The RaspberryPi Pico

As a part of my MEng Project at Cornell University, I have worked intensively with the new RaspberryPi Pico microcontroller under the guidance of Prof. Van Hunter Adams and Prof. Bruce Robert Land.

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• Introduction
• Programming the Pico
• Progress along the way

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Introduction

The Raspberry Pi Pico is a tiny, fast, and versatile board built using RP2040, a brand new microcontroller chip designed by Raspberry Pi foundation. It features:

• Dual-core Arm Cortex M0+ processor, flexible clock running up to 133 MHz
• 264KB of SRAM, and 2MB of on-board Flash memory
• Low-power sleep and dormant modes
• Drag-and-drop programming using mass storage over USB
• 26 × multi-function GPIO pins
• 2 × SPI, 2 × I2C, 2 × UART, 3 × 12-bit ADC, 16 × controllable PWM channels
• An on-board temperature sensor
• 8 × Programmable I/O (PIO) state machines for custom peripheral support
• Support for C and Python

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Programming the Pico

The Raspberry Pi Pico can be programmed using C as well as the Python programming language. I chose to program using C because of the following reasons:

1. A C program is compiled, and is thus faster than Python.
2. I have more experience working with C and is therefore more comfortable for me.

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Progress along the way

In order to keep track of my progress along the way, I have documented what I did along the way.

• Setting up the Raspberry Pi Pico for C/C++ Development on Windows
• Creating a new C/C++ Raspberry Pi Pico Project on Windows
• Understanding the C/C++ SDK architecture for the Raspberry Pi Pico

Over the course of the project, I covered the following topics (not necessarily in the order).

Basic GPIO

• LED Blink (Hello World)
• LED PWM
• ADC Input
• ADC Input UART
• GPIO Interrupt

Timer

• Timer Basic
• Direct Digital Synthesis using SPI and Interrupt
• Direct Digital Synthesis using PIO

Multi Core

• Multi Core Basic
• Multi Core Performance Compare
• Multi Core Contention
• Multi Core Contention Prevention

SPI

• Direct Digital Synthesis using SPI and Interrupt
• Direct Digital Synthesis using PIO
• Generating Sine wave using DMA

PIO

• Hello PIO
• Square Wave Generation
• Direct Digital Synthesis using PIO

DMA

• Hello DMA
• Generating Sine wave using DMA

Games

• Dino Game
• Snake Game

Equations

• Sin Cos Tan
• Heart Equation

Fractals

• Circle Fractal
• Line Fractal
• Tree Fractal

Miscellaneous

• Conway's Game of Life

TFT Library

• TFT Library Creation

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