raspberrypi pico

I recently bough this 1.14‘‘ LCD screen for the RaspberryPi Pico. This screen not only just fits perfectly onto the Rasperry, you literally just put it over all of the pin headers, it also comes with a little analog pad, up, down, left, right, as well as an A and B button. So it is already kind of a very small handheld gaming device. The Game It is really simple, the player, a little green square on the left side of the screen, can move up and down using the analog pad, and shoot lasers using the A button.

We all know the stories of spies placing letters in hidden dead letter boxes during foggy cold november nights to communicate with other spies. Since the year is 2022 now, we will build something like this, but using a RaspberryPi Pico W 2. Basically the Raspberry Pi will act as a WiFi Accesspoint, which you can connect to without the actual need of physical contact with the device. The Raspberry Pi will also run a webserver, which we will use to to read and store messages, for anybody else who knows where the WiFi can be found and also have the password.

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.

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.