Raspberry Pi Pico Picoprobe housing

Raspberry Pi Pico is dirt cheap and can become a very useful SWD probe. Developing using SWD is way better than using the button and disconnecting the USB cable every time you want to try some new software.

This basic housing has space to run wires from the probe Pico to the target board. It snaps together with no fasteners. A button is provided so you have easy access to the Pico's reset button. Leave the button out of the assembly if you prefer to push it with a pencil or similar. It will not only protect your Pico from your big clumsy fingers and shorting against other objects on your bench it will prevent the wires from flexing (and eventually breaking) at the place they are soldered to the Pico.

If you are having trouble getting OpenOCD going, check your gdb-multiarch - the one shipped in Ubuntu 22.04 apparently has a bug that prevents it from connecting reliably, fixed in later versions. Also the submodule repo in .cz that is in the OpenOCD fetched by the pico_setup.sh script is often unreachable and will cause the whole process to fail. I installed OpenOCD separately from the script and used instructions contained in the “Getting started with Raspberry Pi Pico C++ development…” guide from Raspberry Pi.