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 …

Pi Pico Enhances RadioShack Computer Kit

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 wa…

Sonolithography With The Raspberry Pi Pico

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 ca…

Saving PIC Microcontrollers With DIY Programmer

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…

Pico-Sized Ham Radio

There are plenty of hobbies around with huge price tags, and ham radio can certainly be one of them. Experienced hams might have radios that cost thousands of dollars, with huge, steerable antennas…

ProPico For Your Pro Pico Needs

Ever feel like the Pi Pico board could be doing way more given its footprint? Does it bother you that the RP2040’s ADC quality is even further decreased because of the noisy onboard switching…

Gyro-Controlled Labyrinth Game Outputs To VGA

This gesture-controlled labyrinth game using two Raspberry Pi Pico units does a great job of demonstrating how it can sometimes take a lot of work to make something look simple. To play, one tilts …

Raspberry Pi Pico Becomes MIDI-Compatible Synth

ECE 4760 is a microcontroller course that runs at Cornell every year, and it gives students a wide remit to pursue various kinds of microcontroller projects. [Pelham Bergesen] took the class and bu…

PicoDebugger Makes Development Easier

Debugging a Raspberry Pi Pico is straightforward enough; it simply involves hooking up something up to the USB and SWD pins. [Mark Stevens] whipped up the PicoDebugger to make this job easier than …

A BASIC Interpreter For The Raspberry Pi Pico

It’s pretty easy to program the Raspberry Pi Pico in Python, or you can use C or C++ if you so desire. However, if you fancy the easy language of yesteryear, you might like PiccoloBASIC from …

A Pico-Based ZX Spectrum Emulator

The ZX Spectrum was a popular computer of the 8-bit era. Now, it’s possible to emulate this machine on a microcontroller so cheap that it’s literally been given away on the front cover …

Pi Microcontroller Still Runs A Webserver

At first glance, the Raspberry Pi Pico might seem like a bit of a black sheep when compared to the other offerings from the Raspberry Pi Foundation. While most of the rest of their lineup can run L…

A Smart Home That CAN Do It All

In an ideal smart home, the explosion of cheap WiFi and Bluetooth chips has allowed hundreds of small wireless devices to control the switches, lights, and everything else required for a “sma…

Programming SPI Flash Chips? Use Your Pico!

At this point, a Pi Pico is equivalent to a bag full of programmers and debugging accessories. For instance, when you want to program an SPI flash chip, do you use one of those wonky CH341 dongles,…

Reverse Engineering E-Ink Price Tags

E-ink displays are great, but working with them can still be a bit tricky if you aren’t an OEM. [Jasper Devreker] got his hands on three e-ink shelf displays to reverse engineer. After cracki…

Want To Play With FPGAs? Use Your Pico!

Ever want to play with an FPGA, but don’t have the hardware? Now, if you have one of those ever-abundant Pi Picos, you can start playing with Verilog without getting an FPGA board. The FakePG…

A Fun Low-Cost Start For Your Macropad Hobby

If you were ever looking for a small relaxing evening project that you could then use day-to-day, you gotta consider the Pico Hat Pad kit by [Natalie the Nerd]. It fits squarely within the Pi Pico …