.
A lot of people talk about visual studio as being a good development environment but I have resisted looking at it for a long time - probably because of my disdain for microsoft. But it is free and possibly I should learn to use it. If I can get this working quickly I will use it. If not I will consider installing the development tools on a raspberry pi. Now there is the other option of Arduino which I will not rule out.
One thing is essential is that I need to be able to compile code for the pico which will use the ethernet hardware available on some versions of the pico. This will be an essential part of the way I will use this.
So can I be sure that the Arduino platform will make it easy to implement pico code with ethernet compatibility and make it easy to reverse engineer the ethernet interface so that I can make my code minimal for my specific applications?
No guarantees at all I’m afraid - but it might be a really useful springboard to get moving towards a very functional prototype.
Still, I appreciate now why you’d want to stick to VSCode.
I found this Shawn Hymel guide (he does really high quality stuff) that might be a bit better supported than the flat tutorial.md file you’ve been attempting to follow
At about 2 minutes into the video there are multiple options for installing on windows, the second appearing to be a fair bit more straightforward, using 'minGW". Linked below, but also linked in Shawn’s article.
These resources look really promising - I hope they help.
I’ve personally never tried building the C toolchain for windows so I’m afraid all i can do is try to help with my Google-fu
