A user's view

[petercwallis]

I am no CMake expert, and indeed don't know what files are needed or what goes in them. I can, of course, push the buttons which is I guess what most people do.

The use-case for most people is however not to compile all the examples and make sure they still work, but to compile one example and figure out how it was done. The documentation is good for what is there but PLEASE can someone restructure the two examples and documentation so that the instruction cmake .. doesn't reference a file that is 54 lines long with two includes, and then have local cmake files for each example that also have includes.

The cmake file for blink.c should be stand alone so the instructions can match the use-case. Sure including stuff rather that duplicating it does make maintaining it easier, but it doesn't help us learners. I think something like this would help: "In order to blink the LED on the Pico board (GPIO pin25) you will need to make a uf2 file, then copy it over to 2040's memory via a usb cable. To do that, make an empty working directory (e.g. ~/build) and copy blink.c and cmake.txt from ??? into the directory. You may also like to make sure that when you installed the pico-sdk, it set up some environment variables including PICO_SDK_PATH which should be pointing to the "..../pico-sdk" directory. Change to the build directory and type cmake. This will: 1) use gcc to compile the code, 2) use ln to...

If the code does not compile, you will need to...

If the make process cannot find ... you will need to...

As a new learner I hope my reporting of the issues I face is helpful.