ARM Keil MDK is free (sort-of)

This is great news! That is one of my biggest complaints about the Pico, trying to setup the c development environment is way too complicated for a causal complier user.... I like one button installs, like with MPLabx.

It would appear Kiel is using the arm v6 toolchain developer.arm.com/.../0611. I have no idea how the arm complier compares to gcc-arm, that is well above my pay grade...

Thanks for sharing this news, I will have to give it a try in the near future!

This is great news! That is one of my biggest complaints about the Pico, trying to setup the c development environment is way too complicated for a causal complier user.... I like one button installs, like with MPLabx.

It would appear Kiel is using the arm v6 toolchain developer.arm.com/.../0611. I have no idea how the arm complier compares to gcc-arm, that is well above my pay grade...

Thanks for sharing this news, I will have to give it a try in the near future!

I think you'll enjoy it! It is quite user-friendly to use. 

The Keil MDK comes with an older V5 compiler plus the V6 that you mention, it is selectable per-project, in the project configuration options. 

I've got used to a hybrid environment for working with the Pico, where the the tools, SDK and project source reside entirely on Linux, but I use Visual Code on Windows for writing the code, because the remote file capability in VC is pretty amazing, I've never seen anything like it. And then I use a separate SSH/SFTP app, called SecureCRT (it's like PuTTY) for performing the build and transferring it to the Windows machine, i.e. all of that is done from the command line, which is quicker than menus anyway, since it's just an up-arrow to recall the command and hit return, each time I want to build the code.

It all in theory sounds onerous, but it's actually really nice for the Pico, so it's going to have to take a really awesome fully integrated setup for the Pico before I consider doing it differently. But the single fully-integrated setup would encourage a lot of people to use C /C++ with the Pico for sure.

Incidentally there's another C/C++ IDE called CLion, it's by the people who created PyCharm and the Android IDE, which is incredibly well executed for working with code (I guess it has to be for large Android apps!).

CLion has slowly been getting embedded programming capabilities in the past couple of years, so it could be almost ripe for setting up for Pico development soon too. I have a 2019 release of it, which didn't have great capabilities for the embedded space.

This is total wizardry! This parallels my experience in many ways, only in my case my linux machine is the same as my windows machine and I have to reboot into linux (at which point I usually don't bother).  That is very neat, I had no idea this was possible! I am hopeful that when I upgrade to win11, I will try and setup WSL and hopefully all the pico sdk will just work under WSL.

The arduino ide or platformio under Vscode give you a relatively easy way to use c/c++. However if you want to build any of the sample sdk applications or say uPython you need the actual sdk installed and setup correctly. 

When you use the ardunio framework somewhere there is a trigger to have the rp2040 reset into bootloader mode (I'm not sure how its done) but its a nice addition not having to unplug the usb cable. I have now memorized where the enable/ground pins are and can short them with a pair of tweezers. A tactile push button also mounts very easily too!

Hehe I did that button-on-a-pico too! : ) I had a random SMD tact button that happened to straddle the pads.  It makes the Pico so much more easier to use as you say. I've been placing a tact button on any board design too, to make life easier.

Wait - have you actually managed to install Keil support for RPi Pico?  I don't see even the rp2040 in their "packs", and I'd think that configuring Keil to use the SDK would be a significant effort!

(or is this just a "side discussion"?)

> When you use the ardunio framework somewhere there is a trigger to have the rp2040 reset into bootloader mode (I'm not sure how its done)

Arduino uses a hack where setting the usb/serial bitrate to 1200bps causes a chip reset (and enter bootloader.)
Entering the bootloader via application SW command is easy - there's an SDK/ROM function for that: reset_usb_boot()

That was just a side discussion on IDEs in general for Pico. Personally I'm happy with just building for the Pico from the command line, and using Visual Code, as shown in the screenshot above. The combination is great from my perspective, and free.

However, I did download the latest CLion to see if it's straightforward to configure that for Pico, and it worked well!

(for anyone who hasn't tried it, CLion is as close to Android Studio as possible, it's by the same org called JetBrains. It's a fantastic code editor and really good for code navigation).

It is a 1-click effort to build projects, so perhaps CLion is a good option for an all-in-one IDE for Pico projects.

CLion is chargeable, but at a reasonable price £69+tax in the UK, and the license is permanent with upgrades for that year. 

The screenshot below shows a successful build for one of the Pico examples. I'll write up the steps in a blog post, but it was actually trivial to get to this stage.

This is incredible! That is a very clever solution. The same functionality applies to the rp2040 when programmed with the arduino framework. 

Thank you so much for explaining the magic that makes the bootloader entry happen!

I have created a Pico-Template which is an MDK project. So you can use MDK for all Pico development, such as coding, compiling (using Arm Compiler 6), debugging etc.

For debugging, you don't need an extra Pico working as a debugger adapter, and the pico template retargets printf to MDK debug (printf) view window. A software reset button has been added to the project.

Enjoy~

github.com/.../Pico_Template

This is amazing! Thank you so much for sharing your hard work setting up a pico a template. I am downloading the 856 MB MDK as I type this .

I will try it out and let you know how it goes. Thanks again for sharing your project!

I was able to compile your template project and generate a uf2 image. However I can't seem to get Keil to see the pico when flashed with pico-debug.

Not sure...