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 1: Getting Started with the Raspberry Pi Pico

In this chapter, we would like to delve into a quick introduction to the Raspberry Pi Pico and the RP2040 microcontroller. We will discuss the Raspberry Pi Pico's features, the RP2040's peripherals, the add-on hardware for the Pico, and development boards for the RP2040 developed by other makers. We will also discuss the programming language options available for the Pico and supplement the chapter by discussing a simple "Hello World" example where we print something to the screen and blink a light-emitting diode (LED).

By the end of this first chapter, you will have gotten started with the Pico and will be ready to start programming the RP2040 microcontroller and start planning to implement projects from the later chapters of this book, as well as thinking ahead to how you can tackle your own projects with the Raspberry Pi Pico!

We are going to cover the following main topics:

  • Introducing the Raspberry Pi Pico and RP2040
  • Discussing variants of the Pico board
  • Soldering the Pico's headers
  • Implementing the "Hello World!" example
  • Implementing the LED-blinking example
  • Identifying useful add-on hardware for the Pico