Raspberry Pi Pico

Nicely worked out. I must admit I'm quite confused in what is happening in the background of VSCode but will persevere with it. For simple code examples the command line and text editor are far easier for now.

The use of nmake does work and I modified several of the examples in just that way......as you say, do it from the appropriate folder and not the top level pico-examples (otherwise you'll be sat watching it building everything again !)

True, but there is part truth in this as NDA's are over used, in my opinion. If an NDA is not required then of course the marketing teams are employed to be helpful and tend to be good at their jobs.

I believe their criticism was aimed at the scenario where one of the big guys releases a brand new chipset. In these cases the in-house tech departments tend to be overly protective of their "new idea" and then don't want to share any technical detail for fear of giving away detail they consider to be their "secret ingredient". Hence require all sorts of legal protection and lots of meetings to discuss, especially if such initiatives require "board approval" and this then delays the whole 3rd party development process,.

In VS Code with the pico-examples config, if you edit the top level CMakeLists.txt file and comment out all the  "add_subdirectory" entries except the one for 'hello_world', when you run Build, it should only build and compile the hello_world example:

Ex output:

This way all the dependencies and such are brought in as expected.

I'd hoped that the newly created build folder would just be benign if it could still traverse into the pico-examples folder and then use the build folder that was there, but that didn't work out.

Another semi-workaround (not having to type in a Developer Command Prompt) is to create the .vscode folder at the top level (i.e. C:\developer\pico in my case) and then put a task.json file in there, a bit like the one you showed earlier:

{

"version": "2.0.0",

"tasks": [

      {

"label": "Build hello_world",

"type": "shell",

"options": {

"cwd": "${workspaceRoot}/pico-examples/build/hello_world"

        },

"command": "nmake",

"group": "test",

"presentation": {

"reveal": "always",

"panel": "new"

        },

"problemMatcher": []

      }

    ]

  }

and then to do the build, press Alt-T and select Run Task and then select "Build hello_world". That seems to resolve everything without having to manually add the paths for intellisense, but trades that for the ugliness that clicking in the blue bar to perform the build won't work. So I don't like this semi-workaround. Anyway, I'll have to put this aside for now, until I get a Pi Pico (have not got around to ordering one yet, some other work has got in the way).

I'm not sure if it is a good idea to open VS Code in the top level directory "and run the build there since that is where the 'build' folder will be created and typically the CMake command is "cmake .." to resolve where the code and CMakelists.txt file is located.

If you were to do this, then you would need to open the 'pico-examples' folder in VS Code to prevent the top level directory from being contaminated with the build stuff.

You might be able to mess with the 'example_auto_set_url.cmake' and the pico_sdk_import.cmake" as well as the top level CMakefiles.txt files to resolve out things. But, the way they structured the pico-examples repo, there are dependencies between the pico-sdk and pico-examples and vise-versa.  It might be easier to create a new project and just include what is needed.

I like the comments from the video:

"There's no Todd's"

"We're Tortured by these Terrible Chip Giants." "They're the worst"

Considering the products Adafruit produces, I would image they have a lot of experience dealing with many of the larger chip makers. These "terrible chip giants", some who were the start-up chip makers of past, have a lot at stake and need to protect themselves, thus there are bound to be NDAs to sign. However, when I was at Intel, they had an effort to change their company attitude when it came to selling their processors which was more of a "We're the main company in the business so you do it the way we tell you or you go somewhere else". This was before ARM made a major push into the data center and AMD was still lagging.  Not quite so these days so they have to change. The only way these companies have stayed in business for so long is by changing with the market and protecting themselves. Otherwise, they just fade away.

Hi Jon and Rod,

I was able to get the intellisense to automatically resolve the paths using the following method, but it introduced another issue : (

As you mentioned, Visual Studio Code couldn't see the pico-sdk folder, so I closed the project, and instead opened the top-level folder (in my case C:\development\pico, which contains pico-sdk and pico-examples).

Then, intellisense automatically figured things out. However, it means I cannot build using Visual Studio Code, because it doesn't know to traverse into the pico-examples folder to start the build.

I tried modifying the build target in the blue bar to (say) pico-examples but that didn't work.

Then I thought maybe it is looking for a CMakeLists.txt file in the top-level, and so I tried creating one, but I don't understand CMake very well so it failed on me. I tried this in the CMakeLists.txt file, and a few variations:

cmake_minimum_required (VERSION 3.12)
project(pico-examples)
include(pico-examples/CMakeLists.txt)

The workaround is just to keep a Developer Command Prompt open and type nmake in the appropriate folder (e.g. in pico-examples\build\hello_world) whenever the build is needed. Not great but maybe okish for now : (

EDIT: Or maybe the tasks capability can help here somehow.

It sounded like exaggeration though. Even large firms can be agile. It seemed like a cheap shot to accuse marketing teams in semiconductor firms of not helping them fast enough. In contrast, I needed some Silicon Labs help and they sent across a huge box of development boards that arrived within days.

What really surprised me was the long list of dev boards (as per your cnx-software link). I was not expecting that.

So how did the open source community get their designs done so quickly etc.

Well, I just happened to listen to this YouTube video from Adafruit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIUV9gYLYpk

Circa. 7 mins into the video it reveals how it happened. Absolutely love the new way of doing things. It has to be a wake up call for the big guys...

As far as still seeing the red squiggles after adding the c_cpp_properties.json file, run through a build process and see if the error goes away.  There is a strange dependency  in "pico/stdlib.h" for "config_autogen.h" which I could only find in "pico-examples/build/generated/pico_base". Since this is in the build folder, it does not get created until a build is performed.