Feature Request: load different profiles at boot

[Petruzzo73]

It would be useful to load different configurations profiles at boot without having to edit them manually every time. For example assign profile1 to button1, profile2 to button2, etc. loaded automatically if button pressed while plugging usb. Is it feasible?

thanks

[mjrgh]

The idea of multiple profiles is probably useful and feasible. It's not a simple add-on, but it could be done.

Using a button to select a profile at startup might not be, though: buttons don't exist until after a profile is loaded, since the button hardware mappings are part of the profile (and so is the underlying peripheral hardware configuration, when the buttons are connected through peripheral chips, such as a PCA9555 or 74HC165). Waiting until after a profile is loaded to decide which profile to load is a time-travel paradox that the Pico is not equipped to handle natively, since it doesn't have an on-board flux capacitor. To resolve this without time travel, there'd have to be some kind of two-stage loading process, with a low-level core hardware profile containing at least the hardware configuration and button definitions, and a separate profile containing the higher-level definitions that you want to vary by creating multiple profiles. That's probably beyond anything I'd like to contemplate; I don't really want to create a complete operating system here.

What could probably be done instead is to initiate profile selection purely from the host (the PC), so that you do something user-defined on the host (run an AHK script, for example) that fires off a command-line config tool command that transmits a reboot-into-new-profile command to the Pico. That would require some kind of basic multi-profile scheme to start with, which doesn't exist now, but it would be a natural part of that if it were ever added.

[Petruzzo73]

Thank you