I’ve got a couple of Pimoroni’s excellent LiPo SHIM for Pico. When soldered to a Pico they allow a LiPo battery to be connected, or USB power, and if the latter then the battery is charged. There’s also a power button, which is a bonus. I wanted to programattically determine charge level, which it appears …
Gardening is not my thing at all. I can do houseplants, because they’re right in front of me, wilting away as they beg for water. But anything that’s out of sight may as well not exist. And, by the end of summer, they generally don’t, and the only sign that they ever might have done …
It may not be quite true to say modern computers have unlimited processing power and memory, but the high performance and huge storage space I’ve gotten used to does make things a lot easier. Yet one of the fun things about programming for the Pico is in working within tight constraints. The Pico is advertised …
Measuring temperature with the Pico is one of the easiest “quick wins” for getting familiar with the platform. Along with turning the onboard LED on and off, you can achieve something that feels like interaction with the real world with nothing more than a few lines of Micropython due to the Pico’s onboard temperature sensor. …
I’m starting to get more confident with putting components together with the Pico, so without too much research I bought a simple speaker/amplifier breakout board. Still, given how every time I try something simple on the Pico it turns out to involve hours of Googling I assumed that getting a speaker to work would be …
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 …
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 …