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

Setting up the NeoPixel LED

In this section, we will interface and test a NeoPixel LED. We are adding an LED to the project because it could be used as a visual aid to let you know if your soil is too dry. If you are not familiar with NeoPixel LEDs, these are individually addressable RGB LEDs. You can find more information about them here: https://bit.ly/3sin0x5.

The NeoPixel is connected to GP0, as shown in Figure 4.7. The connections between the Pico and the NeoPixel are listed as follows:

  • GP0 → In pin of NeoPixel.
  • VBUS → + pin.
  • The GND pins are tied together.

An interface diagram is shown here:

Figure 4.10 – NeoPixel interface to the Pico

Now, let's test if everything is in working order. The first step is to import the requisite modules, as follows:

import time
import board
import neopixel

Now, let's initialize an object belonging to the Neopixel class by running the following code:

pixel_pin...