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Comment by joezydeco | Hacker News Reader

I was on the fence about using it for a small commercial project I'm doing, but the lifetime has been put out long enough (2041 at this point), and it's so freaking cheap that I'm going to do a one-time buy of 10 years worth of parts.

Lack of code security and onboard flash weren't dealbreakers for me here, but others will have more stringent requirements. QSPI is so incredibly cheap now.

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Ok. One thing I'm worried about is that the tooling is made for hobbyists only. Is there a way to do everything from the commandline with FOSS tools and without installing e.g. the Arduino-IDE?

I'm not sure how things are in the C land, but if you write Rust take a look at this book [1], Embassy has a very good support for the RP2040.

Probe-rs [2] works perfectly well with GDB and the CLion debugger.

[1]: https://embassy.dev/book/

[2]: https://probe.rs/

Yes. Pico SDK is C with CMake and Rust is bare metal (I think).

I'm using the CircuitPython environment. I'm editing in vi and writing directly to the USB storage on the RP2040, which reboots upon write and runs the code. It's no big deal. There's also a virtual UART off that USB connection for light debugging.

Since the RP2040 uses external flash you can pre-program the flash chips before they even get soldered on to the board. Other standard methods still work like breaking out the debug pins to some spot on your PCB so you can quickly "pogo flash" it as part of an assembly process.

Maybe with the Arduino CLI?

> Is there a way to do everything from the commandline with FOSS tools and without installing e.g. the Arduino-IDE?

Yes. In fact, the official getting started guide[0] is all command-line based, with an optional chapter later on about using VS Code if you wish.

I have a low volume product in production using the RP2040 and I've never once opened up any sort of GUI for developing the software or programming it.

[0] https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/pico/getting-started-with...

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