sunfounder

2025-02-22

My new Sunfounder (with Raspberry Pi Pico) hardware kit arrived and I started working through the tutorial

The first thing was plugging in the raspberry pi pico w and dragging the OS to it, which seems sort of unnecessary?
Open up thonny (luckily already installed)
Reminder: GPIO means “General Purpose Input Output”

myLED.value(1) time.sleep(2) myLED.value(0) time.sleep(2)

myLED.value(1) is equivalent to myLED.on()

Connect an LED and flash it on and off. Make sure to connect resistor to the short pin end of the LED so that the LED doesn’t smoke out.
Reminder that any of the pins labeled “GP” on the pinout can be used as GPIO, so select one that is convenient. The device has many grounds, too.
When referring to the pin in code, need to use the GP number, not the Pin number (Pin 20 is GP Pin 15, so need to use 15 in the code).

Skipped ahead in the Sunfounder tutorial to learn about how Neopixels / LED strips work, and started watching Lesson 52.

Important notes about Neopixels:

The tutorial is powering the strip from the Raspberry Pi, but that has limited power. Attempting to power more than ~8 or so lights is going to burn out the power so likely need to provide a different power source for a larger strip. Look at the specs for what DC power supply is needed for the strip. All the grounds need to be connected. (Rewatch the video for reference when it’s time)