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

Installing requisite libraries

In this " section, we will install the requisite libraries needed for this chapter, including the stepper motor, the CO2 sensor, and the wireless pack to the Raspberry Pi Pico. The libraries are all a 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.

Stepper motor

We need the adafruit_motor library to control the stepper motor (shown in the following figure). The stepper motor has a needle that is used to point at the corresponding air quality category. Copy the adafruit_motor library to the lib folder of your Pico.

Figure 7.2 – Automotive gauge stepper motor

Next, we will review installing libraries for the wireless pack.

Wireless pack

We need the...