The board arriving is a Waveshare RP2350-Plus (4MB, USB-C), which is now the
default BOARD. Its pico-sdk header defines neither PICO_DEFAULT_LED_PIN nor
PICO_DEFAULT_WS2812_PIN - it has no onboard indicator at all - so a bare board
gives no sign of life. The status-LED support added for boards that do have one
(zero, one, tiny, usb_a on GPIO16; eth on GPIO25) is kept and compiles out here.
That makes feedback on the strip itself the useful path, and it turns out to be
the better one anyway:
- Boot self-test sweeps one pixel from index 0 to the far end once at startup.
It answers in a single glance whether the firmware runs, PIO drives the line,
the strip is the length LED_COUNT claims, the far end holds voltage, and -
because you see which end it starts from - whether STRIP_REVERSED is right.
It runs before USB, so the first test needs nothing but 5V.
- Idle indicator holds one dim pixel lit while no host is connected, separating
"powered and waiting" from "no power" and from "crashed".
Both are platform-independent, so the Circle build gets them too.
Verified: tests pass across seventeen configurations, now including the
self-test and idle paths on and off. Both platforms build clean with no
warnings from project sources.
Note on the previous commit's verification: a filtered build log hid a real
compile error in the Pico target (sleep_ms takes uint32_t, which is unsigned
long here, and did not match the portable void(*)(unsigned) delay callback).
The build script now gets an explicit success check rather than a grep.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01TVCB25LBsmeteWvaSMz4Ne
prosolis
59bd3b4cea