Dev Kit Weekly: Raspberry Pi Pico RP2040 Development Kit
Enter the raffle (linked below) to win your free Raspberry Pi Pico:
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Check out the Raspberry Pi Pico Obstacle-Avoiding Robot project on GitHub: https://github.com/hashrobotics-hr/ra...
Are you just getting started in electronics? Or maybe you’re just looking to build something fun, like a Simon game, a remote-control car, a mini drone, or even a smart robot that can detect and avoid objects less than 15cm away by stopping, moving backwards, and pivoting 90º. That last sentence was hyper-specific, but these are all examples of things you can do with the Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller board, which is powered by the RP2040 MCU, the first MCU ever designed by Raspberry Pi themselves.
The 40nm RP2040 MCU, measuring just 7mm x 7mm, houses a dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ processor that runs at up to 133 MHz that’s accompanied by accelerated integer and floating-point libraries and 264kB of on-chip SRAM. The Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller board itself includes an additional 2MB of QSPI flash and supports a DC input power range between 1.8V and 5.5V.
The Pico also uniquely includes eight programmable I/O (PIO) state machines that allow you to customize your peripherals to support the specific application you want to develop. But all that is meaningless without software and development environments to bring those hardware components to life. In this case, you’ll be using the Raspberry Pi Pico C/C++ and Python SDKs.
The MicroPython environment is where you can do some creative projects, like the robot-building. There’s even a tutorial that will walk you through the steps of using MicroPython to program your robot to be able to detect and avoid both stationary and moving objects. Aside from the visual guide, everything you’ll need for that is also available on GitHub. You can download the pre-built binary for the MicroPython directly from Raspberry Pi’s Documentation page; or, if you do want to build it yourself, you can find the source code in Section 1.3 of the Python SDK datasheet.
True to the Raspberry Pi philosophy of providing competitive performance capabilities and features at uber-affordable prices, this little guy could be yours for a mere $4. Over the next few months, we at ECD will be giving away 1,000 Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller boards to members of our community, including at A.I. Day on September 20th. You can register for that here, but you will have to be present at the event to win: https://www.bigmarker.com/series/ai-d...
If you win either in the raffle or by attending a virtual event or other activities in the ECD community, we’ll ship your Raspberry Pi Pico right to your home at no extra cost.