programming

Sometimes I need a little visual hint to do things, especially when it comes to little things that I should do on repeat, like dayli or even multiple times per day. I’m not really someone who does a lot of sport, but I love to go bouldering. In my “best times” I went three times every week. A few weeks ago I injured my left leg and since then I was not able to go to the bouldering gym anymore.

Ever wanted to build a custom controller, or a have a few buttons which you could map some shortcuts to? Then the RaspberryPi Pico and a few touch buttons are everything you need. The Pico can be used as a HID (Keyboard, Mouse or MediaController) by using Adafruit’s HID library. The only problem here is that you can not use it using Micropython, but if we setup the Pico to run Circutpython we are good to go.

Most tutorials I’ve found so far are about 3-pin photodiodes. These are meant to recieve digital IR signals from TV remotes or similar devices. The 2-pin diodes can be used to simply meassure the available IR light. So you could use this to build a distance sensor, if you add a IR LED emitter and then meassure the reflected light, or to meassure the IR light emitted by a natural or artificial light source.

The Arduino Nano 33 IoT comes with a built-in 3-axis acceleromteter. This sensor meassures values for x, y and z acceleration between -1 and 1. If we want to know the actual position in which the sensor is, we need to know it’s rotation on two axis, pitch and roll, in dregress. This two angles could be used then later on to control two servos which rotate an object exactly the same way the sensor is rotated.

On a rainy sunday afternoon I found out that the RaspbeeryPi Pico fits perfectly into a 35mm film box if you cut a little hole for the USB port into the lid. Since my box was a semi-transparent white box, I decided to add some LEDs and build a little temperature sensor, that indicates the current temperature range using either a blue, green, orange or red LED. Build I connected the power pin (long side) of each LED to a GPIO port (green = Pin4, blue = Pin5, orange = Pin3, red = Pin2), of course with a 220 ohm resistor in between, and all the short sides to GND.

A few days ago I got two brand new RaspberryPi Pico Boards and so it is time to build something using this new toy. So let’s talk about what it actually is, how to setup a MicroPython development environment and also build a simple example project to make sure everything works as expected. This one is not like the others I won’t go to much into the specs of this board, since you can read them for yourself here, instead I will focus here on two specific things that set’s this Pi appart from others like it.