pi pico

36 Articles

Building A Giant Boardgame Isn’t Easy

April 19, 2024 by 8 Comments

[Stevenson Streeper] is a maker, and was recently charged with a serious mission. He had to prototype, design, and build a board game. A software-controlled board game, that is, and one that was 400 square-feet in size. As you might imagine, this ended up being a tall order, and he’s been kind enough to share his tale on his blog.

His client’s idea was for a giant interactive game board akin to the glowing disco floors of old. It had to play a game approximating the rules of “The Floor Is Lava.” It had to handle up to 20 players at a time, too.

[Stevenson] runs a company that delivers “Activations”—basically big showpieces for customers willing to pay. This wasn’t his first attempt at building an immersive attraction, but it was a big job, and a challenging one at that. He explains the difficulties that came about from a limited crew, limited timeline, and a number of difficult missteps. Hurdles included surprise unusable off-the-shelf hardware and the difficulty of hand-sanding 144 tiles of polycarbonate. One weeps for the project’s plight early on – if only the AliExpress tiles were documented.

He may have bitten off more than he could chew, and yet—the project was finished and to a decent degree of functionality success. That’s to be applauded, and [Stevenson] learned a ton along the way. Big projects can be daunting and can put you in a bind. As this story demonstrates, though, perseverance often gets you somewhere okay in the end. Video after the break.

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PicoNtrol Brings Modern Controllers To Atari 2600

April 13, 2024 by 10 Comments

While there’s an argument to be made that retro games should be experienced with whatever input device they were designed around, there’s no debating that modern game controllers are a lot more ergonomic and enjoyable to use than some of those early 8-bit entries.

Now, thanks to the PicoNtrol project from [Reogen], you can use the latest Xbox and PlayStation controllers with the Atari 2600 via Bluetooth. Looking a bit farther down the road the project is aiming to support the Nintendo Entertainment System, and there’s work being done to bring the Switch Pro Controller into the fold as well.

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The board in question, with a Pi Pico soldered on, with old PCBs for macropads being used as captouch electrodes

Give Your Pi Pico Captouch Inputs For All Your Music Needs

March 31, 2024 by 11 Comments

Unlike many modern microcontrollers, RP2040 doesn’t come with a native capacitive touch peripheral. This doesn’t mean you can’t do it – the usual software-driven way works wonderfully, and only requires an external pullup resistor! In case you wanted a demonstration or you have a capacitive touch project in mind, this lighthearted video by [Jeremy Cook] is a must watch, and he’s got a healthy amount of resources for you in store, too!

In this video, [Jeremy] presents you with a KiCad schematic and an PCB design you can use to quickly add whole 23 capacitive touch sensing inputs to a Pi Pico! The board is flexible mechanically, easy to assemble as [Jeremy] demonstrates, and all the pins involved can still be used as regular GPIOs if you’d like. Plus, it’s fully open-source, can easily be assembled on your own, and available on Tindie too!

Of course, such a board doesn’t get created for no reason – [Jeremy] has a healthy amount of musical creations and nifty ideas to show off. We quite liked the trick of using old PCBs as capacitive touch sensing, using copper fills as electrodes – which has helped create an amusing “macropad of macropads”, and, there’s quite a bit more to see.

If capacitive touch projects ever struck a chord with you and you enjoy music-related hacking, [Jeremy]’s got a whole YouTube channel you ought to check out. Oh, and if one of the musical projects in the video caught your eye, it might just be the one we’ve featured previously! Continue reading “Give Your Pi Pico Captouch Inputs For All Your Music Needs” →

Playing Audio On The Pi Pico With No DAC To Speak Of

March 12, 2024 by 24 Comments

Normally, if you want to play music or other audio on a microcontroller, you need to get yourself a DAC. Or at least, that’s the easiest way to go about it and the one most likely to get you good, intelligible audio. You don’t have to go that way, though, as [antirez] demonstrates.

[antirez] decided to do this with a Pi Pico, but it’s applicable to other microcontrollers too. It’s all done with a single pin and a PWM output. The PWM output is set to a very high frequency beyond human hearing. In this case, it was 100 KHz. Then, the duty cycle of the PWM is changed to essentially output various average voltage levels at the pin. Vary the output voltage as per your desired sound file by using each sample to vary the duty cycle of the PWM. Voila! You can output whatever sound you want on that pin! [antirez] steps through the basics of doing this, including processing simple WAV files into a raw format that can be dumped into MicroPython code.

