Raspberry Pico Adventures

This is a strange tale... I've been using  the excellent  Raspberry Pi Pico Arduino Core , managed by Earle F.  Philhower III, from its beginnings. It has been recently updated to support the new Pico2 and RP2350. As part of my preparations for testing the new Pico2 (received it yesterday), I was playing with some old microcontroller benchmarks. When I tried a Whetstone benchmark in the old Pico the program just stopped somewhere in the middle of the calculations, and here starts the tale. double X; // declared here so the multiplication is not removed by optimization void setup() { pinMode(LED_BUILTIN, OUTPUT); digitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, LOW); double T = millis(); X = -1.3 * T; digitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, HIGH); } void loop() { delay(100); } This code forces the bug!

CircuitPython Day 2024 will be next Friday (Agoust 16), so here is a simple project! I am using a few modules I got in my drawers: An RP2040 Feather board. This is a nice RP2040 board with 8 MB of Flash and a battery charger (not used in this project). A BMP390 sensor. I chose this particular board because it has a  STEMMA QT connector, just like the Feather board. A 128x64 pixels OLED display, with I2C interface. A 4 by 4 WS2812 RGB LED matrix. This project aims to use the sensor to measure temperature, air pressure, and altitude, show this information in the OLED display and set the RGB LEDs to a color based on the temperature.

On August 8th, Raspberry announced a new version of the Pi Pico board, the Pi Pico 2, along with a new microcontroller, the RP2350 / RP2354. In this post I will tell the highlights of these new products, along with my comments.

It is common to see confusion between the Raspberry Pi Pico and other Raspberry Pi boards. The RP2040 Pi Zero, from Waveshare, makes it even more confusing, putting an RP2040 microcontroller in a Pi Zero form factor (including a mini HDMI connector).

The LCD 12864-06D is a graphic (128 by 64 pixels) monochrome Liquid Crystal Display. You will find it in AliExpress and many other stores, but information on it is scarce. An intriguing point is that ads mention that it is graphic and has a Chinese font. In this post I will present the information I have gathered and share some sample code (using the unofficial RP2040 support for Arduino by  Earle F. Phillhoower III).

 The DS18B20 is an easily found temperature sensor, both the sensor itself (it looks like a transistor) and as a waterproof probe with the sensor inside a metallic case. What many don't know is that a large part of the sensors sold are not original parts and many have serious defects.

In this post we will see how to access a REST API with the Raspberry Pi Pico W, using the SDK C/C++ and MicroPython. An example of a call to a RESP API, using Postman Basically, a REST API is uses an HTTP method (like GET and POST) to access and manipulate "resources".