Friends,
I have made a few small Pico projects. I was getting pretty okay with the SDK, although dealing with cmake nonsense, especially on initial project setup, is still a bit grating for me. It took a fair number of hours for me to get productive with the SDK.
I am working on a project to make a motor with a hall effect encoder for the output shaft. The encoder I'm planning to use already has an Arduino driver. I have ported Arduino drivers to the Pico SDK before (see for example this code, which I used to facilitate porting this library to the Pico SDK). However, this new driver I need to use is a bit more involved and uses a larger fraction of the Arduino SDK.
I was getting depressed thinking of the effort required to do the rest of the porting, so I decided to finally try the Arduino-Pico core via PlatformIO. It took me a number of hours to do all of the steps necessary to get the PicoSDK working over SWD, so I was expecting an arduous trek to do the same thing with Arduino. I was greatly surprised, however! I was up and running in a mere hour or so of work! And now I can use all these Arduino drivers that the folks at Sparkfun and Adafruit and elsewhere have written!
I was also surprised to find that you can still use FreeRTOS, LWIP, and all that good stuff via Arduino. So I'm really giving up almost nothing to use this thing. And it seems like I'm gaining the possibility that my code will work on systems other than the Raspberry Pi Pico -- so for example, I could write the code for the Pico, and maybe it would also work on an ESP32 board.
I guess it's no wonder that a lot of the YouTubers who do microcontroller-related work use the Arduino SDK -- it seems like for small hobby projects, this might be the most productive direction. As far as I can tell from brief use, it works great on the Pico. If you're on the fence, I really recommend you try it out.
To be clear, this is not a knock against the truly excellent Pico SDK. I still think the folks as Raspberry Pi have done a great job putting the SDK together and I never had a problem with it that wasn't due to my own newbishness. But Arduino seems like a great HAL to use if it suits your needs.
I have made a few small Pico projects. I was getting pretty okay with the SDK, although dealing with cmake nonsense, especially on initial project setup, is still a bit grating for me. It took a fair number of hours for me to get productive with the SDK.
I am working on a project to make a motor with a hall effect encoder for the output shaft. The encoder I'm planning to use already has an Arduino driver. I have ported Arduino drivers to the Pico SDK before (see for example this code, which I used to facilitate porting this library to the Pico SDK). However, this new driver I need to use is a bit more involved and uses a larger fraction of the Arduino SDK.
I was getting depressed thinking of the effort required to do the rest of the porting, so I decided to finally try the Arduino-Pico core via PlatformIO. It took me a number of hours to do all of the steps necessary to get the PicoSDK working over SWD, so I was expecting an arduous trek to do the same thing with Arduino. I was greatly surprised, however! I was up and running in a mere hour or so of work! And now I can use all these Arduino drivers that the folks at Sparkfun and Adafruit and elsewhere have written!
I was also surprised to find that you can still use FreeRTOS, LWIP, and all that good stuff via Arduino. So I'm really giving up almost nothing to use this thing. And it seems like I'm gaining the possibility that my code will work on systems other than the Raspberry Pi Pico -- so for example, I could write the code for the Pico, and maybe it would also work on an ESP32 board.
I guess it's no wonder that a lot of the YouTubers who do microcontroller-related work use the Arduino SDK -- it seems like for small hobby projects, this might be the most productive direction. As far as I can tell from brief use, it works great on the Pico. If you're on the fence, I really recommend you try it out.
To be clear, this is not a knock against the truly excellent Pico SDK. I still think the folks as Raspberry Pi have done a great job putting the SDK together and I never had a problem with it that wasn't due to my own newbishness. But Arduino seems like a great HAL to use if it suits your needs.
Statistics: Posted by jags84 — Tue Oct 29, 2024 2:31 pm