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

Chapter 9: Let's Build a Robot!

In this chapter, we will have some fun building a robot using a Raspberry Pi Pico. We will discuss programming the Raspberry Pi Pico using MicroPython. We will also discuss building a robot using an off-the-shelf robotics kit. We will get started by reviewing the components of our robot by testing them; then, we will discuss building a line-following robot and an obstacle avoiding robot.

Figure 9.1 – Kitronik Autonomous Robotics Platform for Raspberry Pi Pico

This can be a fun weekend project that could be further enhanced to participate in robotic contests. We will give you some ideas toward the end of this chapter.

Figure 9.2 – Line-following robot using the Kitronik kit

The topics discussed in this chapter include the following:

  • Installing the prerequisites
  • Controlling the LEDs
  • Motor selection and control
  • Testing the sensors
  • Testing the robot