August 7, 2023
Raspberry Pi Pico - Introduction
The Pico has a permanent on board boot loader. To load firmware you hold down the boot
button and keep holding it down while you plug in USB. It will then appear as
a USB mass storage device. The file you drop in has the extension "uf2" and
of course needs to be the proper format. Apparently any base name will work.
What I have seen thus far is that the file doesn't actually stay on the device.
It appears briefly (sometimes), but then gets discovered by the bootloader and
the contents get extracted and placed whereever they need to to to be booted.
Generally the device also resets and runs the code immediately.
The file vanishes almost immediately and near as I can tell there is not
way to have more than one uf2 file there to cause confusion.
There is also a Pico W (and Pico H, whatever that is). The Pico W has Wifi.
The Pico H is silly, it just gives you a connector rather than pads for the 3 debug signals.
Have any comments? Questions?
Drop me a line!
Tom's electronics pages / tom@mmto.org