I’d like to introduce you to Depot, the new name for an expanded version of the Raspberry Pi RP2040-based adaptor I launched last year as cli2c. Why the name change? In addition to I²C, the firmware and the client-side code that interacts with it, now supports 1-Wire, and more buses will be supported soon.
A one-time colleague of mine recently put me onto Tailscale, a rather nifty product that allows you to wrangle all of your computers, phones and more into a single, secure and Internet-spanning virtual private network (VPN). I decided to give it a try and I’m very impressed with its performance and ease-of-use — the latter very important for someone like me who’s not a network guru.
Imagine my surprise when I connected a Raspberry Pi Pico in UF2 mode to my iPad and it mounted as an accessible drive. Yes, iPadOS now supports UF2 drives, something it did not do just over a year ago when I last reported on my efforts to use an iPad as a mobile Pico development system.
The Raspberry Pi company released version 1.5.0 of the Pico SDK a week ago — right after I issued the latest version of my desktop computer-oriented I²C adaptor, which is based on the Pico’s RP2040 chip. If I’d have known about the SDK update, I would have held back — SDK 1.5.0 solves an irritating problem I’d faced with unexplained adaptor firmware hangs.
I haven’t been using a Picoprobe for a while because I needed to rebuild mine and issues with the code’s dependencies and a lack of updates from the Raspberry Pi Foundation meant I haven’t been able to get it to work properly. But I did spot this doohickey: a PCB you can solder a Pico and a header. It’s a much neater way to assemble a Picoprobe than breadboard and jumper wires.
T’other week, I wrote about my work on building a Raspberry Pi RP2040-based I²C host device and some macOS client software to control it. I mentioned that I might get the latter running under Linux too. I now have, and it does.
A short post, this, to recommend Kitronic’s Pico Pin Breakout: an add-on that makes it really easy to make sure you’re wiring up a Raspberry Pi Pico’s pins correctly. It looks like this:
This time round, I’ll wrap up my coverage of the key ARMv6-M Thumb instructions and mnemonics that you can use to command the Raspberry Pi RP2040. There are not many instructions left that were not covered in parts one and two, and I won’t be including all the remaining mnemonics, only those you’re likely to use frequently.
I was travelling when the Raspberry Pi Foundation launched the Pico W, so I had to wait to get back before I could get my hands on one. I have one now, and to try it out, I decided to port my network-oriented PicoWeather app, this time creating a MicroPython version — it was released for CircuitPython.
A number of the Cortex-M0+ Thumb ops I covered last time update the core’s Program Status Register (PSR) based on the outcome of the operation. The ops that do so have an S appended to their mnemonics and they only work with the core’s ‘low’ registers, R0-7.
smittytone messes with micros 