Re: F2FS On USB Sticks?

On 3/22/25 8:52 PM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 22/03/2025 19:09, rbowman wrote:

On Sat, 22 Mar 2025 13:35:54 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>

The PICO has no filesystem. IN use you hold a button down while powering
up and it's Flash presents itself as a USB drive. You copy a special
binary file of compiled code onto that 'drive', and it reboots and runs
it..

>
Okay, you hold down BOOTSEL when plugging it into the USB. Then it shows
up on Files as RP2350.  If you click on that you see INDEX.HTM and
INFO_UF2.TXT. If you look at Properties it reports 2 items totaling 305
bytes and 134.1 MB free.
>
df -Th /dev/sda1
Filesystem     Type  Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1      vfat  128M  8.0K  128M   1% /media/xxxxx/RP2350
>
Then you can
>
cp blink.uf2 /media/xxxxx/RP2350/
>
and, lo and behold, it starts blinking and vanishes from the file system!
I'm lazy so after it blinks 20 times it calls
>
reset_usb_boot(0, 0);
>
and miraculously reappears mounted.  How does it do all this without a
file system known to Ubuntu? I won't even ask why after copying the
CircuitPython uf2 it reboots mounted as CIRCUITPYTHON and you can copy .py
files directly.
>
My comment had nothing to do with the programmatic use of the flash
memory, only how the Pico presents as a mass storage device.

 Well it spoofs the disk obviously

   Ya know ..... think I'm gonna stay away from Pico's  :-)
   If I want microcontrollers, there are more traditional
   straight-up boards out there. If I want microprocessors
   there are the straight-up PIs and beyond.
   Did use PICs for a long time ... kinda remember their
   quirks and tricks. There are Pico/Nano style boards to
   be had cheap that use PICs. Atmel versions also exist.