Lighted Raspberry Pico Stream Deck Is Easy As Pi

Whether it’s for work, school, fun, or profit, nearly everyone is a content-creating video producer these days. And while OBS has made it easier to run the show, commanding OBS itself takes some hotkey finesse. Fortunately, it just keeps getting easier to build macro keyboards that make presenting a breeze. That includes the newest player to the microcontroller game — the Raspberry Pi Pico, which [pete_codes] used to whip up a nice looking OBS stream deck.

Sometimes you just need something that works without a lot of fuss — you can always save the fuss for version two. [pete_codes]’ Pico Producer takes advantage of all those I/O pins on the Pico and doesn’t use a matrix, though that is subject to change in the future. [pete_codes] likes the simplicity of this design and we do, too. You can see it in action after the break.

In reply to the Twitter thread, someone mentions re-legendable keycaps instead of the current 3D-printed-with-stickers keycaps, but laments the lack of them online. All we can offer is that re-legendable Cherry MX-compatible keycaps are definitely out there. Maybe not in white, but they’re out there.

If [pete_codes] wants to go wild in version two and make this macro keeb control much more than just OBS, he may want to leave the labeling to something dynamic, like an e-ink screen.

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The Raspberry Pi Pico Can’t Run Linux. But It Can Run Fuzix.

The great divide in terms of single board computers lies between those that can run some form of Linux-based distribution, and those that can not. For example the Raspberry Pi Zero is a Linux board, while the Raspberry Pi Pico’s RP2040 processor lacks the required hardware to run everybody’s favourite UNIX-like operating system. That’s not to say the new board from Cambridge can’t run any UNIX-like operating system though, as [David Given] shows us with his Fuzix port.

Fuzix is a UNIX-like operating system for less capable processors, more in the spirit of those original UNIXes than of a modern Linux-based distribution. It’s the work of the respected former Linux kernel developer and maintainer [Alan Cox], and consists of a kernel, a C compiler, and a set of core UNIX-like applications.

The RP2040 port maybe needs a little more work to be considered stable. For now, the multitasking support isn’t quite there and NAND flash support is broken, but it does have SD card support for a proper UNIX filesystem and the full set of core tools. Perhaps most interestingly, it only occupies a single core of the dual-core chip, leaving the possibility of the other core and those PIOs to be used for other purposes.

Fuzix has made the occasional appearance here over the years, but perhaps not as often as it should. If you’d like to learn a little more about the genesis of UNIX, we took a look in 2019.

Header: Michiel Henzler (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Arduino Announces Board Based On Raspberry Silicon

The Raspberry Pi Pico burst onto the microcontroller scene last month with much fanfare, and is already popping up in projects left, right and center. Notable for its high clock speed and exciting IO features, it’s a breath of fresh air in a market slowly weaning itself onto ARM architectures and away from 8-bit staples. Not one to miss out on a slice of the action, Arduino have announced their own upcoming board based on the Pico’s RP2040 chip.

The board is named the Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect, a moniker that’s not just a mouthful but likely to be confused with existing Arduino Nano products. It sports several differences to the Raspberry Pi Pico, namely packing WiFi, Bluetooth, and an IMU on board which should make developing motion-sensitive and IoT projects easier, particularly in cases where the Pico’s flexible IO could be useful.

Naturally, Arduino IDE integration will be a major plus point that gets many makers on board, and we can imagine there will be swift development of libraries leveraging the RP2040’s PIO subsystem. If you still haven’t gotten the low down on the Raspberry Pi Pico yet, though, never fear – our own [Elliot Williams] can tell you everything you need to know!

[Thanks to Darrell Flenniken for the tip, via Tom’s Hardware]

Arducam Now Working With The RPi Pico

The Raspberry Pi Pico came out of absolutely nowhere, and has taken the maker world by storm. At the low, low cost of $4, packing some seriously grunty original silicon, and even available free on the cover of magazines, it’s already got a legion of fans. As with any new popular platform, there’s a scramble to get everything under the sun running on the hardware. Already, ArduCAM is up and running on the Raspberry Pi Pico!

Based on the OV2640 image sensor, the ArduCAM is useful for microcontroller applications thanks to its onboard JPEG encoder. This limits the amount of RAM needed onboard the microcontroller to deal with the images fed from the camera. With the Pico now on the market, the team behind ArduCAM set about writing a library to get everything playing nicely with the SPI camera. It’s available on Github, complete with an example program so you can check everything is functional right out of the box. The easiest way to get up and running is from a Raspberry Pi environment, but the Pico acts as a USB Mass Storage device so can be programmed from virtually anywhere.

We’ll likely see the whole cavalcade of microcontroller bits and pieces ported to the Pico in the coming months, along with plenty of interesting uses of the special IO features. Video after the break.

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A Look At The Interesting RP2040 Peripheral, Those PIOs

The Raspberry Pi Pico is the latest product in the Raspberry Pi range, and it marks a departure from their previous small Linux-capable boards. The little microcontroller board will surely do well in the Pi Foundation’s core markets, but its RP2040 chip must have something special as a commercial component to avoid being simply another take on an ARM microcontroller that happens to be a bit more expensive and from an unproven manufacturer in the world of chips. Perhaps that special something comes in its on-board Programable IO perhipherals, or PIOs. [CNX Software] have taken an in-depth look at them, which makes for interesting reading.

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Raspberry Pi Enters Microcontroller Game With $4 Pico

Raspberry Pi was synonymous with single-board Linux computers. No longer. The $4 Raspberry Pi Pico board is their attempt to break into the crowded microcontroller module market.

The microcontroller in question, the RP2040, is also Raspberry Pi’s first foray into custom silicon, and it’s got a dual-core Cortex M0+ with luxurious amounts of SRAM and some very interesting custom I/O peripheral hardware that will likely mean that you never have to bit-bang again. But a bare microcontroller is no fun without a dev board, and the Raspberry Pi Pico adds 2 MB of flash, USB connectivity, and nice power management.

As with the Raspberry Pi Linux machines, the emphasis is on getting you up and running quickly, and there is copious documentation: from “Getting Started” type guides for both the C/C++ and MicroPython SDKs with code examples, to serious datasheets for the Pico and the RP2040 itself, to hardware design notes and KiCAD breakout boards, and even the contents of the on-board Boot ROM. The Pico seems designed to make a friendly introduction to microcontrollers using MicroPython, but there’s enough guidance available for you to go as deep down the rabbit hole as you’d like.

Our quick take: the RP2040 is a very well thought-out microcontroller, with myriad nice design touches throughout, enough power to get most jobs done, and an innovative and very hacker-friendly software-defined hardware I/O peripheral. It’s backed by good documentation and many working examples, and at the end of the day it runs a pair of familiar ARM MO+ CPU cores. If this hits the shelves at the proposed $4 price, we can see it becoming the go-to board for many projects that don’t require wireless connectivity.

But you want more detail, right? Read on.

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