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

Building the display

It is time to assemble the display inside the shadow box. We printed the various air quality categories on a semi-circle and tested its fit inside the shadow box as shown in the following figure. If you are not familiar with shadow boxes, they are display boxes with a recess and glass at the front. They are used for prominently displaying souvenirs, medals, mementos, and so on. They are usually carried by stores that sell supplies for arts, crafts, and other related hobbies.

Figure 7.23 – Testing the fit inside the shadow box

We ensure that the stepper motor sits in the middle of the shadow box on top of the air quality categories. Once the stepper motor is installed, it is time to calibrate the stepper motor movements and calculate the number of steps needed for each category.

Now we are ready to take the display for a spin. The following figure shows the display pointing to the air quality being Good:

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