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

Motor selection and control

In this section, we will discuss the various motor options available to build a robot. For a typical desktop robot, the various motor options include the following:

  • Direct Current (DC) motors
  • Stepper motors
  • Servo motors

Let's discuss the applications of these motors.

DC motors

DC motors are ideal for wheeled robots. The following figure shows the DC motors used to drive the wheels of our robot. DC motors are widely used in toys because of their low cost and their small size. The DC motors used in our robot come with an in-built gearbox to reduce the revolutions per minute (rpm) and make it suitable for a wheeled robot.

DC motors are typically operated using an H-bridge circuit. This enables the speed and direction of travel to be controlled.

Figure 9.11 – DC motors on the robot

Stepper motors

Stepper motors are ideal for positioning applications. For example, stepper motors can be...