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RPi's toolchain situation is awful for beginners/hobbyists. CMake and non-manifest-versioned toolchains are a huge barrier to entry. I'd love to use the hardware but have given up multiple times because I'd rather spend my time writing code than wrestling with toolchain setup. And they won't support platformio which could make things massively easier for beginners to set up.

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I've never used their toolchain, I use Rust on the RP2040 and it's a breeze to set up.

But yeah there's also CircuitPython where you literally drag and drop a firmware blob onto the volume that shows up when plugging in an RP2040 board, and then you're just editing a Python-esque script to do stuff. Not sure what could be easier when it comes to starting with embedded stuff. You can even use the Arduino IDE with RP2040 boards if you like.

https://learn.adafruit.com/getting-started-with-raspberry-pi...

While I've written Rpi Pico applications in C++, IMO CircuitPython/MicroPython is a far better environment for that processor.

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