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 appliances

In this section, we are going to control appliances using a product called IoT Power Relay (shown in the following image). We are going to make some minor tweaks to the code sample discussed in the previous section to turn on a light when the door is open and vice-versa.

Appliances Controlled by the Power Relay

We recommend using the power relay for your projects because it offers a safe way to control AC appliances. We recommend controlling simple resistive loads such as a floor lamp.

The following photo shows the IoT power relay. The terminal on the bottom side of the picture is used to control the relay.

Figure 3.11 – IoT power relay (image source: sparkfun.com. License: CC by 2.0)

Figure 3.11 – IoT power relay (image source: sparkfun.com. License: CC by 2.0)

The IoT power relay enables controlling alternating current (AC) appliances with a 3.3 V signal. It comes with the requisite protection to safely interface the Pico with the relay. We will be making use of the GP11 pin to control the...