The new Raspberry Pi Pico W is just $6

this is the new raspberry pi pico w it's just like the original pico but it adds built-in wi-fi and it's six bucks six bucks once it hits store shelves i guess i'll have to say i used to be rich last sunday it's just two bucks more than the normal pico and only a little more than what you'd pay for an esp32 or esp8266 which are this thing's closest competition i'm going to use this picow to build a wireless sensor from a garage door i know linus over on ltt did a thing where he connected his garage doors up to google but i'm not that trusting i don't want the cloud to control my garage and i certainly don't want voice control over something as potentially dangerous as closing a garage door i just want to see if the thing's open i'm already running home assistant thanks to this raspberry pi in my rack and i've already set up some sensors for carbon dioxide levels in my house but those are using the esp8266 so how easy is it for me to build a wireless garage door sensor but with the pico w i put together a proof of concept at my desk using this rugged 20 garage door sensor i can connect these two wires to the pico w and i should be able to detect open or closed states in software this sensor is a magnetic switch and this part is a big magnet you mount the switch part to the garage door track and the magnet to the door if the door is open the switch stays open so the two wires won't be connected if the door is closed the switch closes so these wires pass through current so the pi can detect the door is closed i could solder on some headers like these and put the picot on a breadboard but in this case i'll just use friction while i'm testing out the circuit i'll stick one wire through pin 3 which is a ground pin and one through pin 1 which is gpio pin 0. you can see a quick reference for all the pins on the bottom of the picow or go online for a full reference chart to program the picow i'm going to use thani it's a code editor built for microcontrollers it should already support the pico w or if not by the time you're watching this it should soon raspberry pi has a really nice getting started guide so if you haven't used thani before go check that out i put this code into a script called sensor.pi i configured the sensor on gpio pin 0 which is physical pin 1 on the pico to control the led on the picow it's actually a little different than the regular pico the picos led is just hanging out on gpio pin 25 but on the pico w the led is controlled to the wi-fi chip so on the pico w you use the special led pin like this the main loop of the script is simple if the sensor is high i turn on the led and if it changed from last time i checked i print out a debug message garage door is open if the sensor is low meaning the magnet is close by i turn off the led and if that's different than the last time i checked i print out garage doors closed later on we can add in the wireless bits to make this work from my garage but right now i just want to validate the hardware works so i hit the run button and thoni will launch the script on the picow and right now since the magnet's far away the led is on and thunder reports garage doors open if i move that magnet closer there the led turns off and fanning reports the garage door is closed moving the magnet back and forth things seem to be working now one quick note the first time i tested it out the sensor would work for a while then it wouldn't and then it would again and that was because i had forgotten to add this little pull-up part in the code that tells the pico to activate what's called a pull-up resistor on the gpa open without it the digital input could get into a funky state where it doesn't really have a good reference for what's on or off so we can connect through a resistor to the pi's internal voltage and that makes the signal a lot clearer and it seems to be working well the next step is to get the garage door status available over wifi but i'm actually going to leave that part for a future video why because i was in the hospital well actually i am in the hospital right now but i won't be by the time you're seeing this this is something like what the code will look like and i promise i'll have it all up on github zoom i just didn't have the time to get it all ready this week thank you crohn's disease and because of that hospital visit i also didn't get time to finish testing something else i'm really excited about and that's esp home support for the pico i posted a short blog post demoing the feature and soon that support will be in a stable release that means for a garage door sensor like this instead of writing a bunch of micro python code to connect it to home assistant i could just write a short yaml file instead esp home can flash all the firmware to the picow and make integrating it super easy so i'll cover that too in the future but let's get back to testing wifi on the picow one of the easiest ways to demonstrate pico's new wi-fi skill is to run a tiny micro python web server on it and it's surprisingly easy this little script serves up a tiny web page from the pico and i flashed it using thani i grabbed the ip address that was printed in the console and ran it through apache bench to see how many requests per second i could get it to serve up only four but heck this thing only has like a quarter meg of ram it's not going to break any records and since it can run micro python i can also use micro pip to install micro iperf 3 and do a bandwidth test i get about nine megabits per second near my access point and six megabits out at the far side of my house that's decent speed for embedded wi-fi and it's been pretty stable so far but i haven't had enough time to do long-term stability tests yet that's one thing that bites people on esp devices sometimes wi-fi can just kind of drop out after a really long time and that gets really annoying i'll have more data on stability in my next video two other things you should know if you pick up a picow you can also use lightweight ip if you're using the picos c sdk and if you're using micropython you can turn off power saving with this line if you need wi-fi to be a little more responsive power savings on by default and that makes response times a bit jittery but not terrible if i turn off power saving you can see response times are much more stable so yeah you're not going to be serving up wordpress on a picow but it's got just enough memory to serve up some text a status page and things like that i also wanted to do some more work on power benchmarking but that'll have to wait until my next video too so the picow is six bucks should be available today in quantity and it's a great alternative to esp devices like the esp8266 i used in my air quality sensors there are other rp2040 devices with wi-fi that came before like the weo rp 2040 by seed studios or the arduino nano rp 2040 connect with eight times the flash storage but the picow is a great choice for most products unless you need specialized features built into other boards besides wi-fi the best feature of the picow is still the rp2040 it has features like programmable io or pio that makes the chip able to be kind of a lightweight fpga what does that mean well it can be programmed to interact with lots of different interfaces heck conrad beckman got a pico to work as a programmable game cartridge in a nintendo 64. check out his picocart64 project for more on that i asked him what motivated him to work on that project and he said he just wanted to see if it was possible it was a great way to test out his hardware hacking skills and the picot was cheap easy to get and well documented and that's the thing raspberry pi accidentally had perfect timing with their rp2040 microprocessor in the midst of the chip shortages they have the one thing competitors are lacking availability i can drive to micro center here in st louis and pick up a pico today some microcontrollers have been unavailable for months and it's anybody's guess when they'll be back in stock couple that with the community extensive public documentation and the low price even in single unit quantities and raspberry pi kind of hit a grand slam the picow and the ecosystem around it continues to make microcontroller programming more approachable and i'm here for it until next time i'm jeff gearling this is what the shirt says in case you're wondering

