Cyberdecks!

I got the debuggery to work!


One pico plugs into the compy via usb, and you flash it with debugprobe_on_pico.uf2. The other one uses pin power and you wire the opposite end up to some pins on the compy-plugged-in one and it acts like a serial debuggerererereerer.

This helped me out though it is a bit outdated: areed.me | Setting up Raspberry Pi Pico development with picoprobe in VSCode on Arch Linux

There's this openocd that the vscode pico extension tries to run but there's assgoblinry with it needing sudo. It behaves about like a console devkit. You can step and see variables and such in the debugger. It occasionally screws up but usually works next try so there's usually no need for any unplug /replug stuff.

I figured out how to use my multimeter so I sat at a table and just kept at the solderizing until all the pins worked properly. Some got shorted together and that took me awhile to figure out how to fix that. I've got this little spring loaded sucker thing that zaps away big blobs of silvery stuff when you put too much or need to just start over.

I made all that sound so easy. I rebooted to do some vrchat, and when I got back to linux land nothing worked again

Took many many many hours of searches, re-solders, and rewiring strategy to get it going again.

My best guess at what happened was some kind of grounding problem. I had read that sometimes if you are connected thru usb and use another power supply for the second pico, wierd spikes can happen and fry stuff. Luckily nothing was fried, but I never could get any sort of debuggery going for many hours.

What ended up working for me was just USB powering the debugger pico, then wiring the 3.3 volt out from that onto the power rail of the breadboard, and the ground to the ground rail. Then the second pico uses that for power, and the little oled screen too.

The oled I never got anything out of. It seems completely dead, but they are like 3 for 10 dollars so I ordered another batch.

I dunno what I will end up doing with this. Maybe some kind of little weather device or or or audio display thing or or something. There are 2 i2c "channels" so maybe you can only have 2 screens running, but there are like 5 sets of pins usable for channel 0, and 6 for channel 1. Dunno if available pins or channels are the limiter. Or cpu power?