Pico-mposite is one of my favourite side projects at the moment. Whilst designing it I’ve learned how to program the Raspberry Pi Pico, use KiCad to design PCBs, and order PCBs from JLCPCB. The PCBs I ordered earlier this year have been sat in my cupboard gathering dust. I figured it was time to populated one. I’ve warmed up the iron I soldered the Pico directly to the PCB via its castellations for aesthetic reasons, …
I’ve designed dozens of small yet interesting electronics circuits over the years, progressing from hand-drawn schematics to ones designed on computer. I’ve always wanted to transfer these designs to PCB, yet up until now have restricted myself to breadboard and stripboard as I considered the process to be complicated for various reasons. Historically making a PCB was a messy and manual process involving etching and drilling. This instructables guide gives you a good idea of …
My first project on the Pico was the Pico-mposite, a breadboard circuit and application that demonstrated how to generate a black and white composite video signal in software using the Pico’s PIO cores and DMA and a resistor ladder as a digital to analogue convertor. The project went through a couple of iterations; from a hacked together demo to something that was a bit more usable and, more importantly, was ready, at least in principle …
About this time last year I started a simple project for the Raspberry Pi Pico to output grey-scale composite video via a simple circuit using a 5-step resistor ladder. The Pico had not been out for very long, and I was attempting to use the PIO to output the video signal. Whilst I got it working, it did feel rather hacked together. But I left it on my Github as a quick project: https://github.com/breakintoprogram/pico-mposite During …
I received my Pico a day or so after it was announced, and felt a little bit like a mule with a spinning wheel at first – was there a project I could start on this that would also serve as an introduction to key parts of the hardware, and could be completed in a few days. I was interested in the PIO feature of the Pico – this is a cut down core in …
