Raspberry Pi has just announced the availability of the Raspberry Pi Pico Visual Studio extension public beta. Its release comes a few months after the initial extension was made available on GitHub and subsequently got feedback and improvement to get it to a stage where it's considered beta quality software.
The new extension is designed for Visual Studio Code (VS Code) users who are working on Raspberry Pi Pico projects. The extension can make it easier to write and debug code. Not only that, the Pico VS Code extension can help with the setting up of your environment, this is something that can be a headache even for veterans, according to Raspberry Pi.
Getting the extension is pretty simple. Just open the Extensions tab on the left side of VS Code (or press Ctrl+Shift+X on Windows/Linux, or Cmd+Shift+X on macOS) then in the search bar type pico-vscode, when you see the extension just tap Install, then you are set. If you're away from a computer, you can check out the extension in the Visual Studio Marketplace.
In other news, Raspberry Pi announced yesterday that it has released a new book called Design an RP2040 board with KiCad by Jo Hinchliffe and Ben Everard. For those unaware, the RP2040 is a chip that powers the Raspberry Pi Pico that we were talking about earlier. KiCad is free and open-source software that allows people to make high-quality printed circuit board (PCB) designs.
The book, which is available for £14.99, provides a "gentle introduction" to PCB design using the RP2040 microcontroller chip. It will teach you the basics of creating schematics and PCB designs in KiCad and how to work with component footprints that you create yourself.
Once you've made your board, the book will tell you have to get the designs sent off to be manufactured and assembled, including how to pick the right manufacturer. It's available in print from the Raspberry Pi Press store right now and will go on sale across various print and electronic bookstores in the coming weeks.
If that book isn't for you, there is a Humble Bundle running until October 5 letting you pay what you want for 14 books from the Raspberry Pi Press covering all sorts of topics including C programming and the history of computers in Britain, which Neowin covered before.
If you want to see some of the company's other books, their magazine website, The MagPi, has some of them available for free as PDFs here. Additionally, you can get free PDFs of the company's two magazines, The MagPi and HackSpace, here.
Source: Raspberry Pi
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