Raspberry Pi Pico and RP2040 - The Deep Dive

Class 5 - Hello, PIO

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.

Class 5 Video:

Class 4 - Under the hood with GDB

We'll learn how to use GDB, the GNU Debugger, and see how we can harness its power for debugging and reverse engineering. We'll also dig into the internals of MicroPython and see how to combine it with Thumb assembly!

Class 4 Video:

Class 3 - Under the hood

We'll continue exploring the ARM Cortex M0+ instruction set, learning about branches, flags, conditional instructions. We will also learn about the ARM assembly ABI (application binary interface) as we write our own routines in pure ARM assembly, and take a look under to hood to see the assembly code generated by the GCC compiler.

Class 3 Video: 

Class 2 - Interrupts & Introduction to ARM Assembly

We'll cover hardware and software interrupts, the NVIC (Nested Vector Interrupt Controller), and the vector table, and of course - get our hands dirty writing some C code to demonstrate these concepts. Then we'll learn about the CPU registers, and start digging into ARM assembly.

Class 2 Video:

Class 1 - The Big Picture

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 1 Video: