Hardware: For hands-on exercises, you will need a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 board (featuring the RP2350 microcontroller). This board was chosen for its modern capabilities and ease of use. You’ll also need some basic accessories: a USB cable to connect the Pico to your computer, and optionally a sensor or display module for later chapters (more on this below). A suggested sensor is the MCP9808 I²C temperature sensor (a cheap, widely available sensor) or a small I²C OLED display like the SSD1306 – we’ll use these to demonstrate hardware interactions. If you have a different I²C sensor or display, that’s fine too – the concepts will generalize.
Software: You should have a recent stable version of Rust installed (with rustup). We will install a few additional Rust targets and tools for cross-compiling to the ARM Cortex-M33 processor in the RP2350 and for flashing the device. All needed software is free and open-source.
Time & Effort: Working through the entire guide (including examples and exercises) will take around 3-4 hours. The guide is designed so you can follow at your own pace, and you can break it into multiple sessions. The first section (up to getting an LED blinking) can be done in about 30 minutes (this mimics the short in-person workshop version). Subsequent sections diving into HAL usage, sensors, and async will add a few more hours of exploration.