giles' projects for the RaspberryPi Pico from the XMas Advent Calendar 2022.
Now with updates for the 2023 calendar 'Let it Glow' See https://thepihut.com/pages/maker-advent-2023-guides for the 2023 let it glow projects.
See https://thepihut.com/pages/maker-advent-2022-guides for details of the 2022 projects.
Note to make this work on linux requires:
sudo adduser <your_user_name> dialoutFollowed by a reboot (logout is not enough). This group membership gives your user access to the USB serial port that the PICO uses to communicate with the host.
My 2023 RPI Pico H came without microPython installed. To install it without getting involved with Thonny I used the following steps:
Go here and download the latest UF2 file: https://micropython.org/download/RPI_PICO/
Plug in your PICO while holding the BOOTSEL button. You will find that it opens as a USB drive. Copy the above UF2 file to the drive and wait for it to reboot.
Using this step after setting dialout group membership I was found that
the vscode extension attached immediately as soon as the PICO rebooted.
For this project I have used vscode which is an excellent integrated development environments that supports working with any programming language that you choose. To get vscode installed see https://code.visualstudio.com/download
To work with vscode, the RPI Pico and MicroPython, this excellent plugin makes everything work together nicely: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=paulober.pico-w-go.
It gives quite a nice experience compared to Thonny (see below). If you clone this project it already includes the necessary extensions when opened in vscode.
Note that you can access the functions of the extension using the new
commands that appear in the vscode status like this:
- With a pico project open you should automatically get a terminal linked to the pico when you plug it in to USB.
- To upload the project to your pico or execute right click on the 'pico-xmas' project folder in the explorer (pane to the left of the screen )and select 'Upload project to the Pico'.
- To run your code, select the file you want to run and click the '> Run' button on the status bar at the bottom.
UPDATE: all issues with uploading code to the Pico seem to have been solved since 2022 and everything works smoothly. If the extension does seem to stop working, usually ctrl-C will help, but when it does not use the Hard Reset function from 'All Commands' on the vscode status bar.
I've now broken the README up into the the two separate years: