A short post, this, to recommend Kitronic’s Pico Pin Breakout: an add-on that makes it really easy to make sure you’re wiring up a Raspberry Pi Pico’s pins correctly. It looks like this:

Here’s the thing, I got sick of counting pins, and then having mentally to map the physical number to the GPIO pin number. The Pico has 20 pins along each side; there are quite a few GND pins among them, so there’s no straightforward way of working out that GPIO 12, for example, is pin number 16.

Enter the Kitronic board, which has the GPIO numbers, GND, 3V3 and other pin types clearly marked for my ageing eyes to identify at a glance.

Two parallel rows of female header make it easy to hook up jumper wires, either into a standard solderless breadboard or direct to the peripheral device you’re working with.

It’s only a whisper over four quid. Get yourself one now. I bought mine from Pimoroni but it’s widely available from Kitronics and many other suppliers.