Arduino Quick Start (NEXT)

The Arduino path is the default for HealthyPi 5. It gives you the complete production firmware, eleven teaching sketches, and the same dual-core architecture the board ships with — in an Arduino IDE workflow.

This page gets you from a blank machine to a live ECG trace in about ten minutes.

1. Install the board core

HealthyPi 5’s main MCU is an RP2040, supported by Earle Philhower’s arduino-pico core.

1. In the Arduino IDE, open File → Preferences.

2. Add this URL to Additional Boards Manager URLs:

    https://github.com/earlephilhower/arduino-pico/releases/download/global/package_rp2040_index.json

   

3. Open Tools → Board → Boards Manager, search for pico, and install Raspberry Pi Pico/RP2040 by Earle Philhower.

   

4. Select Tools → Board → Raspberry Pi RP2040 Boards → Raspberry Pi Pico.

   

2. Install the libraries

Open Tools → Manage Libraries and install all three.

3. Run your first sketch

Start with a single sensor rather than the full firmware.

1. Open File → Examples → ProtoCentral HealthyPi 5 → Tutorials → 01_ECG_Plotter.
2. Connect the board over USB-C and pick its port under Tools → Port.
3. Click Upload.
4. Open Tools → Serial Plotter and set the baud rate to 115200.

Snap on the ECG electrodes (Hooking up the Sensors) and you should see a live ECG waveform.

If the board doesn’t appear under Tools → Port, put it into UF2 mode by hand — hold the RP2040 boot button while powering on.

The board mounts as a drive named RPI-RP2, and the IDE offers a UF2 Board port.

4. Work through the tutorials

Each sketch brings up one sensor or one idea, and is short enough to read top to bottom. Sketches 01–08 and 10 are plain single-core sketches — they share only board.h, so no GPIO is ever hardcoded.

Tips that save time:

• Baud must match. The Serial Plotter and Monitor both need 115200.
• Sketches print label:value (e.g. ECG:123, IR:900,RED:1200) so each Serial Plotter trace is named.
• The ECG and PPG sketches high-pass the signal to strip baseline drift. Comment those lines out to see the raw sensor data — a good exercise.
• 04_SpO2: FINGER_IR_MIN is a starting value. Watch data.IR_data with and without a finger on your own board and tune it.

5. Three sketches need one extra setting

Most of the tutorials are ordinary single-core sketches — they talk to a sensor and print. Three are different, because they use the dual-core runtime inside the HealthyPi5 library:

The runtime is built on FreeRTOS, and the arduino-pico core ships FreeRTOS as a separate board variant that you select by hand. Before compiling any of the three, set:

Tools → os → “FreeRTOS SMP”

Then start the sketch with these two includes, in this order:

#include <FreeRTOS.h>                 // must come first
#include <Protocentral_HealthyPi_5.h>

Order matters because the HealthyPi5 header checks that the FreeRTOS variant is active and refuses to compile without it.

If you forget

You get this, immediately, instead of a confusing linker error later:

error: HealthyPi5 requires the arduino-pico FreeRTOS-SMP variant.
Select Tools > 'FreeRTOS SMP' (FQBN option os=freertos), and
#include <FreeRTOS.h> before <Protocentral_HealthyPi_5.h>.

Building from the command line? build.sh and upload.sh already pass os=freertos for the sketches that need it — there’s nothing to set.

6. Build the production firmware

examples/Applications/HealthyPi5_NEXT is the complete headless firmware — and it’s a twelve-line sketch:

#include <FreeRTOS.h>
#include <Protocentral_HealthyPi_5.h>

void setup() {
  HealthyPi5.computeVitals();      // HR + SpO2 + respiration
  HealthyPi5.streamOpenView();     // OpenView 2 over USB-CDC
  HealthyPi5.enableCommands();     // host control plane on USB RX
  HealthyPi5.persistConfig();      // device name + auto-stream saved to flash
  HealthyPi5.recordSD();           // REC*.BIN to a FAT SD card on SPI1
  HealthyPi5.enableSensors();      // I2C temperature + battery
  HealthyPi5.enableBridge();       // HealthyBridge link to the ESP32-C3
  HealthyPi5.begin();              // ring + broker + telemetry + watchdog
}

void loop() {}                     // everything runs in pinned core0 tasks

Delete a line to drop a feature. Each call registers an independently queued sink, so a slow SD card or an unplugged ESP32 drops only its own samples — counted, and reported once a second on the HPI_INSTR telemetry line over UART0.

Command-line workflow

For CI, batch builds, or flashing over a Raspberry Pi Debug Probe, the repo ships three scripts (they need arduino-cli):

./extras/scripts/install-core.sh       # one-time: board core + sensor libraries
./extras/scripts/upload.sh ecg --monitor   # flash tutorial 01, open the console
./extras/scripts/upload.sh next            # flash the production firmware

Targets: next · openview · raw · datalog · ecg resp ppg spo2 hr temp vitals wireless · tutorials (all standalone sketches) · all.

upload.sh defaults to the Debug Probe over SWD; --serial falls back to USB/UF2 and --monitor opens the UART console.

Next

• Streaming to OpenView 2 — view all channels at once.
• Recording Data — the microSD sink and its on-disk format.
• Wireless: BLE & Wi-Fi — the ESP32-C3 co-processor.