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We (Pimoroni) actually shipped this technique in PicoVision, used to load the “GPU” firmware (an RP2040 used to offload the HDMI signal generation) at runtime-

https://github.com/pimoroni/picovision/blob/main/drivers/dv_...

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What are the advantages of doing this instead booting it through UART? Speed perhaps?

I think RP2040 does not support UART booting.

In theory you wouldn’t even need to load firmware- you could just manipulate the relevant registers directly over SWD for the silliest IO expander.

In our case it was the only choice. I’d say we’d use UART now but the RP2350 can pretty much do it all in one chip.

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