Designing, Building, and Coding Custom Raspberry Pi RP2040 Arduino Devices – Day 1

The overall objective for today will be to code some Arduino sketches that will be adapted to a custom piece of RP2040-based hardware. With that in mind, today we begin our tour of duty in the Arduino programming space. Our first mission will include the task of installing the Visual Studio Code IDE. The mission’s second task involves the installation and configuration of the Arduino for Visual Studio Code extension, which will allow us to construct and compile Arduino sketches from within the Visual Studio Code IDE. The final software tool installation task will consist of the installation of Segger’s J-Flash application that will be responsible for loading our compiled Arduino sketch into our target hardware via a J-Link Pro programmer/debugger. Following the installation and verification of our RP2040 Arduino Software Development Tool Kit, we will commence with the tasks of writing Arduino sketches aimed at exercising our custom piece of RP2040-based hardware. Our custom RP2040-based hardware design includes a pair of SPI portals, a pair of serial ports, a pair of PWM pin portals, a pair of I2C portals, and some general purpose GPIO pins. The custom RP2040 board was not designed specifically for use with Arduino. The hardware exercise sketches will be the culmination of today’s mission and will demonstrate how to adapt Arduino programming methods to custom RP2040 hardware not originally designed to support Arduino.