With the uncertain future of the Arduino platform I've decided to look more deeply into the Raspberry Pi PICO platform. I ordered a Raspberry Pi Debug Probe and it arrived today. It plugs into three pins on the end of the board and also to the serial port pins.
I had previously installed the official extension for Visual Studio Code.
By some magic it automatically found the board and the debug probe and "just works". The marvellous thing is that this lets me set breakpoints and single step through a program while inspecting variables.
I had a bit of trouble the first time I added a variable which didn't show up in the Locals area. Turns out the compiler optimises out variables you don't actually use. Presumably this can be turned off but it's for the best. Anyhow, this is a very nice improvement over lots of print statements to figure out what's going on.
The Pi Pico software development kit is extensive and well documented.
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