Pimoroni Pico Wireless: adding wireless connectivity to the Raspberry Pi Pico

The Raspberry Pi Pico is a great board, albeit with stripped down features. Overall, it lacks two key features. The first is the reset button, which, however, you can add yourself without any problems. The second and more important one is wireless communication.

The second problem is more difficult to fix, but still possible. Now there is a compatible board, Pimoroni Pico Wireless, which connects to the “Malinka” and provides work with wireless networks – so far only WiFi, we’ll talk about Bluetooth below. It is connected via an SPI interface.

Overall, adding wireless connectivity to the Pico isn’t a big deal, as Adafruit has proven with AirLift FeatherWing with ESP32. The system works with both Pico and Feather RP2040. There is also the Maker Pi Pico, a board that supports the ESP8266 as well. But there are not many portable systems that add wireless connectivity to the Pico. And the Pimoroni Pico Wireless is one of the great options.

What is Pimoroni Pico Wireless and how to use the board?

Pico Wireless via GPIO interface. Here are the advantages and disadvantages of the system. The advantage is the ease of connection. Disadvantage – the board closes access to all pins. The module fits perfectly with the Pico, its dimensions are the same as those of the “raspberry”.

The ESP32-WROOM-32E is a powerful microcontroller that Pico Wireless uses as a coprocessor, just like Adafruit’s AirLift FeatherWing. In a normal situation, the controller supports both WiFi and Bluetooth, but in this model only WIFi works. On the other hand, if you look closely at the board, you will probably be able to activate Bluetooth as well, since all of this is supported by hardware.

It is also possible to still use the GPIO pins, but this will require an additional system – for example, Pico Omnibus. In this case, you will need to make sure that there are no conflicting contacts on the connected devices. The Pico Wireless is powered by the GPIOs of the Raspberry Pi Pico, so you don’t need to plug in anything else.

Hardware is nothing without software. Pico Wireless supports C ++ and its own version of MicroPython, which includes a “picowireless” module designed for use with the board. This function works great, it has already been tested with scripts. There were no problems, the only thing is that the user must understand how the wireless network works in order to work with the software.

If you don’t want to mess around on your own, then the best option is Adafruit CircuitPython. Here you just need to change a few lines in order for Pico to “see” the plug-in. In addition, you also need to copy a few libraries into Pico. After that was done, I managed to connect to the network without any problems and get weather data through the API.

The data was written to an SD card, with the connection of which I also had to tinker a little – I needed to use an additional library, which activated the card reader. After writing a few lines of CircuitPython, I managed to create a new file that stores a log of JSON data received through the API. Information can be read from SD using CircuitPython.

The RGB LED is connected to the ESP32 via three pins (red = 25, green = 26, blue = 27) and we need to use esp.set_analog_write () to use it. For example, here is the code to set the red LED.

esp.set_analog_write(25, 0)
esp.set_analog_write(26, 1)
esp.set_analog_write(27, 1)

Here you can change values ​​between 0 and 1, which makes it possible to customize the color of the LED itself.

A button can also be installed in the system by connecting it to GPIO 12 and ground. When you press the button, that closes the GPIO contact, causing an event. Which one exactly depends on the desire of the developer.

Characteristics:

  • ESP32-WROOM-32E module (datasheet).
  • 1 touch button.
  • RGB LED.
  • Micro-SD card slot.
  • Pre-soldered pins for connecting to the Raspberry Pi Pico.
  • Size – 53mm x 25mm x 11mm.
  • Libraries C ++ and MicroPython

There are tracks on one side of the board that can be cut to remove unused features, which frees up some of the GPIO pins.

Where can I use Pimoroni Pico Wireless

In general, wireless connectivity for Pico opens up a number of new possibilities for the developer, including working with IoT applications. Pico Wireless enables Malinka to interact with other devices using both standard communication protocols and not the most common ones, including MQTT. The CircuitPython library also adds support for basic HTTP. During the test, we checked the HTTP response from the API with the transfer of the value to the REPL, which is useful for debugging connection problems.

The Raspberry Pi Pico, together with the Pimoroni Pico Wireless, is ideal for adding data monitoring to a project, collecting information from sensors, storing the received information on a memory card and transferring data to a remote machine. If you have the skills, you can do something more complicated using Pico as a network intermediary.

In the dry residue

As mentioned above, Pico Wiereless can be connected to the “Malinka” in a matter of seconds, while losing access to the GPIO. Accordingly, it will not be possible to use pins. The problem is solved with the help of Pico Omibus, which increases the size of the board. You can also solder the system yourself by inventing something to connect to the pins.

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