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

Interfacing a LoRa module

In this section, we are going to interface two LoRa modules with the Raspberry Pi Pico. This will enable us to establish communications between two wireless nodes.

What is LoRa?

Before we get started with our example, let's get started with a brief introduction to LoRa. LoRa stands for Long Range Radio and is a wireless protocol meant for long-range and low-power communications. It was developed by an organization called Semtech. While LoRa and Sigfox (discussed in the previous section) are similar, the main difference is that the former lets you set up your own network, while the latter is operated by an individual operator that requires a license to connect to their network. The following table highlights the difference between LoRa and Sigfox radios:

Table 8.1 – The differences between LoRa and Sigfox

There is a nonprofit organization called the LoRa Alliance that has developed a standard for interoperability between...