Arduino Core for Raspberry Pi Pico, Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect Released — and Upstreamed, Too
Having been pipped at the post for first-to-release, Arduino has now launched an official Core for the Raspberry Pi Pico.
Last month's release of an unofficial Arduino Core that brings support for the Raspberry Pi Pico and other RP2040-based development boards to the Arduino IDE has now been followed by its official equivalent, targeting both the Raspberry Pi Pico and Arduino's own Nano RP2040 Connect.
When Raspberry Pi launched the Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller development board earlier this year, it made the surprising announcement that the RP2040 chip — the organization's first part designed by its in-house application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) team — would be made available for others use in their own hardware. Arduino was among the first to announce they'd be taking advantage of this, planning a premium RP2040 board dubbed the Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect — and the development of a supporting Arduino Core.
Last month Arduino was pipped to the post on the latter with the release of an unofficial Core by Earle F. Philhower, III — bringing the first opportunity to use the Raspberry Pi Pico with the Arduino IDE. A community-managed Core, though, may not be to everyone's taste — and now there's an official equivalent.
In Release 2.0.0 of the Arduino Core for mbed, the Core gets support for two key new target devices: The Raspberry Pi Pico and Arduino's own Nano RP2040 Connect. At the same time, developer Martino Facchin published a pull request that upstreams the RP2040 support into Arm's mbed OS — though this is not yet been merged.
Those looking to try out the new release, which also brings a range of improvements for existing board targets including the Arduino Portenta H7, it is now available on Arduino's GitHub repository.