why is it every time i put FILE ON THE PICO IT DISAPEARS WHEN I PLUG IT BACK INTO USB
It’s supposed to do that – the reason why it disappears is that it is booting the image freshly loaded from the UF2 file you just copied! If it didn’t disappear, then something would be wrong.
I had it not disappearing on FreeBSD, turned out I have to force a disk sync, then it unmounts and works!
(leaving it here in case someone else has a similar problem on any other UNIX)
And since no one has mentioned it already, but it was assumed…
The only files meant to be copied to the Pico this way are UF2 files. This is how you replace the firmware on the device. Any other files will be ignored, since the device won’t be able to boot from them.
There’s no other mountable filesystem on the Pico that you can get to directly by plugging into USB like that. Depending on the firmware you’ve got installed and how it’s partitioned you may have some flash space that you can access but you’ll need to use other tools to get to that and copy files to that space, unless the firmware itself allows direct access via USB (which it could, but only if it was made that way).
The PicoCalc also has the SD card, which for most firmware needs to be frmatted as FAT32, and can be removed and accessed on any device with an SD reader. Some PicoCalc firmware allows for mounting of the SD card over USB as well, like the UF2Loader and at least a few others, but those are things you’d need to flash and set up to be able to use.
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I should note that as of the most recent release of zeptoforth, 1.17.0, as installed by the PicoCalc installers for it the SD card in your PicoCalc can be mounted on your PC like a USB Mass Storage device, and if you copy a UF2 file onto this it will just store it on the SD card rather than install it in your board’s flash.
You can tell the difference between BOOTSEL mode and the SD card by the name of the filesystem that shows up on your PC, and that BOOTSEL mode always contains a few small files with directions in them.
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