Raspberry Pi Pico, Robotics, Tutorials

Drive servos, steppers, DC motors and solenoids with the Raspberry Pi Pico and CircuitPython with this great guide from Adafruit

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Adafruit have produced some exceptional tutorials/guides over the years and it appears that they are doing a sterling job on new guides for the Raspberry Pi Pico.

Their latest guide shows you to how to hook up a Raspberry Pi Pico to various electronic components to drive servos, stepper motors, DC motors and even solenoids!

You can read the guide here which includes a full list of parts which you should be able to source even if you don’t live in the US – check The Pi Hut, Pimoroni and AliExpress for what you need. You can see a video of the whole “party” below:

Geeky Techiness, Operating systems, Raspberry Pi Pico, Tutorials

Run a v7 Unix clone on your Raspberry Pi Pico – take a look at this experiment using Fuzix

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Image by Alasdair Allan (https://alasdairallan.com/)

David Given has been working on porting the Fuzix operating system to various microcontrollers and he wondered if he could get it working on the Raspberry Pi Pico.

He’s described Fuzix in the following terms:

Fuzix is a proper Unix, with multiple processes, devices, all the standard Unix tools, Bourne shell, vi clone, etc. Given the RP2040’s limited RAM and no MMU, this port keeps just one process in memory at a time, swapping in and out to an SD card to do context switches; this works surprisingly well. Each process gets up to 64kB of code and data.

He succeeded in his efforts, and he describes performance on the little board as “pretty decent”, though he hasn’t tried overclocking the Pico yet to see how much he can get out of it. He has documented it all over on his blog where you can see how he did it and how to reproduce it yourself. Over on the Raspberry Pi Forums, where he posted the work as a thread, you can see the exploits of other people who have replicated the project, as well as some more information on hooking up an SD card reader like so:

Thanks to Alasdair Allan again for this wiring diagram

David’s plan is to look at porting Fuzix to the full Raspberry Pi at some stage, so keep an eye on his blog for that.

Communications, LoRaWAN, Raspberry Pi Pico, Tutorials

Add LoRaWAN support to your Raspberry Pi Pico with this tutorial

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Mauro Riva has written an excellent tutorial on adding LoRaWAN support to the Raspberry Pi Pico using a cheap Lora board and custom MicroPython firmware. He details how to connect the Lora board up to the Pico before going on to describing how to extend the normal MicroPython firmware to support cryptographic primitives. By introducing these primitives, he communicates with the Lora board and opens up the possibility of communication with other Lora devices, such as those on The Things Network.

Until someone comes up with a plugin daughter board for the Pico (and my money is on Pi Supply), this is an excellent start for anyone wanting to use the Pico to “do” Lora. You can read how to do it yourself, and find the Lora board, over on LeMaRiva.

Games, GPIO boards, Programming, Raspberry Pi Pico

Conway’s Game of Life on a Pimoroni Pico Scroll Pack (and other accessories!)

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Tony Goodhew got in touch and told me about Steve Baines’ effort to get the famous Conway’s Game of Life running on the Raspberry Pi Pico with a Pimoroni Pico Unicorn Pack attached. You can see Steve’s original script on the Pimoroni forums here. You can also read about Tony’s port of the same code to work on the Pico Explorer screen in the same place.

Not having a Pico Unicorn to hand, I wondered if it would work on a Pimoroni Pico Scroll Pack – and indeed it did, with some minor modifications to Steve’s code. You can see that code on a GitHub Gist here.

To get it to run, load the Pimoroni MicroPython UF2 onto your Raspberry Pi Pico, then use Thonny to put the code onto your Pico, calling it main.py. Make sure you’re not in REPL mode in Thonny, and the code should just run. The A button on the Scroll Pack resets the game and starts it going again.

A demo video of a couple of runs can be seen below:

Programming, Raspberry Pi Pico, Sensors, Tutorials

Use an MCP3008 analog to digital chip to expand the Raspberry Pi Pico’s analog reading capabilities

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Back in 2013, I covered Matt Hawkins’ excellent post about using an MCP3008 analog-to-digital chip with a Raspberry Pi to read analog values, something that the Pi was previously incapable of doing. Now, we have the Raspberry Pi Pico which gives us the ability to read analog signals using its on-board capabilities. However, sometimes we need access to more analog inputs. This is where we can revert back to using an external chip, such as the MCP3008.

Romilly Cocking, who has been around the Raspberry Pi community since the very beginning, has taken on this task using MicroPython, Raspberry Pi’s recommended language for those who don’t want to get into the lower level stuff of C/C++. You can read his tutorial here – it goes into a lot of detail about SPI and how he found out the wrong way of doing it before finding success, and it’s well worth a read! 🙂