The Raspberry Pi Pico Installer Is a One-Shot Way to Set Up an RP2040 Toolchain on Windows

Raspberry Pi's Gordon Hollingworth has announced an easier way to get started developing for the Raspberry Pi Pico and other RP2040-based devices on Microsoft's Windows OS: an all-in-one installer which pulls down a full ready-to-go C/C++ toolchain.

"If you want to get started with the Raspberry Pi Pico C SDK it can initially seem quite daunting," Hollingworth admits. "There are a lot of moving parts to install before you can blink your first LED on, and then off again, especially if you want proper debugging using something like our new Debug Probe. While there has been a 'one click' solution to install the toolchain on a Raspberry Pi since launch — see Chapter 1 of the Getting Started guide — installing the toolchain on other platforms like Apple's macOS, or Microsoft's Windows, has always been a little more difficult."

It's this sharp edge of difficulty the new software release aims to solve. Where the original release was based on a Linux-first philosophy, the new installer adapts standard Windows-isms to install everything exactly where it should go — even going so far as to optionally clone and compile the Raspberry Pi Pico example projects, both to get you started with samples and to prove that the toolchain is installed and working correctly.

Developed by Nikhil Dabas, the installer is primarily designed for those beginning from scratch without even so much as an integrated development environment (IDE) — installing Microsoft's Visual Studio Code as part of the process. For those who already have Visual Studio Code installed, however, Hollingworth admits there may be a few glitches — with the known ones, at least, documented in the installer's wiki.

The new installer is available now from the Pico Setup for Windows GitHub repository, where it's made available under the permissive Apache 2.0 license.