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

Using the display

In this section, we will discuss driving the displays in two ways: with a simple web server running on the Pico and via a serial port.

Let's get started!

Simple web server

In this example, we will host a simple web server on the Pico so that we can update the display using a browser from any device on a local network. This example is based on the esp32spi_wsgiserver example made available from Adafruit (link: https://bit.ly/3itHrmY). We made some simple modifications to the code sample to adapt it to our example. The modified code sample is available for download from this chapter's repository as code_server.py (link: https://bit.ly/3hqWA7X).

The changes made to the server example include the following:

  • Importing the seven_segment driver so that we can update the display when there is a request:
    import seven_segment
  • We updated the GPIO pin numbers to drive the ESP32 wireless pack:
    # If you have an externally connected ESP32:
    esp32_cs...