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

Testing the sensors

In this section, we will test the ultrasonic sensor and the line-following sensor that come with the robotics kit. We will start by testing the ultrasonic sensor.

Ultrasonic sensor

Ultrasonic sensors are generally used in obstacle-avoidance applications. They use the time of flight principle to measure the distance between objects. The sensor transmits a sound signal at a known frequency in the ultrasonic spectrum. The sound signal bounces off the surface of obstacles back to the sensor. The time elapsed since the transmission of the signal is used to calculate the distance between the sensor and the object. The distance between objects is calculated as follows:

Speed = Distance / Time

Distance = (Speed of Sound x Time) / 2

We divide by two because the sound has to travel twice between the obstacle and the sensor.

You can learn about ultrasonic sensors at https://bit.ly/3xeqpS2.

The ultrasonic sensor can be installed on both the front and...