I’m starting to realise that “compatible with the Pico” might have as much meaning as “sure it’s possible to ride a tiger”: “compatible” is not the same as “conducive” in the same way that “possible” is not the same as advisable. Perhaps I was boosted by the “ease” with which I got the Pico and …
Pico project number one is finally “shipped” with the addition of a badly made wooden frame to hold the thing and let me stick it to the wall, plugged into a USB power socket. Let’s face it: the frame is not it’s strong point, but just putting the raw components on the wall would look …
Hot on the heels of, if not success, then at least lack of failure in my rather simple project to build a Raspberry Pico e-paper weather display, what I’d really like to have is a camera to photograph the very infrequent visits to the feeder in the garden. There are plenty of cameras on the …
For my first Pico experiments I bought the smallest e-ink display I could, because it was the cheapest and who knows if I’d even pass the first hurdle of making a prototype. I’d also bought the wrong type, with a cable connection instead of a nice and easy Pico-compatible HAT. So I ended up with …
Whilst building the e-ink weather display for the Pico I’ve had to make a number of RAW images. I’ve been doing this by opening PNGs in Photoshop, converting them to grayscale, changing them to Bitmap (or 1-bit images) and then, because Photoshop won’t let me save a 1-bit image as RAW, I convert them back …
With all the pieces in place to allow me to draw to the e-ink screen, I made some 8-bit RAW images and wrote values to the display. It worked, but it looked a bit crusty, not least because the Framebuffer.text method for putting text onto the screen is a fixed size, and a fixed font. …
After connecting the e-ink display to the Pico and managing to get it to display in landscape mode I felt I’d solved the unknowns in making this e-ink weather display. Now it was time to decide what I was going to show, and how I was going to show it. One Python example I’d found …
By default, sending pixels from a Raspberry Pico to a Waveshare e-ink display will result in a portrait image. In the case of the 2.13inch display I started with, this means a screen of 122 pixels wide by 250 pixels high. But what if you want to display in portrait mode? As someone who’s used …
I’d gotten as far as running a few lines of code on the Pico, so the next thing was to work out if I could display anything at all on the e-ink display. Since I’d already messed up by buying the wrong HAT type, I still had a small doubt about whether I would get …
The whole Raspberry Pi craze has passed me by before. Mainly because I have no competency whatsoever in electronics, and when it comes to using it just as a small computer I’ve had no need for one. I don’t really know what drew me to the Raspberry Pi Pico, but it just looked like such …