While flashing a Raspberry Pi Pico (RP2040) from a Raspberry Pi 3 I got the error "No drive to deploy", there's a relatively simple fix if hard to find on the internet.

Error Flashing the Device

While using Earle Philhower's RP2040 board package in the arduino-cli to flash a Raspberry Pi Pico (RP2040) from a Raspberry Pi 3 (Raspberry Pi OS Lite, buster) I got the following error:

Converting to uf2, output size: 516096, start address: 0x2000
No drive to deploy.
An error occurred while uploading the sketch

The board was accessible via serial, the arduino-cli was correctly rebooting the RP2040 to where an external drive was appearing at /dev/sda.

I could find nothing on the internet except this bug report, however there was no effective solution proposed there. Wondering whether it was the board package or Raspberry Pi OS Lite, I decided that trying the official Arduino Core for mbed enabled devices might help.

I encountered the same difficulty. Looking around on the web, I find a Arduino forum thread which had the solution.

The solution: post_install.sh

After installing official Arduino Core for mbed enabled devices before you attempt to use it the first time you must run the shell script sudo ~/.arduino15/packages/arduino/hardware/mbed_rp2040/2.5.2/post_install.sh

Links

• GitHub: Raspberry Pi Pico Arduino core, for all RP2040 boards by Earle Philhower
• GitHub: Arduino Core for mbed enabled devices

Credits

Photo by dhehaivan on Unsplash

This article was first posted at https://www.dfoley.ie/blog/raspberry-pi-pico-not-flashing-with-arduino-cli #indieweb #posse