Looking at some available SDKs
To give you a glimpse of the wide variety of SDKs available, let’s discuss a few of them. One thing you will pick up quickly is that it is easy to tell how many microcontrollers are available from a vendor by the initial look at the SDK. Vendors who are new to the market, such as the Raspberry Pi 2040, look very different from NXP or ST who have hundreds of different devices and are trying to support them with a common set of tools and software.
Raspberry Pi
Let’s start with the Raspberry Pi Pico. The Pico, released in January 2021, is a new microcontroller at the time of writing this book. One of the unique things about the Pico SDK is that it was designed to be run on a Raspberry Pi running Linux as opposed to a Windows personal computer. All of the content of the SDK is found on GitHub. There is the SDK itself and examples. The SDK relies on numerous open source tools for compilation and debugging. The build system is cmake. Execute...