Getting Started with the Raspberry Pi Pico

Raspberry Pi Pico – Raspberry Pi Pico is a tiny, fast, and versatile board built using RP2040, the flagship microcontroller chip designed by Raspberry Pi Foundation in the UK. The Raspberry Pi Pico can be used to drive anything from light displays and IoT devices to signage including automation of manufacturing processes. The Raspberry Pi Pico gives the maker the power to control countless home, hobby, and industrial projects.

The Raspberry Pi Pico is Programmable in C and MicroPython. The Pi Pico is adaptable to a vast range of applications and skill levels, and getting started is as easy as dragging and dropping a file. More experienced users can take advantage of Raspberry Pi Pico’s rich peripheral set, including SPI, I2C, and eight Programmable I/O (PIO) state machines for custom peripheral support.

Here’s some basic videos to get you started with your learning journey on the Raspberry Pi Pico.

Here’s the specifications (from Raspberry Pi Foundation website) of the Raspberry Pi Pico in case you are interested –

1. 21 mm × 51 mm form factor
2. RP2040 microcontroller chip designed by Raspberry Pi in the UK
3. Dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ processor, flexible clock running up to 133 MHz
4. 264kB on-chip SRAM
5. 2MB on-board QSPI flash
6. 2.4GHz 802.11n wireless LAN (Raspberry Pi Pico W and WH only)
7. 26 multifunction GPIO pins, including 3 analogue inputs
8. 2 × UART, 2 × SPI controllers, 2 × I2C controllers, 16 × PWM channels
9. 1 × USB 1.1 controller and PHY, with host and device support
10. 8 × Programmable I/O (PIO) state machines for custom peripheral support
11. Supported input power 1.8–5.5V DC
12. Operating temperature -20°C to +85°C (Raspberry Pi Pico and Pico H); -20°C to +70°C (Raspberry Pi Pico W and Pico WH)
13. Castellated module allows soldering direct to carrier boards (Raspberry Pi Pico and Pico W only)
14. Drag-and-drop programming using mass storage over USB
15. Low-power sleep and dormant modes
16. Accurate on-chip clock
17. Temperature sensor
18. Accelerated integer and floating-point libraries on-chip

Pinout diagram for the Raspberry Pi Pico – To help you work out which pins are located where and what they are called you can refer to the pinout diagram for the Raspberry Pi Pico provided below.

This was a short tutorial with some basic videos to get you started with your learning journey on the Raspberry Pi Pico. For additional tutorials head over to KidzCanCode and check out our learning track on the Raspberry Pi Pico there – https://learning.kidzcancode.com/course/physical-computing-with-the-pi-pico-i/. Drop us a note at trevor at hack2 dot live if you have any questions, comments or suggestions.

Happy making!!!!!