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

Assembling and testing the weather station

We recommend following an excellent guide from SparkFun to assemble the kit. You can refer to the guide here: https://bit.ly/3yTgZZu. We assembled our kit and tried setting it up in our backyard, as shown in the following figure. We made use of a Pico and a weather carrier board for our installation. This is just for the sake of convenience to avoid some messy wires outdoors:

Figure 5.18 – A weather station installation in the backyard

We tested our weather station without the following considerations:

  • A power source for the weather station
  • Assembly of the carrier board onto the weather station
  • Weather-proofing the carrier board inside an enclosure
  • Sturdy installation of the weather station

It is going to take some extensive testing to identify and fix all the problems. The first step is to fix any problems associated with sensor interfacing. Then, we need to ensure that any enclosure...