Welcome to the firmware onboarding for Waterloo Reality Labs!

At Reality Labs, our default platform is the Raspberry Pi series of microcontrollers. We’re also going to do low-level programming on other Raspberry Pis, but that's a much more complicated story…

For this onboarding, we’re going to play around with a camera module based on the RP2040, which is one of the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s popular microcontrollers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RP2040

https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/rp2040/rp2040-datasheet.pdf

Hopefully, more knowledge about camera controls will help you understand one of the most important things in VR: inside-out positional tracking via sensor fusion (camera + IMU data).

A Peek at the Hardware

The RP2040 camera module, aka PICO-Cam-A, is a tiny devkit designed by Waveshare.

The package includes the following:

• RP2040 microcontroller with dual-core ARM Cortex M0+ processor
• 264KB of SRAM and 16MB of onboard Flash memory
• HM01B0 grayscale camera
• 1.14-inch 240x135 LCD (ST7789V)
• 13 GPIO pins (with a horrible pin pitch…)
• Support for various interfaces (SPI, I2C, UART, and ADC)

This board is more of a “toy camera”, so it’s very fun to play around with!

We have 2 of these dev boards at reality labs, you can freely borrow them during team meetings to test your code!

Installing Pico SDK (mac/windows)

To get started, we need to install a few things, and that differs based on the platform you’re on.

Installing on MacOS