First Contact With the Raspberry Pi Pico
I received a lovely little package in the mail a few weeks ago, and finally had some time to open it. I thought it would be great fun for my robot-obsessed six year-old to help his dad with, but good instructions took some time to find (the link on the box wasn’t particularly helpful) and parse and I ended up completing the first task alone as my six year-old’s passion for science wasn’t quite powerful enough to overcome his six year-old’s lack of patience :(
I guess it’s not an easy line to walk, determining what information a first-timer needs! I would have appreciated a brief overview / key for how the pins can and should be used (as opposed to having to read through the datasheet, which I started skimming through but it’s a real time investment), and it took me a while to realize that the pin numbers in the examples are the green-labelled numbers: even though it explicitly states “which can be accessed using GPIO pin 25” , when I first read that I didn’t know that little tidbit of information was important, nor realize how to make use of it!
The rest of the steps I completed were simple, straightforward and fun to follow, and at this point the balancing act is on me: I want my kid to be able to see what the code is doing, but I don’t want to overload him with having to understand the code itself…
In summary, the Pico is great and I’m looking forward to our next session! I guess my next purchase will need to be a set of containers, though, as I thoroughly failed to fit all the contents back into their original one :P
