Lack of USB Mass Storage support for RP2 port - have I missed a critical difference moving from STM32?

[DoubleVee73]

I think I may have messed up badly.

I have a product in advanced stages of development (based upon the STM32F411) but have been hit with the chip shortage and now huge price hikes. So I have moved the design to the RP2040 (and I wanted to support British), have tested everything in prototype builds but I have missed a critical feature.

The product requires a customer supplied config file. A button press during power on was used to put the STM32 into USB mass storage mode to expose the flash, config.json was copied across from any connected laptop and the product restarted. However, I am not able to access the file system on the RP2 port (as I currently understand things). Am I correct? Have I missed a rather critical difference here for my application?

At a stretch, I could get customers to install something 'light' (like mpremote but it would need to be a standalone app), and use this to copy the file to the product, but I am reaching out to the community to see if there is a better solution or recommendation at this stage. The product will use a frozen build so the only file visible to a customer will be config.json.

Your advice and any pointers at this stage would be so welcome - thank you.

[robert-hh]

If you build your software yourself, you can try to enable MSC support by adding the line:

// Enable USB Mass Storage with FatFS filesystem.
#define MICROPY_HW_USB_MSC              (1)

to mpconfigboard.h.

[martin-ringaly]

Hi @DoubleVee73, did you find a way to programmatically enable USB MSC mode?

[Josverl]

@martin-ringaly , this might be worth following on Discord : https://discord.com/channels/574275045187125269/1012726673709469818/1411253746725294091

[scruss]

that discord link is giving me the infinite wait. Maybe it's a private group?

[Josverl]

MP discord > MicroPython-dev channel

[scruss]

does a weird re-login thing, but gets there eventually. This is why Discord is not a place of record

[sophiedegran]

I'm thinking about other simple thing..
I don't know if it's possible for you..
Installing microdot with a simple upload page where you can 'upload' your config file..
That's what I do for certain of my project to modify main.py..
The avantage is no usb manipulation and you can verify 'checksum' file before acting...