Raspberry Pi Pico

The Raspberry Pi foundation has just release their brand new Pi Pico microcontroller. This low-cost microcontroller board features a powerful new chip, the RP2040. Inside the RP2040 is a 'permanent ROM' USB UF2 bootloader. What that means is when you want to program new firmware, you can hold down the BOOTSEL button while plugging it into USB and it will appear as a USB disk drive you can drag the firmware onto.

Quick Spec

• Dual ARM Cortex-M0+ @ 133MHz
• 264kB on-chip SRAM
• Support for up to 16MB of off-chip Flash
• DMA controller
• Fully-connected AHB crossbar
• On-chip programmable LDO
• 30 GPIO pins
• 2 x UARTs
• 2 x SPI controllers
• 2 x I2C controllers
• 16 x PWM channels
• USB 1.1 controller and PHY
• 8 PIO state machines
• 4 Analog inputs
• Size 51.3mm x 21mm x 3.9mm

Pin Functions

Resources

• Official Specifications
• Pi Pico Board - Official Datasheet and Dimensions
• Micro Python Editor - Thonny support Pi Pico from version 3.3
• Getting Started with Raspberry Pic- MicroPython and C/C++
• Getting Started with MicroPython

Using Thonny as Micro Python Editor

• Download the latest UF2 Bootloader from the Pi Pico Getting Started Page - https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/pico/getting-started
• Select getting started with MicroPython
• Download latest UF2 file -> pico_micropython_xxxx.uf2


• Push and hold the BOOTSEL button and then plug your Pico into the USB port of your Raspberry Pi or other computer.


• Release the BOOTSEL button and your Pico appear as a removable drive
• Click and hold the mouse button on the UF2 file then drag it to your Pico’s removable storage drive
• After a few seconds you’ll see your Pico disappear from File Manager, don’t worry, that’s supposed to happen!
• Congratulations your Pico is now running MicroPython
• Download Thone v3.3 or higher
• Inside Thonny go to options, Interpreter and select Pi Pico

Hello World Example

While Inside Thonny IDE go to the bottom of the screen   

• Click next to the >>>> symbol and hit Enter
• Now the REPL is active
• Enter the line of code - print("Hello, World!")

Video Tutorial

• For more Python examples to the Pico Python SDK

Shipping List

• 1 x Raspberry Pi Pico
• 2 x Header 40 Pin - Female
• 2 x Header 40 Pin - Male