Not sure why or what the rationale for doing that is.Actually most of the examples are running without USB, on purpose.
IMO they should all be using the #define's the Pico SDK provides and tailoring themselves to whether USB serial is selected or not.
That way it would avoid those like the OP having to come here and ask why the examples don't work, people having to explain it, tell them how to fix things.
Just enabling USB serial in 'CMakeLists.txt' isn't enough to solve the problem. The examples expecting UART to be used all need to be modified to not report anything until a USB connection is made, and not exit main when done, or they hang 'minicom' and other utilities, and also require manually putting into BOOTSEL mode again if you want to upload using 'picotool' or drag and drop.
Even better than using #define is to hide that in pre-main and post-main functions which allows standard C code to be used without the faff of having to add extra #include and code. That's what I do - viewtopic.php?t=390377
Statistics: Posted by hippy — Thu Oct 02, 2025 10:32 pm