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Raspberry Pi Pico SDK

The Raspberry Pi Pico SDK (henceforth the SDK) provides the headers, libraries and build system necessary to write programs for the RP-series microcontroller-based devices such as the Raspberry Pi Pico or Raspberry Pi Pico 2 in C, C++ or assembly language.

The SDK is designed to provide an API and programming environment that is familiar both to non-embedded C developers and embedded C developers alike. A single program runs on the device at a time and starts with a conventional main() method. Standard C/C++ libraries are supported along with C-level libraries/APIs for accessing all of the RP-series microcontroller's hardware including PIO (Programmable IO).

Additionally, the SDK provides higher level libraries for dealing with timers, synchronization, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth networking, USB and multicore programming. These libraries should be comprehensive enough that your application code rarely, if at all, needs to access hardware registers directly. However, if you do need or prefer to access the raw hardware registers, you will also find complete and fully-commented register definition headers in the SDK. There's no need to look up addresses in the datasheet.

The SDK can be used to build anything from simple applications, fully-fledged runtime environments such as MicroPython, to low level software such as the RP-series microcontroller's on-chip bootrom itself.

The design goal for entire SDK is to be simple but powerful.

Additional libraries/APIs that are not yet ready for inclusion in the SDK can be found in pico-extras.

Documentation

See Getting Started with the Raspberry Pi Pico-Series for information on how to setup your hardware, IDE/environment and how to build and debug software for the Raspberry Pi Pico and other RP-series microcontroller based devices.

See Connecting to the Internet with Raspberry Pi Pico W to learn more about writing applications for your Raspberry Pi Pico W that connect to the internet.

See Raspberry Pi Pico-Series C/C++ SDK to learn more about programming using the SDK, to explore more advanced features, and for complete PDF-based API documentation.

See Online Raspberry Pi Pico SDK API docs for HTML-based API documentation.

Example code

See pico-examples for example code you can build.

Getting the latest SDK code

The master branch of pico-sdk on GitHub contains the latest stable release of the SDK. If you need or want to test upcoming features, you can try the develop branch instead.

Quick-start your own project

Using Visual Studio Code

You can install the Raspberry Pi Pico Visual Studio Code extension in VS Code.

Unix command line

These instructions are extremely terse, and Linux-based only. For detailed steps, instructions for other platforms, and just in general, we recommend you see Raspberry Pi Pico-Series C/C++ SDK

  1. Install CMake (at least version 3.13), and a GCC cross compiler

    sudo apt install cmake gcc-arm-none-eabi libnewlib-arm-none-eabi libstdc++-arm-none-eabi-newlib

  2. Set up your project to point to use the Raspberry Pi Pico SDK

    • Either by cloning the SDK locally (most common) :

      1. git clone this Raspberry Pi Pico SDK repository

      2. Copy pico_sdk_import.cmake from the SDK into your project directory

      3. Set PICO_SDK_PATH to the SDK location in your environment, or pass it (-DPICO_SDK_PATH=) to cmake later.

      4. Setup a CMakeLists.txt like:

        cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.13...3.27)

# initialize the SDK based on PICO_SDK_PATH
# note: this must happen before project()
include(pico_sdk_import.cmake)

project(my_project)

# initialize the Raspberry Pi Pico SDK
pico_sdk_init()

# rest of your project

    • Or with the Raspberry Pi Pico SDK as a submodule :

      1. Clone the SDK as a submodule called pico-sdk

      2. Setup a CMakeLists.txt like:

        cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.13...3.27)

# initialize pico-sdk from submodule
# note: this must happen before project()
include(pico-sdk/pico_sdk_init.cmake)

project(my_project)

# initialize the Raspberry Pi Pico SDK
pico_sdk_init()

# rest of your project

    • Or with automatic download from GitHub :

      1. Copy pico_sdk_import.cmake from the SDK into your project directory

      2. Setup a CMakeLists.txt like:

        cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.13)

# initialize pico-sdk from GIT
# (note this can come from environment, CMake cache etc)
set(PICO_SDK_FETCH_FROM_GIT on)

# pico_sdk_import.cmake is a single file copied from this SDK
# note: this must happen before project()
include(pico_sdk_import.cmake)

project(my_project)

# initialize the Raspberry Pi Pico SDK
pico_sdk_init()

# rest of your project

    • Or by cloning the SDK locally, but without copying pico_sdk_import.cmake:

      1. git clone this Raspberry Pi Pico SDK repository

      2. Setup a CMakeLists.txt like:

        cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.13)

# initialize the SDK directly
include(/path/to/pico-sdk/pico_sdk_init.cmake)

project(my_project)

# initialize the Raspberry Pi Pico SDK
pico_sdk_init()

# rest of your project

  3. Write your code (see pico-examples or the Raspberry Pi Pico-Series C/C++ SDK documentation for more information)

    About the simplest you can do is a single source file (e.g. hello_world.c)

    #include <stdio.h>
#include "pico/stdlib.h"

int main() {
    stdio_init_all();
    printf("Hello, world!\n");
    return 0;
}

    And add the following to your CMakeLists.txt:

    add_executable(hello_world
    hello_world.c
)

# Add pico_stdlib library which aggregates commonly used features
target_link_libraries(hello_world pico_stdlib)

# create map/bin/hex/uf2 file in addition to ELF.
pico_add_extra_outputs(hello_world)

    Note this example uses the default UART for stdout; if you want to use the default USB see the hello-usb example.

  4. Setup a CMake build directory. For example, if not using an IDE:

    $ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake ..

    When building for a board other than the Raspberry Pi Pico, you should pass -DPICO_BOARD=board_name to the cmake command above, e.g. cmake -DPICO_BOARD=pico2 .. or cmake -DPICO_BOARD=pico_w .. to configure the SDK and build options accordingly for that particular board.

    Specifying PICO_BOARD=<booardname> sets up various compiler defines (e.g. default pin numbers for UART and other hardware) and in certain cases also enables the use of additional libraries (e.g. wireless support when building for PICO_BOARD=pico_w) which cannot be built without a board which provides the requisite hardware functionality.

    For a list of boards defined in the SDK itself, look in this directory which has a header for each named board.

  5. Make your target from the build directory you created.

    $ make hello_world

  6. You now have hello_world.elf to load via a debugger, or hello_world.uf2 that can be installed and run on your Raspberry Pi Pico-series device via drag and drop.

RISC-V support on RP2350

See Raspberry Pi Pico-series C/C++ SDK for information on setting up a build environment for RISC-V on RP2350.