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 …
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 …