Development

Pico ASHA is developed in C++ (with a bit of C) using the Pico SDK.

The build system is CMake, as that is what the SDK uses.

Compile firmware

Download pico-sdk 2.2.0, using the provided instructions.

Create an environment variable called PICO_SDK_PATH that points to the downloaded SDK location.

Note

Prior to Pico SDK 2.2.0, the BT firmware did not properly support Data Length Extensions (DLE), and you had to manually apply a patch.

As of Pico SDK 2.2.0, the BT firmware has been updated to support DLE.

Pico-ASHA requires TinyUSB 0.20.0, which is newer than the TinyUSB included in the Pico SDK. There are two options to obtain this:

  1. Update the TinyUSB submodule in the SDK: cd pico-sdk/lib/tinyusb git pull && git checkout 0.20.0
  2. Download/clone TinyUSB to a separate directory and pass -DPICO_TINYUSB_PATH=<path> to cmake.

Build pico-asha

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DPICO_BOARD=pico_w ..
cmake --build .

Compile GUI

A basic Qt GUI has been developed. You will need Qt6 development libraries (including qtserialport) available so that cmake can find it.

cd gui
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
cmake --build .

Note

Linux users will most likely need to belong to the dialout group to gain serial port permissions.