Play with RP2040 MCU PIO Assembler
With the trend of ROE (Rust on Everything), cool kids (respectfully) have worked hard to port Rust Embedded toolchain to RP2040 MCU, in addition to many other MCUs already.
After the ubiquitous Micro-Python (also Circuit-Python) and Arduino toolchains, Rust now becomes another development platform for Raspberry Pi Foundation’s RP2040 MCU, which similar to STM32 Bluepill, provides a cheap and versatile piece of hardware. RP2040 helps you learn about ARM MCU, digital design from its excellent documentation, and Rust embedded programming in general.
The Rust rp-hal library (link) provides detailed setup information to get you started.
One interesting feature of RP2040 is its self-driving GPIO pins, called PIO. PIO has its own 9 instructions set, bunch of registers, full access to GPIO pins.
Parallax Propeller 2’s smart pin idea is kind of similar, but not exactly the same … (https://forums.parallax.com/discussion/173167/rpi-pico-do-creators-users-reviewers-know-about-the-propeller-2)
In this article, we will examine a few PIO programs, as well as their disassembled instructions, as the output from the Rust assembler (pio-rs).