Channel: Jeff Geerling

Views: 397,666

Keywords: raspberry pi, pico, pico w, wifi, wireless, bluetooth, le, esp, esphome, esp8266, esp32, adafruit, pimoroni, programming, microcontroller, rp2040, picow, remote, control, robot, robotics, thonny, micropython, sdk, software, progammable, flash, sram, memory, arduino, atmega, microchip, arm, cortex, m0, dual core, picocart64, nintendo, 64, emulation, pio, io, pins, digital, analog, adc, breadboard, electronics, computer, emulate, serial, bus, interface, garage door, sensor, detect, home assistant

Id: VEWdxvIphnI

Length: 7min 56sec (476 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 29 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Girafferage]

A lot of the Pi's are supposed to be very cheap. The lack of supply has made it so you cant get them from their normal suppliers and 3rd party sellers are now selling a pi 4 for $200+. Hopefully we will be able to more easily get our hands on this one.

[u/atlcog]

If you have a microcenter nearby, keep checking them. Duluth, GA store had a bunch of raspberry pi 4s (only the 2gb model and limit one per customer) in stock today. Managed to get one after months of checking.

[u/Syntaximus]

With RPIs being so hard to come by economically these days this is great timing. I like my Pico, but it's been moved to its permanent home as a motor controller for my lapidary setup.

[u/helloE9]

I want to check how well it connects to the IOT Cloud using the MQTT protocol.

Seems like there are a lot of cheap chipsets for small IOT nodes coming out lately.

[u/[deleted]]

I just found a 400 and a pi 3 hiding in my supply room. Debating whether to build a retropie or sell it and retire

[u/zesammy]

So could this drives demands for esp32/esp82xx goes down in favor of the pico? If we get the supply out of the pictures ?