Pi Pico Lays Down The Groove

From the 60s to perhaps the mid-00s, the path to musical stardom was essentially straight with very few forks. As a teenager you’d round up a drummer and a few guitar players and start jammin…

Use PicoGlitcher For Voltage Glitching Attacks

We see a fair few glitcher projects, especially the simpler voltage glitchers. Still, quite often due to their relative simplicity, they’re little more than a microcontroller board and a few …

Open-Source, 3D Printed Trackpad

Touchpads, or trackpads, have been around since the 1980s. Today, you can often find them in laptops and notebook computers as pointing devices. With no moving parts, a trackpad are easy to integra…

Supercon 2023 – Going Into Deep Logic Waters With The Pico’s PIO And The Pi’s SMI

The Raspberry Pi has been around for over a decade now in various forms, and we’ve become plenty familiar with the Pi Pico in the last three years as well. Still, these devices have a great d…

Using The Pi Pico As ‘Programmable Hardware’ For The Apple II

When we think of programmable hardware, we think of FPGAs. But they’re not the only option. [Oliver Schmidt] has been exploring how the Raspberry Pi Pico can serve in such a role for the clas…

Pi Pico SDR On A Breadboard

How hard is it to make a fully standalone SDR? [101 Things] shows you how to take a breadboard, a PI Pico, and two unremarkable chips to create a capable radio. You can see the whole thing in the v…

Mouse Doesn’t Play Pong… It IS Pong!

From the “why didn’t we think of that” department comes [dupontgu’s] pong mouse project. The mouse appears and acts like a normal computer mouse until you click the scroll w…

Raspberry Has A New Pico, Built With The New RP2350

Raspberry Pi’s first foray into the world of microcontrollers, the RP2040, was a very interesting chip. Its standout features were the programmable input/output units (PIOs) which enabled all sorts…

Probably The Cheapest Mac Emulation Hardware

There are many ways to build your own Macintosh clone, and while the very latest models remain a little inaccessible, there are plenty of Intel-based so-called “Hackintoshes” which deli…

A C64 SID Replacement With Built-in Games

Developer [frntc] has recently come up with a smaller and less expensive way to not only replace the SID chip in your Commodore 64 but to also make it a stereo SID! To top it off, it can also hold …

The Pi Pico, An SDR Receiver Front End

Making a software defined radio (SDR) receiver is a relatively straightforward process, given the right radio front end electronics and analogue-to-digital converters. Two separate data streams are…

A Scope Test Tool You Can Build With Just A Pico

Ever wanted to see how well your oscilloscope adheres to its stated capabilities? What if you buy a new scope and need a quick way to test it lest one of its channels its broken, like [Paul Wasserm…

Running Four Brushless Motors With A Single Pi Pico

Sometimes, you have to drive four motors, and you need to do so with a certain level of control. You could throw a lot of parts at the problem, but you don’t necessarily have to. As [Shaun Cr…

Breadboard OS Is An Operating System For The Pi Pico

Operating systems! They’re everywhere these days, from your smart TV to your smartphone. And even in your microcontrollers! Enter BreadboardOS for the Raspberry Pi Pico. BreadboardOS is built…

This Tiny Game Boy Lets The Real Thing Play Online

Back in 2021, [stacksmashing] found that it took little more than a Raspberry Pi Pico and some level-shifters to create a USB connection with the Game Boy’s link port. Add in the proper softw…

Pi Pico Gets A ZX Spectrum Emulator

The Pi Pico is a capable microcontroller that can do all kinds of fun and/or useful things. In the former vein, [antirez] has ported a ZX Spectrum emulator to the Pi Pico. ZX2040, as it is known, i…

Building A Giant Boardgame Isn’t Easy

[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 40…

PicoNtrol Brings Modern Controllers To Atari 2600

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 …

Give Your Pi Pico Captouch Inputs For All Your Music Needs

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 w…

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

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 …