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⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-03)
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Over the last 2 weeks I've been experementing with the Pi Pico a relatively new microcontroller from the Raspberry Pi Foundation. My previous experience with microcontrollers has been arduino compatable dev boards and custom boards using Atmel chips so this was a huge step up from the slow 8bit microcontrollers.
This is the language I settled on after trying the other two supported languages. My choice came down to what I know best and what is documented best. Most of my programming experience is with C++ and Rust and have very little knowlage of Python. If you've used a lot of python and not much C/C++ then this might not be the best language for you on this board. However, the primary reason I settled on C++ as my development language is because the documentation is easier to find and is more complete. Every function is documented, and there are many more examples. The final reason to choose C/C++ over the python derivatives is library support. Both MicroPython and CircuitPython do not support all features of Python so only a handful of libraries will work with them without being specifically ported. You will be missing out on the most popular python libraries such as NumPy, and SciPy. While there are alternative libraries to the Python ones you'll have fewer options or none at all.
This is the recommended starting language by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. I really did try to like it. If they wanted it to be a friendly language for beginners they would have made a website documenting the APIs that are included with it.
Adafruit's fork of MicroPython that supports multiple boards and all supported boards have the same API. I found it enjoyable to work with.
Kind of annoying that it only has 4 ADC and one of the is connected to the on chip thermometer.
Price is decent. Using a Pico as a debugger for another Pico is really convenient.