Book Image

Raspberry Pi Pico DIY Workshop

By : Sai Yamanoor, Srihari Yamanoor
Book Image

Raspberry Pi Pico DIY Workshop

By: Sai Yamanoor, Srihari Yamanoor

Overview of this book

The Raspberry Pi Pico is the latest addition to the Raspberry Pi family of products. Introduced by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, based on their RP2040 chip, it is a tiny, fast microcontroller that packs enough punch to power an extensive range of applications. Raspberry Pi Pico DIY Workshop will help you get started with your own Pico and leverage its features to develop innovative products. This book begins with an introduction to the Raspberry Pi Pico, giving you a thorough understanding of the RP2040's peripherals and different development boards for the Pico designed and manufactured by various organizations. You'll explore add-on hardware and programming language options available for the Pico. Next, you'll focus on practical skills, starting with a simple LED blinking project and building up to a giant seven-segment display, while working with application examples such as citizen science displays, digital health, and robots. You'll also work on exciting projects around gardening, building a weather station, tracking air quality, hacking your personal health, and building a robot, along with discovering tips and tricks to give you the confidence needed to make the best use of RP2040. By the end of this Raspberry Pi book, you'll have built a solid foundation in product development using the RP2040, acquired a skillset crucial for embedded device development, and have a robot that you built yourself.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: An Introduction to the Pico
6
Section 2: Learning by Making
10
Section 3: Advanced Topics

Controlling the LEDs

In this section, we will get started with testing the RGB LEDs on the Kitronik Robotics kit. There are four RGB LEDs on the chassis (highlighted in Figure 9.6). The LEDs could be used to provide a visual indication of the robot's action. We will light them up in a circular pattern.

Figure 9.8 – The LED location on the robotics platform

The code sample discussed in this section is rgb_led_test.py:

  1. In the Thonny IDE, create a file called main.py and save it to your Pico, as shown in the following figure, where the dialog appears when you click on the Save button.

Figure 9.9 – Save main.py to Raspberry Pi Pico

  1. Now, let's discuss the code meant to drive the LEDs in a circular pattern. The first step is to import the requisite modules. We are going to need the KitronikPicoRobotBuggy class from the library we installed earlier, along with the time module:
    from PicoAutonomousRobotics...