HackadayU is pleased to offer Raspberry Pi Pico and RP2040 - The Deep Dive, with instructor Uri Shaked.

Classes are live and will take place Wednesdays 2pm-3:30pm EDT (Starting May 5th), and a live Q&A session will take place right after each class for questions and help from the Instructor. Link to the calendar for easy timezone conversion.

Overview: The Raspberry Pi Pico is a capable 4$ microcontroller board. It comes with a set of features that make it a great choice for many maker projects, including the programmable I/O (PIO), which makes it possible to support new protocols and implement custom peripherals.

This course will take you on a journey to explore the internals of the RP2040 chip, the brains of the Pico. We'll learn about the system architecture, hardware peripheral registers, and even the basics of the ARM assembly language.

The course will be intense and will walk you through the core principles behind the RP2040 chip. While we can't cover everything in a 5 hours course, you'll get the essential knowledge and links to resources that will help you keep rolling on your own. Expect to spend some time digging into the microcontroller's datasheet! 📚

• Class 1: We'll learn how the memory space is organized, explore the RP2040 bus fabric, become friends with the RP2040 datasheet, talk about the AHB-Lite bus and the APB bridge, and see how our C code can interact with the on-chip peripherals (such as GPIO and UART) by directly accessing the hardware registers.
• Class 2: We'll cover hardware and software interrupts, talk about the Pico's bootrom and the boot process, discuss multi-core operation and take a look at the IOPORT/SIO, and of course - get our hands dirty writing some C code to demonstrate these concepts.
• Class 3: We'll learn the basics of the ARM assembly language, and write our first assembly routine together!
• Class 4: We'll continue exploring the ARM Cortex M0+ instruction set as we take a look at the assembly code generated by the gcc compiler. We'll also take a glance at GDB, the GNU Debugger, and see how we can harness its power when reverse engineering a project.
• Class 5: The Programmable Input/Output (PIO) is a unique feature of the RP2040 chip. It enables the creation of additional hardware interfaces, even ones that are not natively supported by the chip (WS2812B, I'm looking at you!). We'll learn how the PIO state machine works and see an example of programming it.

Schedule: The course will consist of five sessions in total. Each section will contain a live 1-hour class, followed by a live 30-minute office hour where the instructors will be available for questions. Unedited video recordings of each class will be available to everyone registered for the course within 1-2 days (some class recordings may not be available due to technical issues/recording). All courses will be available as edited recordings about a month later on Hackaday's Youtube.

Prerequisites:

• Bitwise Math (and for the visual learners, also Bitwise GIFs)
• Fluency with Arduino / microcontroller programming. I.e. being familiar with terms such as GPIO, SPI, I2C, etc.
• Basic understanding of electronics (e.g. you should know how to use a breadboard, what an LED is and how to properly wire to a microcontroller, etc).

Hardware: The hardware is optional. We'll use the emulator during the course. But if you want to try things on the actual hardware (because it's always more fun!), here's what you need:

• A Raspberry Pi Pico board.
• For debugging over SWD with GDB: either a second Pi Pico or a Raspberry Pi 3 / 4. You'll also need a dupont wires and the ability to solder. Consult sections 5, 6, and Appendix A of the Getting Started Guide.

Software downloads:

• Modern web browser (Chrome, Firefox, etc.). We'll use the online simulator at https://wokwi.com.
• Optional: If you want to build the code on your machine then install the Pico SDK and get a fresh copy of pico-examples. You can find the installation instructions in Chapter 2 of the Getting Started Guide.
• Optional: Node.js + avr-gdb for interfacing with GDB (instructions will be provided prior to the relevant class).

Certificate: HackadayU is proud to offer a Certificate of Completion for this course. Students will complete a final project to receive a badge.

About the instructor: Uri is a maker who loves voiding warranties; Currently building RP2040js, an open-source Raspberry Pi Pico emulator in JavaScript, and working on Wokwi, an online Arduino simulation platform. Uri also instructed the AVR internals course in the previous session of HackadayU.

Instructor's Website: https://urish.org

Course Page on Hackaday.io

FAQ

Additional Questions: superconference@hackaday.io