Getting started with the Raspberry Pi pico

By -

I'm always excited when Eben Upton pulls another Raspberry Pi rabbit out of his capacious topper.

Last week he announced the $4 Raspberry Pi pico. It's a unique product for several reasons, and I put an order in as soon as I saw the announcement.

It's easy to get the pico going

The pico's on-line documentation is superb and it's supplemented by an excellent and inexpensive book from Gareth Halfacree and Ben Everard.

I did hit one minor 'gotcha'. I've been working on my main workstation which runs Linux Mint, and discovered the hard way that the Thonny Editor won't install properly if you're using Python 3.5

Python 3.5 has reached end-of-life, but it's still the default on Linux Mint 18.3. If I want to use a later version I have to set up a virtual environment. Once I did that, Thonny installed perfectly and within a couple of minutes I'd created a Hello World script and run it on the pico.

If you're using a Raspberry Pi to program the pico you won't have this problem, as the current version of Raspberry Pi OS has Python 3.7 installed.

Raspberry Pi partners with Pimoroni, Adafruit, sparkfun and Arduino

I mentioned that the pico was unique for several reasons. One I find particularly exciting: the RP2040 chip at the heart of the pico will be used in products from Pimoroni, Adafruit, sparkfun and Arduino as well as the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

It's great to see these movers and shakers cooperating in this way. It makes good commercial sense. This cooperation will create more opportunities for us all, and will expand the market as a result.

I'll be documenting my pico exploration as I go. Follow @rareblog on twitter if you want to stay informed.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Controlling a Raspberry Pi Pico remotely using PySerial

By -
Image
Update : I'm using thie code below in another project, and found that I had not correctly fixed the reported bug. The new version passes automated tests, and I am pretty sure it works OK. I have changed the name of the class to Talker  since it can both send and receive information. Apologies to all concerned for the bug! Introduction You can use a Raspberry Pi Pico as a powerful peripheral to a host - a Raspberry Pi, a Jetson Nano, a laptop or workstation. In this article you'll see how to interact with a Pico running MicroPython or CircuitPython by writing some Python code that runs on the host. The software is easy to use. It enables you to send a Python statement to the Pico and read the results. The statement can be any valid MicroPython code. Setting up the host and the Pico For this article I've used a Raspberry Pi as the host, but any computer running Windows, Linux or Mac OS will do so long as it has Python 3.5 or later installed. In particular, you can use this t
Read more

Five steps to connect Jetson Nano and Arduino

By -
Image
Yesterday's post showed how to link a micro:bit to the Jetson Nano. One of the members of the (unofficial) NVIDIA Jetson Nano group on Facebook asked about connecting an Arduino to the Jetson. Here's a simple recipe for getting data from the Arduino to the Jetson Nano. It should work on all the Jetson models, not just the Nano, but I only have Nanos to hand. On request, I've added a recipe at the end of this post which sends data from the Jetson Nano to the Arduino; it turns the default LED on the Arduino on or off. The recipe for sending data from the Arduino to the Jetson has just 5 stages: Program the Arduino. (I used the ASCIITable example). Connect the Arduino to the Jetson using a USB connector Install pyserial on the Jetson Download a three-line Python script Run the script.   Programming the Arduino I used an Arduino Uno, and checked it on a verteran Duemilanove (above), but any Arduino should work. You'll need to do this step usi
Read more

Raspberry Pi Pico project 2 - MCP3008

By -
Image
This post show you how to drive the MCP3008 8-channel ADC using a Raspberry Pi Pico. I'll start with a personally embarrassing and annoyingly relevant story. I'll also tell you about a minor 'gotcha' when using SPI on the Pico, and how you can avoid it. Finally, I've include the code and fritzing diagram I used to test the interface. First, the story. Back in 2012, when the Raspberry Pi was fresh and new, I was running a startup called Quick2Wire.  We made add-on boards for the Pi. Just before Christmas we sent out our first batch of boards to a small army of beta-testers. The beta boards didn't work. Somehow a single trace on the pcb had got deleted and one of the GPIO pins was isolated. The boards were still usable and it wasn't too hard to solder in a jumper wire to replace the missing trace, but it was very embarrassing. It wasn't just that we'd shipped boards with a defect. The really annoying thing was that I'd set up an  automated loop-bac
Read more