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 6: Designing a Giant Seven-Segment Display

In this chapter, we will have fun with some retro-style displays. We will build a giant display driven by the Pico. It is a fun experience to build visual aids involving LEDs and seven-segment displays. By the end of this chapter, you should be able to build something like the display shown in the following figure, where we have a seven-segment display inside a shadow box:

Figure 6.1 – Giant seven-segment display

In this chapter, we will discuss building such visual aids. We will also discuss options to build displays of different sizes and applications. The topics discussed in this chapter include the following:

  • 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