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

Testing the robot

Now that we have tested the components of our robot, it is time to take it for a spin. The first step is to install the wheels of the robot (as shown in the following figure):

Figure 9.23 – Installing wheels on the robot

The code samples for the line-following and obstacle-avoidance robots are available for download along with this chapter as line_following.py and obstacle_avoidance.py. We tested the line-following robot using a mat from Kitronik (https://bit.ly/3GAn0xM), as shown in the following figure:

Figure 9.24 – Line-following robot on a map

Robotics contests

Where do we go from here? If building robots interests you, we recommend checking out contests organized by your local robotics club. There are other types of robots, such as maze-solving robots and sumo wrestling robots, for example. Some clubs even organize robotic sumo wrestling competitions. Our favorite contest is a Micromouse contest...