First Real Project with the RP2040
I've been doing Arduino projects for years and the RP2040 (the Raspberry Pi Foundation's microcontroller) looked like a gimmick when it launched — why do I need two cores on a microcontroller? Then I built something that actually needed parallel execution and understood immediately.
The project: a MIDI controller for live music. One core handles the MIDI USB device stack, which has strict timing requirements — messages must be sent within microseconds of the corresponding hardware event. The other core reads 16 analog potentiometers and 8 buttons, debounces inputs, and passes events to core 0 via a FIFO queue. Under Arduino or single-core approaches, the ADC scanning would occasionally block the MIDI timing, causing missed or late events audible as clicks and glitches.
With the RP2040's dual-core setup, the timing is clean. Core 0 runs the MIDI handler with a tight interrupt-driven loop. Core 1 runs the sensor scanning in a slower loop (every 5 ms) without affecting MIDI latency. No glitches in the six months I've been using this in live performance.
Programming in C with the Pico SDK was harder than Arduino but the tooling (CMake-based, GDB debugging via picoprobe, proper linker scripts) makes large projects manageable in ways that the Arduino IDE doesn't.