Last Summer, I explored using the Raspberry Pi Pico as the basis of a cellular IoT device. That done, I wanted to try out WiFi connectivity. To do so, I ordered a Pimoroni PicoWireless.
Build a Raspberry Pi Pico WiFi IoT Device
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Category Archives: Raspberry Pi
Recreating the Motorola 6809 in a Raspberry Pi Pico
This is a little project I’ve been working off and on now for some time. It’s one of those efforts where you do a heap of work and then leave it alone for months on end while you go off and do something else entirely. Eventually you come back and do a little more, and then something else distracts you. But you know you’ll complete it in the end, and the journey is as much fun as reaching the destination.
Raspberry Pi Pico development on the iPad Pro: almost, but not quite there
I recently upgraded my ageing iPad to a new iPad Pro 11. This has a USB C port, and I immediately wondered if I could use this to connect a USB C equipped Raspberry Pi RP2040-based device like the Adafruit Feather RP2040, and do development on the iPad rather than a Mac. The answer is a cautious ‘yes’, provided you can work to a very specific limitation: your RP2040-side application environment has to be CircuitPython.
Program games on the Pimoroni PicoSystem
A wee while back I ordered a Pimoroni PicoSystem to try out. It’s a small handheld games console based on the Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller, and it sports both classic joypad controls and a 240 x 240 16-bit colour display. I gave my first impressions in an earlier post. Here’s what I think after spending some time porting my Raspberry Pi Pico version of the 1980s 3D shooter Phantom Slayer to the unit.
How to send data to a Raspberry Pi Pico via USB
Do you need to transfer data to and from a Raspberry Pi Pico, or similar RP2040-based board, connected to your computer by USB? Here’s a neat way to achieve it without any tedious mucking about with the USB stack. Apart from a couple of questions on the Raspberry Pi Forum, there’s not much in the way of documentation, so here’s a write-up.
First look: Pimoroni’s PicoSystem hackable handheld games console
I’ve had my eye on the PicoSystem, the Raspberry Pi RP2040-based games console platform, for some time. It surfaced back in the Spring and was long marked “coming soon”. But now it’s here, mine showed up yesterday while I was at work, and this morning I’ve been messing about with it.
How to build a cellular IoT device with the Raspberry Pi Pico — part two, the code
In part one, I described an IoT demo setup based on the Raspberry Pi Pico and the Waveshare Pico SIM7080G Cat-M1/NB-IoT cellular add-on board, and wrote about some of the design goals. Now it’s time to implement that design with some C++ code: a host application, drivers for the modem, the HT16K3-based display and the MCP9808 temperature sensor, and some third-party libraries to decode incoming commands formatted as JSON and encoded in base64 for easy SMS transmission.
How to build a cellular IoT device with the Raspberry Pi Pico — part one, the hardware
To turn the Raspberry Pi Pico into an Internet of Things (IoT) device, you need to add wireless connectivity. I thought I’d give it go, to see how straightforward it might be to connect the Pico to cellular networks and have a bare-metal app written in C++ run the show. For a modem, I chose to use Waveshare’s suitably sized Pico SIM7080G Cat-M1/NB-IoT.
How to pop up a Picoprobe from the Adafruit QT Py RP2040
A little while back I wrote about Adafruit’s QT Py RP2040 and how it makes a nice, compact Picoprobe. That’s a Raspberry Pi RP2040-based device used as a bridge between your computer and a target device for debugging work using Single Wire Debug (SWD). I first used the QT Py RP2040’s side-mounted GPIO pins, but SWD hosting is a great role for the device’s QT Stemma connector.
Raspberry Pi Pico proxies: the Pimoroni Tiny 2040 and the Adafruit QT Py RP2040
Having spent some time with the Raspberry Pi Pico, I thought it was time to try out some of the other RP2040-based development boards that have become available. When it launched the Pico, the Raspberry Pi Foundation said it would make its RP2040 microcontroller available to third-party board makers. Retailers Pimoroni and Adafruit were among the first to toss their caps into the ring. Their offerings: respectively, the Tiny 2040 and the QT Py RP2040.
smittytone messes with micros 