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.

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Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Preface
Preface
Who this book is for
What this book covers
To get the most out of this book
Download the example code files
Code in Action
Download the color images
Conventions used
Get in touch
Share your thoughts
1
Section 1: An Introduction to the Pico
Section 1: An Introduction to the Pico
Free Chapter
2
Chapter 1: Getting Started with the Raspberry Pi Pico
Chapter 1: Getting Started with the Raspberry Pi Pico
Technical requirements
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
Summary
3
Chapter 2: Serial Interfaces and Applications
Chapter 2: Serial Interfaces and Applications
Technical requirements
Installing requisite libraries
Using the UART interface to communicate between two Pico boards
Interfacing sensors using the I2C interface
Displaying temperature data using the SPI
Setting up the wireless pack
Summary
4
Chapter 3: Home Automation Projects
Chapter 3: Home Automation Projects
Technical requirements
Installing the requisite libraries
Interfacing sensors
Controlling appliances
Publishing sensor events to the cloud
Controlling LED strips
Introducing the RP2040 Connect
Installing CircuitPython on the RP2040 Connect
Summary
5
Chapter 4: Fun with Gardening!
Chapter 4: Fun with Gardening!
Technical requirements
Why gardening?
Installing the requisite libraries
Setting up the soil sensor
Setting up the wireless pack
Setting up the NeoPixel LED
Publishing data to ThingSpeak
Putting it all together
Summary
6
Section 2: Learning by Making
Section 2: Learning by Making
7
Chapter 5: Building a Weather Station
Chapter 5: Building a Weather Station
Technical requirements
Conducting citizen science experiments
Installing the requisite libraries
Testing the sensors
Assembling and testing the weather station
Summary
8
Chapter 6: Designing a Giant Seven-Segment Display
Chapter 6: Designing a Giant Seven-Segment Display
Technical requirements
Inspiration for the project
Installing the required libraries
Selecting a seven-segment display
Wiring up the giant seven-segment display
Writing the drivers for the giant seven-segment display
Using the display
Putting it all together
Summary
9
Chapter 7: Designing a Visual Aid for Tracking Air Quality
Chapter 7: Designing a Visual Aid for Tracking Air Quality
Technical requirements
Inspiration for the project
Installing requisite libraries
Using public data sources for air quality data
Interfacing a CO2 sensor with the Pico
Interfacing the stepper motor
Building the display
Summary
10
Section 3: Advanced Topics
Section 3: Advanced Topics
11
Chapter 8: Building Wireless Nodes
Chapter 8: Building Wireless Nodes
Technical requirements
Installing requisite libraries
Interfacing a Bluetooth Low Energy module
Interfacing a Sigfox module
Interfacing a LoRa module
Summary
12
Chapter 9: Let's Build a Robot!
Chapter 9: Let's Build a Robot!
Technical requirements
Installing the prerequisites
Controlling the LEDs
Motor selection and control
Testing the sensors
Testing the robot
Summary
13
Chapter 10: Designing TinyML Applications
Chapter 10: Designing TinyML Applications
Technical requirements
Introducing TinyML
Keyword recognition in audio samples
Classifying images
Developing edge devices
Summary
14
Chapter 11: Let's Build a Product!
Chapter 11: Let's Build a Product!
Technical requirements
Understanding the Pico phone
Capturing the requirements
Designing a PCB
Bringing up the board
Taking the project forward
Summary
15
Chapter 12: Best Practices for Working with the Pico
Chapter 12: Best Practices for Working with the Pico
Technical requirements
Upgrading your Pico's firmware
Programming the Pico using the Arduino IDE
Programming in C/C++ using the Pico SDK
Tools to aid with prototyping and product development
Summary
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16
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Installing the requisite libraries

In this section, we will install the requisite libraries needed for interfacing the soil sensor, NeoPixel LED, and the wireless pack to the Raspberry Pi Pico. The libraries are all part of the Adafruit CircuitPython bundle. The latest bundle can be downloaded as a ZIP file from https://circuitpython.org/libraries. We used the bundle version meant for CircuitPython 6.x.x.

After downloading the ZIP file, extract its contents so that we can copy the libraries we need for the project.

Soil sensor

We are using a capacitive soil sensor based on the Adafruit seesaw framework. You can see this in the following screenshot:

Figure 4.2 – Capacitive soil sensor from Adafruit

If you are not familiar with Adafruit seesaw, this is a framework that enables the interfacing of any type of sensor, drive motor, control pulse-width modulation (PWM) output, and so on via the I2C interface. This is especially helpful in scenarios...

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