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

Installing the prerequisites

Before we get started, we need to install the Thonny IDE, along with installing MicroPython on the Raspberry Pi Pico.

MicroPython Installation

We recommend installing MicroPython on your Pico. If you are not familiar with the installation process, you can follow the installation process in Chapter 1, Getting Started with the Raspberry Pi Pico.

The required library for the Kitronik Robotics kit is available for download as a ZIP file from its repository at https://bit.ly/3K35aoM.

Once the contents of the files are extracted, we can install the library via the Thonny IDE as follows:

  1. In the Thonny IDE, go to the folder containing the extracted library files, as shown in the following screenshot, where you can navigate to the location of the files:

Figure 9.3 – Locating the extracted files in the Thonny IDE

  1. Now, right-click on PicoAutonomousRobotics.py, and upload it to the Pico, as shown in the...