Raspberry Pi Pico and the Next Generation

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hfwarner3

New member
Sep 30, 2020
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Has anyone else been playing with the Raspberry Pi Pico?

I have picked up a few each time I stop by Microcenter. My daughter (14) thinks they are cute and that was all the opening I needed. We gave a couple of them "legs" by soldering on the pins. After just one session of showing her how to solder, she had it. She is a natural and now solders better than me!

We have written some simple programs in MicroPython using Thonny - starting with just making the built-in LED blink. Her second project was to set up a button and an external LED with a resistor on a breadboard. She updated her blink program to turn on the internal LED and wait for a button press. Once a press is detected, it turns off the internal LED, turns on the external LED, waits for half a second, and resets everything back to the initial state. She will be taking this to school on Monday as an extra credit project for her "Introduction to Technology" class.

She is very interested in lights for her room and I would love to help her build a controller for a string of LEDs she could hang in her bedroom. Does anyone have any suggestions for an easy-to-use, inexpensive string of LEDs that could reach around an entire 9x9 bedroom?
 
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Very cool!

My adult son has a full led light setup he controls with both a pi and an app on his phone. He started with an inexpensive generic set of strip lights from Amazon before upgrading when he moved into his new place. Sorry I don't have any details on the strip lights, but they worked great.

I do know his initial setup didn't included a wifi controller, only remote. He ended up adding that capability.
 
I watched a YouTuber showing how to connect some stuff up to one and thought I gotta learn more hardware. I haven't used a soldering iron since I was a teen... and I didn't really know what I was doing back then... just adding a reset switch to a Vic-20 and stuff like that. I tried soldering RAM expansion into one, but I think my techniques were bad, and I probably cooked my chips.
 
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