Introduction
Welcome!
Hi there. Congratulations on getting your hands on this book. I hope that you’re excited to learning about using a Raspberry Pi Pico.
This will be a journey of discovery for both of us. By experimenting with microcontrollers we will be learning about interfacing from the computing world to the physical world. Others have written many fine words about doing this sort of thing, but I have an ulterior motive. I write books to learn and document what I’ve done. The hope is that by sharing the journey others can learn something from my efforts :-).
Am I ambitious? Maybe :-). But if you’re reading this, I managed to make some headway. I dare say that like other books I have written (or are currently writing) it will remain a work in progress. They are living documents, open to feedback, comment, expansion, change and improvement. Please feel free to provide your thoughts on ways that I can improve things. Your input would be much appreciated.
You will find that I eschew a simple “Do this approach” for more of a story telling exercise. Some explanations are longer and more flowery than might be to everyone’s liking, but there you go, that’s my way :-).
There’s a lot of information in the book. There’s ‘stuff’ that people with a reasonable understanding of microcontrollers and programming will find excessive. Sorry about that. I have gathered a lot of the content from other books I’ve written to create this guide. As a result, it is as full of usable information as possible to help people who could be using the Pico and coding for the first time.
I’m sure most authors try to be as accessible as possible. I’d like to do the same, but be warned… There’s a good chance that if you ask me a technical question I may not know the answer. So please be gentle with your emails :-).
Email: d3noobmail+pico@gmail.com
What are we trying to do?
Put simply, we are going to examine the wonder that is the Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller and use it to accomplish ‘stuff’.
Along the way we’ll;
- Look at the Raspberry Pi Pico and its history.
- We’ll examine the difference between computers and microcontrollers and work out when it might be better to use one over the other.
- Work out how to get software loaded onto the Pico.
- Write / install and configure our applications.
- Write some code to interface with the physical world.
- Explore just what our system can do for us.
Who is this book for?
You!
By getting hold of a copy of this book you have demonstrated a desire to learn, to explore and to challenge yourself. That’s the most important criteria you will want to have when trying something new. Your experience level will come second place to a desire to learn.
It will be useful to be comfortable using a standard desktop operating system. You should be broadly comfortable with the concept of programming, but you needn’t have tried it before. Before you learn anything new, it pretty much always appears indistinguishable from magic. but once you start having a play, the mystery falls away.
What will we need?
Well, you could just read the book and learn a bit. By itself that’s not a bad thing, but trust me when I say that actually experimenting with computers is fun and rewarding.
The list below is flexible in most cases and will depend on how you want to measure the values.
- A Raspberry Pi Pico. The standard Pico is okay, but I’m pretty much always going to be using the wireless enabled version, the Pico W.
- A power supply for the Pico (almost any micro-USB charger will do the job).
- A remote computer (like your normal desktop PC) that you can use to program the Pico.
- An Internet connection for getting and updating the software.
As we work through the book we will be covering off the different aspects required and you should get a good overview of what your options are in different circumstances.
Why on earth did I write this rambling tome?
That’s a really good question. Writing the other books was an enjoyable process, so I thought that I’d carry on and write more. This is my eighteenth (?, I lose track) book. So I suppose this a ‘thing’ I do now. Will this continue? Who knows, stay tuned…
Where can you get more information?
The Raspberry Pi as a concept has provided an extensible and practical framework for introducing people to the wonders of computing in the real world. At the same time there has been a boom of information available for people to use them. The following is a far from exhaustive list of sources, but from my own experience it represents a useful subset of knowledge.