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 4: Fun with Gardening!

In this chapter, we will discuss interfacing a soil sensor to a Raspberry Pi Pico and publishing the soil moisture and temperature values to ThingSpeak (https://thingspeak.com), an Internet of Things (IoT) platform that enables you to visualize collected data. By the end of this chapter, you should be able to build something like this:

Figure 4.1 – Fun with gardening

In the preceding photo, a STEMMA soil sensor from Adafruit Industries is inserted next to a small potted plant. The soil sensor is interfaced to a Raspberry Pi Pico. The Pico is mounted onto a Dual Expander pack. A Pico wireless pack is interfaced to the left of the Pico for uploading soil moisture values to ThingSpeak.

We are going to discuss the following topics in this chapter:

  • Why gardening?
  • Installing the requisite libraries
  • Setting up the soil sensor
  • Setting up the wireless pack
  • Setting up the NeoPixel light-emitting diode ...