There’s no sound sample on the project page, and we’d have to assume it sounds pretty crunchy when hooked up to a speaker. And yet, it could prove a useful technique if you’re designing your own audio greeting cards or something, so keep that in mind!

Pi Pico Enhances RadioShack Computer Kit

February 20, 2024 by 9 Comments

While most of us now remember Radio Shack as a store that tried to force us to buy batteries and cell phones whenever we went to buy a few transistors and other circuit components, for a time it was an innovative and valuable store for electronics enthusiasts before it began its long demise. Among other electronics and radio parts and kits there were even a few DIY microcomputers, and even though it’s a bit of an antique now a Raspberry Pi Pico is just the thing to modernize this Radio Shack vintage microcomputer kit from the mid 80s.

The microcomputer kit itself is built around the 4-bit Texas Instruments TMS1100, one of the first mass-produced microcontrollers. The kit makes the processor’s functionality more readily available to the user, with a keypad and various switches for programming and a number of status LEDs to monitor its state. The Pi Pico comes into the equation programmed to act as a digital clock with an LED display to drive the antique computer. The Pi then sends a switching pulse through a relay to the microcomputer, which is programmed as a binary counter.

While the microcomputer isn’t going to win any speed or processing power anytime soon, especially with its clock signal coming from a slow relay module, the computer itself is still fulfilling its purpose as an educational tool despite being nearly four decades old. With the slow clock speeds it’s much more intuitive how the computer is stepping through its tasks, and the modern Pi Pico helps it with its tasks quite well. Relays on their own can be a substitute for the entire microcontroller as well, like this computer which has a satisfying mechanical noise when it’s running a program.

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Sonolithography With The Raspberry Pi Pico

February 16, 2024 by 5 Comments

You can do some wild things with sound waves, such as annoy your neighbours or convince other road users to move out of your way. Or, if you get into sonolithography like [Oliver Child] has, you can make some wild patterns with ultrasound.

Sonolithography is a method of patterning materials on to a surface using finely-controlled sound waves. To achieve this, [Oliver] created a circular array of sixteen ultrasonic transducers controlled via shift registers and gate driver ICs, under the command of a Raspberry Pi Pico. He then created an app for controlling the transducer array via an attached computer with a GUI interface. It allows the phase and amplitude of each element of the array to be controlled to create different patterns.

Creating a pattern is then a simple matter of placing the array on a surface, firing it up in a given drive mode, and then atomising some kind of dye or other material to visualize the pattern of the acoustic waves.

It could be a useful tool for studying the interactions of ultrasonic waves, or it could just be a way to make neat patterns in ink and dye if that’s what you’re into. [Oliver] notes the techniques of sonolithography could also have implications in biology or fabrication in future, as well. If you found this interesting, you might like to study up on ultrasonic levitation, too!

Saving PIC Microcontrollers With DIY Programmer

January 14, 2024 by 31 Comments

When working on a project, plenty of us will reach for an Atmel microcontroller because of the widespread prevalence of the Arduino platform. A few hackers would opt for a bit more modern part like an ESP32. But these Arduino-compatible platforms are far from the only microcontrollers available. The flash-based PIC family of microcontrollers is another popular choice. Since they aren’t quite as beginner or user-friendly, setting up a programmer for them is not as straightforward. [Tahmid] needed to program some old PIC microcontrollers and found the Pi Pico to be an ideal programmer.

The reason for reaching for the Pico in the first place was that [Tahmid] had rediscovered these decade-old microcontrollers in a parts bin but couldn’t find the original programmer. Thanks to advances in technology in the last ten years, including the advent of micropython, the Pico turned out to be the ideal programmer. Micropython also enables a fairly simple drag-and-drop way of sending the .hex file to the PIC, so the only thing the software has to do is detect the PIC, erase it, and flash the .hex file. The only physical limitation is that the voltages needed for the PIC are much higher than the Pico can offer, but this problem is easily solved with a boost converter (controlled by the Pico) and a level shifter.

[Tahmid] notes that there’s plenty of room for speed and performance optimization, since this project optimized development time instead. He also notes that since the software side is relatively simple, it could be used for other microcontrollers as well. To this end, he made the code available on his GitHub page. Even if you’re more familiar with the Arduino platform, though, there’s more than one way to program a microcontroller like this project which uses the Scratch language to program an ESP32.