Technology Is Not Dull: February 2022

Sunday, 20 February 2022

PICO Breakout Garden Base

The Pimoroni PICO Breakout Garden Base has a socket for a Raspberry Pi PICO (available from Pimoroni with headers pre-soldered) plus four I2C sockets and two SPI sockets compatible with the Pimoroni breakout garden breakouts. Pimoroni also do a Breakout Garden to QT/QWIIC adapter.

This allows soldering free development (assuming you buy the PICO with headers attached) and reuse of the various breakouts (with other PICOs including the Explorer Base or Raspberry Pis).

There are libraries for C++, MicroPython and Circuit Python.

Installation

Hardware

Breakout Garden Base, self adhesive feet and a Raspberry Pi PICO.

The printed paws on the underside show where the self adhesive feet go.

Before fitting the Raspberry Pi PICO to the Breakout Garden Base, I would recommend testing the PICO. The Blink program (that flashes the PICO's built in LED) is a good test.

The Breakout Garden Base has two rows of sockets to take the pins soldered to the Raspberry Pi PICO microcontroller. Match the orientation of the Pico with the drawing between the sockets and align the pins on the Raspberry Pi PICO with the holes in the sockets and gently and evenly apply pressure until the PICO is in place.

Software

To use the I2C and SPI sockets on the base, Pimoroni have created a custom UF2 file including the required drivers. Follow the instructions here: https://learn.pimoroni.com/tutorial/hel/getting-started-with-pico

If you find the latest Pimoroni UF2 version does not work as expected, use the Update Firmware option on Thonny to return to a vanilla flavour UF2 and reload the Blink example.

It might be that the latest version has introduced a bug in the Breakout Garden handling. Download and install an earlier version of the Pimoroni UF2.

It is very useful to add parts of the Blink example to your code when testing to show that the code is working.

There are examples for a number of the breakouts available.