Trying to debug brickpico with VSCode & VSCode's "Raspberry Pi Pico" Extension

[st2000]

I am able to, on the command line, perform cmake, make, start the OpenOCD server & connect to it with gdb-multiarch successfully. However, I would like to do the same using VSCode & the VSCode "Raspberry Pi Pico" Extension.

I have VSCode running the the PICO extension. Using the PICO extention I "import" the brickpico project. This generates the necessary .vscode directory and files. However...

The VSCode CMake fails. Likely I need to edit the VSCode launch.json file (or some other *.json file) to add the switches for the correct PICO board and the correct brickpico PCB type. Regardless, just a "cmake .." in the build directory should generate a project that can be compiled. For what ever reason, importing the brickpico project into VSCode using the "Raspberry Pi Pico" extension fails badly at this.

Going on, I can, by hand, perform the CMake in the brickpico project successfully as I did before trying VSCode. If I now go back to VSCode and press the "make" (green arrow) button, VSCode appears to successfully compile and program the PICO in the brickpico PCB! Great, only the VSCode CMake is broken. Nope...

After compiling and programming the PICO successfully, VSCode is not able to debug the target!

VSCode About Info:
Version: 1.96.4
Commit: cd4ee3b1c348a13bafd8f9ad8060705f6d4b9cba
Date: 2025-01-16T00:16:19.038Z
Electron: 32.2.6
ElectronBuildId: 10629634
Chromium: 128.0.6613.186
Node.js: 20.18.1
V8: 12.8.374.38-electron.0
OS: Linux x64 6.8.0-51-generic snap

[tjko]

I haven't tried VSCode, so can't really help with that.

If you want to debug (with gdb) you need to set CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug to include debug information in the firmware.
However, with current Pico-SDK (2.1.0) Debug builds seems to fail if compiling for pico_w (or pico2_w), due to a bug in LwIP.

At until there fixed version available, one must apply patch to SDK (LwIP library) manually. Patch can be found here: https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/index.php?62159

[st2000]

I have had success at building the brickpico project by importing it into VSCode using the Raspberry Pi Pico Integration. I have only done this once and am planning on trying again with a fresh/clean git pull of the project to verify it works. I believe the key step is to not create the build directory and its files manually but to do it using the Raspberry pi Pico Integration from inside VSCode. Also, leaving any old manually created build files about appears to cause the Raspberry pi Pico Integration not to properly create build files. This was the key to success / failure for me. I had assumed that the Raspberry pi Pico Integration was capable of cleaning the build directory.