The Raspberry Pi Pico

Motivation:

Throughout this project I'm entirely leveraging microcontrollers instead a of full fledged processor. This makes sense for a weather station because:

• power consumption will be very low
• battery powered operation will be possible
• cost will be low
• match the right hardware to the right problem

Here I'll get familiar with the basics of getting a Rasberry PI Pico up and running Micropython. In this project step we will just need a Raspberry Pi Pico an IDE to program with and the latest micropython .uf2 file to flash the board.

Download

• Micropython for Raspberry Pi Pico from the micropython.org website
• SSD1306 LCD driver from github
• gfx.py This is a port of micropython-adafruit-gfx

Complete Bill of Materials

• Raspberry Pi Pico H (Pi Pico no Wireless, with headers)
• long breadboard
• jumper wires
• short micro USB cables
• resistor pack (or just a couple ~500 ohm resistors)
• LEDs (two or three is enough)
• an SSD1306 based LCD display

Activities

1. Put micropython on the Pico and write my first program
2. Set up visual studio
3. write code to understand how to control GPIO pin modes and input/output
4. write code to understand how to ust the Analog-to-Digital converter