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…

RP2040 Boot Loader Is A Worm

[Hunter Adams] has written a secondary bootloader for the RP2040 that uses an IR link and can be extended to behave like a polite worm virus. This allows the easy updating of a large cluster of co-…

RP2040, ESP32, And An Atmega Have An ADC-Off

[Simon Monk] got frustrated with bad ADC performance when tinkering with an ESP32 board, and decided to put three of the nowadays-iconic boards to the test – a classic ESP32 devboard, a Pi Pi…

Inputs Of Interest: The Svalboard Could Be Your Salvation

You know, sometimes dreams really do come true. When I told you about the DataHand keyboard almost four years ago, I never imagined I’d ever get to lay my hands on anything even remotely like…

Simon Says With An RP2040

The team of [Michael] and [Chimdi] from Cornell’s Designing with Microcontrollers (ECE 4760) Fall 2023 session designed a version of Simon Says on an RP2040 which they call Pico Says. It uses…

Building A Loop Station With An RP2040

Loop stations are neat things, able to replay one or more loops of audio over and over again while you perform over the top of them. Musicians like [Marc Rebillet], [Reinhardt Buhr], and [Dub FX] h…

The ScottoKatana Keyboard Is Cutting-Edge

The lovely thing about a hobby like keyboard building is that the melting pot of designs manages to never turn into a nasty porridge. Rather, it remains a tasty chili that keeps getting more flavor…

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…

Precise Positioning With The RP2040

Microwave imaging is similar to CT imaging, but instead of X-rays, the microwaves are used to probe the structure and composition of an object. To facilitate experimentation with microwave imaging,…

Sound-Reactive Light Saber Flips Allegiance Via Vowel Sounds

Students [Berk Gokmen] and [Justin Green] developed an RP2040-based LED-illuminated lightsaber as a final project with a bit of a twist. It has two unusual sound-reactive modes: disco mode, and vow…

CoreXY On The Pi Pico

There are enough off-the-shelf CoreXY mechanisms out there that for the cost of an AliExpress order it’s possible to quickly and cheaply make yourself a plotter. But [Koushani Das], [Mahathi …

Raspberry Pi Pico Parallel Mandelbrot Computation

The Mandelbrot set is — when visualized with some colors — an interesting shape with infinite detail. While the patterns are immediately obvious to the human eye, anyone who’s run…

Building A Better Keyboard And Mouse Switch

Switching inputs between desktops seems like something that should be simple but can prove to be a pain in reality. [Hrvoje Cavrak] decided to take maters into his own hands and build a better keyb…

Open Source DC UPS Keeps The Low-Voltage Gear Going

We all like to keep our network gear running during a power outage — trouble is, your standard consumer-grade uninterruptible power supply (UPS) tends to be overkill for routers and such. The…

PicoGUS: For All Your ISA Sound Card Needs

Sound cards used to be a big part of gaming machines in the 90s and 2000s but have largely gone extinct in the wake of powerful CPUs doing the sound themselves. Sound cards were expensive back then…

Pi-lomar Puts An Observatory In Your Hands

Humans have loved looking up at the night sky for time immemorial, and that hasn’t stopped today. [MattHh] has taken this love to the next level with the Pi-lomar Miniature Observatory. Built…

The Birdy44 Keyboard Is Something To Crow About

The funny thing about keyboard end game is that it usually involves more than one keyboard. Rare is the board that is great for both home and away. Having finished their dactyl build, [RalphCoder13…

2023 Halloween Hackfest: Candy Basket Sees You Coming

On Halloween, some people can’t or don’t want to open the door for various reasons. Maybe they have a cat that likes to escape every chance it gets, or maybe their favorite TV show is o…

Close To The Metal

Firmware is caught between hardware and software. What do I mean? Microcontroller designers compete on how many interesting and useful hardware peripherals they can add to the chips, and they are a…

How Not To Build An RP2040 Board

We love that these days you can buy ready-made microcontroller boards that are very capable. But sometimes you need to — or just want to — do it yourself. Unfortunately, you really shou…