// the find
earlephilhower/arduino-pico
Raspberry Pi Pico Arduino core, for all RP2040 and RP2350 boards
A community-maintained Arduino core for the RP2040/RP2350 chips (Raspberry Pi Pico family). It lets you write Arduino sketches targeting Pico hardware using the official Pico SDK under the hood, with GCC 14.3 and support for both ARM and the RP2350's RISC-V (Hazard3) core. Aimed at embedded developers who want Arduino's ecosystem and tooling without giving up access to RP2040/RP2350 hardware features.
PIO state machines are exposed and actually used internally for jitter-free servos, I2S, and software UARTs — not just documented and left to you. Multicore support maps naturally to Arduino's setup/loop model via setup1()/loop1() with FreeRTOS SMP available if you need it. Board coverage is genuinely wide (100+ boards) with per-board pin definitions rather than a generic fallback. The BearSSL/TLS stack and lwIP networking are fully integrated, so WiFi + HTTPS on Pico W works without reaching outside the core.
The vendor library sprawl (lwIP, BearSSL, FreeRTOS, all vendored inline) makes the repo large and means security patches in upstream lwIP or BearSSL won't land until this maintainer pulls them — check the lwIP version before shipping anything network-facing. The Bluetooth stack on Pico W depends on the closed-source CYW43 firmware blobs and has known stability issues under heavy A2DP load. PSRAM transparency on RP2350 is a nice idea but the TLSF allocator integration adds a failure mode that's hard to debug when heap and PSRAM regions interact unexpectedly. Documentation points to readthedocs but several peripheral pages are still stubs or lifted verbatim from the ESP8266 core with s/SPIFFS/LittleFS.