Install Raspberry Pi Pico toolchain

I have installed Raspberry pi pico sdk for cross compiling and development on this latest version of Leap 16.0
and it is quite simple.

I tested before some repos with the cross-compilers that are available on opensuse build service, I had some issues mainly the C++ version for the compiler I tested was not present. (I do not recall exactly which one).

The simple thing is to get the Toolchain directly from ARM

https://developer.arm.com/downloads/-/arm-gnu-toolchain-downloads

choose the arm-gnu-toolchain-15.2.rel1-x86_64-arm-none-eabi.tar.xz basically the latest as of this writting arm-none-eabi toolchain

I actually used version 13.2 Rel1 but for sure the latest works as well.

I installed in /opt/cross
should be like this:

 > tree ./opt -L 2
./opt
└── cross
    ├── 13.2.Rel1-x86_64-arm-none-eabi-manifest.txt
    ├── arm-none-eabi
    ├── bin
    ├── include
    ├── lib
    ├── libexec
    ├── license.txt
    └── share

Then the simple thing is to install both the Pi Pico SDK and say the examples.

just make a directory say ~/git/pipico

and them simply clone the projects on github inside your base folder

https://github.com/raspberrypi/pico-sdk
https://github.com/raspberrypi/pico-examples
https://github.com/raspberrypi/pico-extras

should be something like this your base/root directory :

~/git> tree ./pipico -L 1
./pipico
├── debugprobe
├── FreeRTOS-Kernel
├── pico-examples
├── pico-examples-eclipse
├── pico-extras
├── pico-playground
├── pico-sdk
├── setenv.sh
├── setup.sh
└── toolchain

Notice I install also from the same Pi Pico github repos FreeRTOS-Kernel and pico-playground (this last one contains interesting stuff on sensors and the like)
Notice that the debugprobe git project is also important since you can use a Pi Pico as your debugprobe, it will connect to your project hardware and becomes the programmer and also the debug interface … very very nice, no need to spend money on a dedicated debug hardware.

After this one has to set environment variables for the compiler and cmake to work

edit your ~/.bashrc file and add:

(the root of the project And of the SDK is the same ~/git/pipico)

export PICO_SDK_PATH=/home/user/git/pipico/pico-sdk
export PICO_TOOLCHAIN_PATH=/opt/cross
export PICO_EXTRAS_PATH=/home/user/git/pipico/pico-extras

now everything should be set and ready to go. Simply go to your ~/git/pipico/pico-examples/ directory and make inside a directory named build

mkdir build

go to that directory because otherwise the CMake process will clutter your base dir with all the output of the compilation and linking it would be a mess.

cd build

and then

cmake ..

after that

make

and you should have all your projects compiled inside ~/git/pipico/pico-examples/build/

each example project should have his own directory

enjoy …

1 Like

As a final note that I forgot on the previous post:
Keep the pico-examples and pico-SDK current since it may be the case were some update on the SDK is not yet implemented on the example for example and that could generate a warning or error upon compile time.
Enjoy.