/firmware-pi-rp2040

Ingestion & inferencing firmware for the Raspberry Pi Pico (RP2040)

Primary LanguageC

Edge Impulse firmware for Raspberry Pi RP2040

Edge Impulse enables developers to create the next generation of intelligent device solutions with embedded Machine Learning. This repository contains the Edge Impulse firmware for the Raspberry Pi RP2040 based development boards, specifically Raspberry Pi Pico and Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect. This device supports Edge Impulse device features, including ingestion and inferencing.

Note: Do you just want to use this development board with Edge Impulse? No need to build this firmware. See the instructions here for a prebuilt firmware and instructions. Or, you can use the data forwarder to capture data from any sensor.

Requirements

Hardware

  • Raspberry Pi RP2040 based development boards, preferably Raspberry Pi Pico or Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect.
  • (Optional) If you are using Raspberry Pi Pico, Grove Shield for Pi Pico makes it easier to connect external sensors for data collection/inference.

Tools

The below instructions assume you are using Debian-based Linux distribution. Alternative instructions for those using Microsoft Windows or Apple macOS are provided in Getting started with Pico guide (Sections 9.1 and 9.2).

To build firmware, you will need pico-sdk, CMake, a cross-platform tool used to build the software, and the GNU Embedded Toolchain for Arm. You can install both these via apt from the command line.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install cmake gcc-arm-none-eabi libnewlib-arm-none-eabi build-essential

NOTE Ubuntu and Debian users might additionally need to also install libstdc++-arm-none-eabi-newlib.

You'll need PICO SDK to compile the firmware. You can obtain it from https://github.com/raspberrypi/pico-sdk and then specify PICO_SDK_PATH environmental variable, that would point to exact PICO SDK location on your system. E.g.

cd ~/
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/raspberrypi/pico-sdk
export PICO_SDK_PATH="~/pico-sdk"

Building the application

Then from the firmware folder execute:

mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make -j4

If you want to enable debug build (with lots of printing, specifically in data acquisition and flash read/write parts of the code), run

mkdir build && cd build
cmake .. -DDEFINE_DEBUG=ON
make -j4

The fastest method to load firmware onto a RP2040-based board for the first time is by mounting it as a USB Mass Storage Device. Doing this allows you to drag a file onto the board to program the flash. Go ahead and connect the Raspberry Pi Pico to your computer using a micro-USB cable, making sure that you hold down the BOOTSEL button as you do so, to force it into USB Mass Storage Mode. Drag the ei_rp2040_firmware.uf2 file from build folder to newly appeared USB Mass Storage device.

Troubleshooting