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

Controlling LED strips

In this section, we will interface a NeoPixel LED strip with the Pico. NeoPixels are serially connected LEDs that are individually addressable. The NeoPixels come in a variety of form factors, namely, horizontal bars, flexible strips, and circular rings. We will be discussing this example with a NeoPixel ring (link: https://bit.ly/3cn5pxj). We are discussing the LED strip interface because they could make a great holiday lighting project or an ambient light controller. Our favorite project using Pico and the NeoPixel LED is this table lamp (link: https://bit.ly/3r6iIdJ).

The examples discussed in this section make use of helper functions from Adafruit.

The NeoPixel ring requires three connections, namely, Data IN or DIN, Power, and Ground (connections shown in Figure 3.23). While the Power pin is connected to the 3.3V pin of the Pico, the Data IN pin is connected to GP10 of the Pico.

Figure 3.15 – Schematic for connecting the...