How can you make your Pico/Pico W project portable?
Some Pico W projects need to work anywhere. Wi-Fi takes care of the connectivity, but the projects need battery power to make them truly portable.
If you're building a portable project you'll find the Pimoroni Lipo Shim for Pico is a great solution. Here's how to attach and use it.
Powering the Pico
While you're writing the software for your Pico or Pico are you'll be using a USB cable to linking it to your host. Once your hardware and software are working you may want to free the Pico from its umbilical cord.
The Pico can be powered from a battery; it's very adaptable, working off an input voltage that can range from 1.8 to 5.5 volts.
The Pimoroni Lipo Shim for Pico takes advantage of that. It lets you power your project from a compact LiPo battery, and you can recharge the battery via USB when it needs it. You can even use the Pico while the battery is charging.
There are lots of suitable batteries available, from Pimoroni and others, but my current favourite is the Pimoroni Galleon; its rugged case reduces the risk of crushing or puncturing the LiPo.
So how do you hook up the LiPo shim to the Pico it's powering?
Pimoroni suggest two options.
Connecting the Pico
Both options involve some soldering. One is simple; the other, Pimoroni suggest, is suitable for advanced solderers. You can connect the Pico to other components via female header sockets or male header pins.
The simple option
You want to connect two layers of PCB, one for the Pico and one for the Shim. You can use stacking female headers like this:
Image courtesy of Pimoroni.
You get a bonus (sockets on the top of the Pico, giving you extra connection options), but there are two disadvantages:
your project is now quite a bit bigger, and you may find it fiddly to press the bootsel button if you need to.
There's an easy fix to the bootsel issue; you can use mpremote's bootsel command, or run machine.bootsel() from a
REPL.
If space is a problem, you have another option.
For advanced solderers
From the Pimoroni site:
"Alternatively, if you're ambitious in the ways of experimental soldering, you can try soldering the Pico and the SHIM both to the short end of your header, back to back. This method makes for a much more slimline Pico/SHIM package which works nicely with Pico Display, but you'll need to make sure your solder joints make good contact with the pads of both boards and the header."
Here's how you do it, in words and pictures.
Step 1
button of the shim is located below the shim and below where the USB connector of the Pico will be.
Step 2
Step 3
If not, it's fairly easy to melt the solder on the relevant corner and fix the alignment.
Step 4
Step 5
Step 6
If all is well you should see a white LED, showing that the Pico is powered, and a red LED, showing that the battery is charging.
NB: You may need to push the button on the end of the shim to turn the power on.
Well done! You are now an official advanced solderer :)
Checking the battery voltage
If you're using a Pico you can easily use an OLED display to show the state of the battery. There's a useful program to do that on the Pimoroni website, but it won't work for the PicoW without a change. That's because it uses ADC29 (also known as ADC3) to monitor the Vsys voltage.
You can do that on the Pico W, but you need to pull P25 high which disables wireless. Since I wanted to use MQTT over a wireless connection to monitor the battery, I had to find an alternative solution.
A couple of the projects I had in mind used two of the three normal ADC pins on the pico, but none used all three., If your project doesn't need three Analogue inputs, you can use one to monitor the battery voltage.
That needs a little care, as the GPIO pins on the Pico (including the analogue pins) should not be connected to more than 3.3 volts. A fully charged Lipo might be outputting 4.2 volts, which would damage the analogue pin.
Fortunately there's an easy solution.
Using a voltage divider.
You can use a voltage divider to reduce Vsys to a safe voltage. I used two 10K ohm resistors, but 100K would be better, as that would reduce battery drain.
Then you can safely read the adc output and convert it to a voltage. Remember to multiply it two to compensate for the divider!
Here's the breadboard layout for the divider:
and here's the schematic:
The code
# This example shows how to read the voltage from a LiPo battery
# connected to a Raspberry Pi Pico via the Pimoroni LiPo shim for Pico
# secrets.py should contain your network id and password in this format:
"""
SSID = 'your Wi-Fi network id'
PASSWORD = 'your Wi-Fi password'
MQTT_HOST='broker url'
"""
from machine import ADC, Pin
import time
import random
import network_connection
from umqtt.simple import MQTTClient
from secrets import SSID, PASSWORD, MQTT_HOST
# connect to wifi
# this may take several seconds
network_connection.connect(SSID, PASSWORD)
print('connected')
CLIENT_ID = 'pico-lipo-monitor-%d' % (1000 + random.randrange(999))
mc = MQTTClient(CLIENT_ID, MQTT_HOST, keepalive=3600)
mc.connect()
adc2 = ADC(28)
conversion_factor = 2 * 3.3 / 65535
while True:
voltage = adc2.read_u16() * conversion_factor
message = 'Lipo voltage: %f' % voltage
mc.publish('lipo', message)
time.sleep(60)Summary
That's how you can connect the Pimoroni Lipo shim for Pico and the Pico W, and how you can then monitor the LiPo battery voltage.
I'll be publishing the hardware and software details of the weather station project in my forthcoming guide to the Pico W. Read more details here.
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