The Pico Toolkit aims to provide a collection of production quality add-ons to the Raspberry RP2040 ecosystem. The toolkit is focused around a hackable Symmetric Multi Processing (SMP) scheduler paired with a RP2040 tuned integration of the PicoLibc standard C library which targets small embedded systems. Two RTOS personalities are provided: ISO C11 Threads and a CMSIS RTOS v2. The toolkit provides standalone features such as a C11 standard atomic and thread local storage support as well as a backtrace generator using a lightweight stack unwinder compatible with the Exception Handling ABI for the Arm Architecture.
To encourage community support, the Pico Toolkit is licensed under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). The MLP allows inclusion toolkit in closed source embedded systems while requiring the open sourcing of any changes to the the Pico Toolkit source code. This seems like a reasonable compromise allowing construction of typical closed source deeply embedded systems while preserving the copyleft, but non-viral, nature of successful open source development.
The Pico Toolkit project strives to be an inclusive community following Bazzar Model of software development. We are looking for maintainers, contributors and testers!
Ask me what I think of Cathedral projects pretending to be a Bazzar.
Pull Requests are the primary way of contributing to the toolkit so go ahead, fork the repo, hack it and open a PR. A matching Pico Tookkit Issue for enhancements and bug fixes would be greatly appreciated. A response and review is guaranteed!
Have a question or comment? Pico Toolkit Discussions is the place to be! Considering contributing a new library? Have great new idea? Open a discussion to get community feedback!
| Library | Description |
|---|---|
| multicore-support | Adds multicore irqs and SMP support to when the pico-scheduler is included. Uses the flexible RP2040 NMI handling to support Realtime IRQ priorities |
| pico-atomic | Provides multicore safe atomic options. |
| pico-cmsis-rtos2 | Includes the CMSIS RTOS v2 personality on top of the pico-scheduler |
| pico-fault | Cortex-M0+ fault handling and exception backtrace support. |
| pico-nmi | Create a simple interface to the RP2040 NMI block. |
| pico-rtt | Include Segger Real Time Transfer (RTT) support. This also works with OpenOCD. |
| pico-scheduler | A SMP capable real time scheduler with flexible Futex support including priority inheritance and contention tracking. |
| pico-threads | Includes the ISO C11 threads personality. |
| pico-tls | Add support for C11 _Thread_local storage-class specifier and matching support for a core_local concept riding on top of the RP2040 multicore hardware. |
| picolibc-glue | Implements the extensible retargetable locking mechanism utilized by Picolibc. Locking works transparently with and without an RTOS. |
| picolibc | Builds and integrates the Picolibc version of Newlib tuned for the Cortex-M0+ processor. Unwind table and function names are included in the build. |
| toolkit-support | Common toolkit header files including a header only ticket based spin locks and intrusive linked lists. |
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The Pico Toolkit integrates with the Pico SDK and your project following Getting Started with the Raspberry Pi Pico Guide. In addition to the Pico SDK build dependencies of cmake gcc-arm-none-eabi libnewlib-arm-none-eabi build-essential the toolkit requires the meson build system when using the picolibc interface.
sudo apt install meson
In your project environment you should export the PICO_TOOLKIT_PATH variable. Assuming you checked out the pico-sdk and the pico-toolkit at the same level as your project.
$ cd your_project_path
$ export PICO_SDK_PATH=../pico-sdk
$ export PICO_TOOLKIT_PATH=../pico-toolkit
Your project CMakeLists.txt should look something like this:
cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.13)
include($ENV{PICO_SDK_PATH}/external/pico_sdk_import.cmake)
include($ENV{PICO_TOOLKIT_PATH}/external/pico_toolkit_import.cmake)
project(pico-project C CXX ASM)
set(CMAKE_C_STANDARD 11)
set(CMAKE_CXX_STANDARD 17)
pico_sdk_init()
add_subdirectory(hello-world)
Notice the include of pico_toolkit_import.cmake. You are good to go, configure and build as you normally would. You can add -DPICO_TOOLKIT_TESTS_ENABLED=true to your cmake configure to build the include test projects.