Additional information
by Donald Dienst (Compiled by)
This is a printed copy of the Raspberry Pi Pico C/C++ SDK for people that like to use printed manuals. The information in this manual is available for free in PDF format directly from Raspberry Pi. This manual is printed in accordance with the CC BY-ND license. This is a third party printing of their manual. The SDK (Software Development Kit) provides the headers, libraries and build system necessary to write programs for RP2040-based devices such as Raspberry Pi Pico in C, C++ or Arm assembly language. The SDK is designed to provide an API and programming environment that is familiar both to non-embedded C developers and embedded C developers alike. A single program runs on the device at a time with a conventional main() method. Standard C/C++ libraries are supported along with APIs for accessing RP2040's hardware, including DMA, IRQs, and the wide variety fixed function peripherals and PIO (Programmable IO). Additionally the SDK provides higher level libraries for dealing with timers, USB, synchronization and multi-core programming, along with additional high level functionality built using PIO such as audio. These libraries should be comprehensive enough that your application code rarely, if at all, needs to access hardware registers directly. However, if you do need or prefer to access the raw hardware, you will also find complete and fully-commented register definition headers in the SDK. There's no need to look up addresses in the datasheet. The SDK can be used to build anything from simple applications, full fledged runtime environments such as MicroPython, to low level software such as RP2040's on-chip bootrom itself.
