The 12 best Raspberry Pi Pico projects

Released in 2021, the Raspberry Pi Pico is a mi­cro­con­troller that can help you put a range of project ideas into practice. The mi­cro­con­troller can be pro­grammed with Mi­croPy­thon as well as with C and C++.

The Raspberry Pi Pico is the smallest model of the Raspberry Pi family and costs less than $10. It’s ideal if you’re just starting out in mi­cro­con­troller pro­gram­ming because it’s so af­ford­able. The technical spec­i­fi­ca­tions are nev­er­the­less im­pres­sive:

The 2-core processor runs at a clock frequency of up to 166 MHz but is perfectly suited for over­clock­ing. The main memory is 264 KB RAM. Like other mi­cro­con­trollers, the Raspberry Pi Zero can be pro­grammed with the Arduino IDE and the pro­gram­ming language C. If you don’t know C yet, you can also fall back on Mi­croPy­thon to put your project ideas into practice.

If you’re short on ex­pe­ri­ence when it comes to pro­gram­ming mi­cro­con­trollers, then a https://iot­de­sign­pro.com/projects/getting-started-with-raspberry-pi-pico-blinking-led-on-pico-using-mi­cropy­thonTutorial for Raspberry Pi Pico Flashing LED" target="_blank">blinking LED is a great Raspberry Pi Pico beginners’ project. With the help of the pro­gram­ming language Mi­croPy­thon, you can write the simple program that provides a timer for the blinking LED. In addition to the mi­cro­con­troller you’ll also need an LED and a plug-in board to connect the LED and the Raspberry Pi Pico.

Another Raspberry Pi Pico project that you can program with Mi­croPy­thon is an LCD display that outputs a text of your choice. For this, you’ll need your Raspberry Pi Pico and of course an LCD. Connect the pins of the display with the pins of your mi­cro­con­troller using a plug-in board. The code needed to interact with the LCD is a bit more complex, so you can choose to also download it.

The LoRaWAN network protocol lets you transmit data over long distances of up to 9.3 miles in a resource-efficient way. The dis­ad­van­tage is that the trans­mis­sion rate is only in the byte range. In addition, you have to be in a LoRaWAN network. Luckily, this isn’t an issue thanks to a globally active community.

If you’re in­ter­est­ed in setting up LoRaWAN support for your Raspberry Pi Pico, then you’re in luck: Sandeep Mistry, the author of the Arduino LoRa library, has extended it to support the Raspberry Pi Pico. To enable LoRaWAN on your mi­cro­con­troller, you’ll first need a LoRa Radio Breakout that you can connect to your Raspberry Pi Pico. Once the mi­cro­con­troller is set up, nothing can stop you from sending data.

Another Raspberry Pi Pico project uses the app Blynk to send messages to your smart­phone. To start, connect Raspberry Pi Pico to your Wi-Fi. This works with an external, battery-powered Wi-Fi module that you can connect to your mi­cro­con­troller. Them, set up the Blynk app, which connects mi­cro­con­trollers and other IoT devices via the Internet. It can also be used to receive messages.

With a few ac­ces­sories and a bit of pro­gram­ming know-how, you can use your Raspberry Pi Pico to run a gesture-con­trolled ping-pong game. To start, you’ll need to overclock your Raspberry Pi Pico, which is something the mi­cro­con­troller is known for. The code to run the game can be down­loaded on GitHub. Now, the only thing left to do is play ping-pong.

If you’re more into music than games, then Music Box is the right Raspberry Pi Pico project for you. Besides the mi­cro­con­troller and the usual cables, you basically only need an amplifier and a speaker. For an aesthetic finishing touch, you can make a case using 3D printing. You can play almost any song – the total memory re­quire­ment of your code and the song file just needs to be under 1 MB. If that’s not enough, it’s also possible to connect an SD card reader and store songs ex­ter­nal­ly.

Another in­ter­est­ing use case for the mi­cro­con­troller is human gesture recog­ni­tion like circles and up-and-down movements. For this, you’ll need TinyML and embedded machine learning. Plus, you’ll need a sensor that you connect to the Raspberry Pi Pico to perceive the gestures. The motion data that the sensor records can then be used to train the neural network. This way, gesture recog­ni­tion can be im­ple­ment­ed bit by bit.

Another fun Raspberry Pi Pico project is to build a line-following robot that follows a drawn line according. Either infrared sensors or proximity sensors are used to detect the line. Attached wheels make sure that your Raspberry Pi Pico robot can move. To program the mi­cro­con­troller, you can use the Visual Studio Code de­vel­op­ment en­vi­ron­ment, which includes Pico Go, a handy extension for every­thing related to Raspberry Pi Pico.

Building your own os­cil­lo­scope is a Raspberry Pi Pico project for tech­nol­o­gy en­thu­si­asts. An os­cil­lo­scope lets you measure signals and display their voltage on your smart­phone. All you’ll need for this is the mi­cro­con­troller, resistors, and the Android app Scoppy. With this setup, signals with a frequency of up to 250 KHz can be displayed.

The DHT11 is a popular sensor that can be used for measuring tem­per­a­ture and humidity. It’s also great for con­nect­ing with mi­cro­con­trollers. If you want to measure tem­per­a­tures between 0 and 122°F and humidity between 20 and 90%, then you can create a Raspberry Pi Pico tem­per­a­ture and humidity sensor. Once you’ve connected the sensor to your Raspberry Pi Pico, you can set up the mi­cro­con­troller using Python.

The mi­cro­con­troller is also ideal for dis­play­ing some math­e­mat­i­cal functions. For example, the char­ac­ter­is­tic Man­del­brot sets can be shown using a display connected to the Raspberry Pi. The Man­del­brot sets are fractals, patterns or struc­tures that are both confused and har­mo­nious. You only need to set up your mi­cro­con­troller for this Raspberry Pi Pico project, as the code needed is written in Mi­croPy­thon and can be down­loaded.

If you’re fre­quent­ly using key com­bi­na­tions, then you can try replacing them with a USB foot pedal. Setup doesn’t involve much effort using a Raspberry Pi Pico. Besides the pedal itself, you only need the mi­cro­con­troller and a bit of pro­gram­ming skill. Unlike most com­mer­cial­ly available USB pedals, the DIY variant can be used with common operating systems, since no separate software is needed for con­fig­u­ra­tion.