Cornell University ECE4760
Getting Compile information
Pi Pico RP2040/2350

It is sometimes useful for a running program to know when it was compiled, and with which version of the SDK, and for which target board.
This simple example just prints the information when the program boots up. The example prints the following:

Compiled file: start_message_example.c
Compile time/date: 11:39:05  Dec 25 2024
SDK version: 2.1.0  Board: Pico2-rp2350
Windows User name: bruce
ProtoThreads: pt_cornell_rp2040_v1_3.h
Application: Compile message test -- bruce.land@cornell.edu

There are predefined macros in C for several functions related to compilation.
Here we are using the following:

• __FILE__ (underscore, underscore at beginning and end)
  The macro returns the absolute path to the actual file being currently compiled as a string.
  Parsing out the string after the final "/" gives the file name.
  Parsing out the string after "/Users/" gives the Windows user name.
• __TIME__
  Time macro returns a stirng in the format hour:minute:second in 24 hour time format.
• __DATE__
  Date macro returns a string in the format mmm dd yyyy with a 3 letter month abbreviation.

• The automatically included file pico/version.h defines a macro,
  PICO_SDK_VERSION_STRING
  The format is a sring.
• The files desctibed on
  https://github.com/raspberrypi/pico-sdk/tree/master/src/boards/include/boards
  define a macro describing the board. For the four variants from Raspberry Pi define one of:
  RASPBERRYPI_PICO, RASPBERRYPI_PICO2, RASPBERRYPI_PICO_W. or RASPBERRYPI_PICO2_W
  These macros need to be decoded into strings for printing using a series of #ifdefs

This simple program just packages the environment variables into strings and prints them.
I think that it will be useful to me for documenting when examples are generated. It may be
useful to you for version control. and documenting when an assignment was actually done.

All of the logic for the decode and printing is in one function, except for the macro which defines
the protothreads version. This needs to be added to the begining of the program to identify the
the threader to the function.

// protothreads header
#define threader "pt_cornell_rp2040_v1_3.h"
#include threader
  

Copyright Cornell University December 27, 2024