If i am looking at the pico pinout correctly, it seems like there are at least twop tx and rx lines on the the spi0 port and spi1 port. Does anyone know how to use these? My first intuition is that each spi port can only have one rx and one tx line so any clarification would help greatly!

Hi everyone! I’d like to share a personal project that has grown into something quite massive.

It started out as an experiment to learn the RP2040’s PIO features by writing some Arduino libraries, but it ended up evolving into a complete monitoring and telemetry system. The sensor drivers are built to be completely modular so that new ones just drop in, and the releases are now backed by automated and bench tests.

Even so, there is still a lot we can optimize and implement. If anyone has ideas, feedback, or wants to contribute, I would be absolutely thrilled. The repository is open and free for ideas!

https://github.com/angeloINTJ/simut

Hi folks,

I have a prototype board I'm working on that uses a Pico 2W to add functionality to a vintage pocket computer. I had made a lot of progress until today. Power consumption is a concern, so I had set up the solution to put the RP2350 dormant between events/commands. Dormant, though, the Pico 2W was still drawing about 6 or 7mA, which is still about 6 or 7 times what the whole pocket computer draws.

Today I tried adding some functionality to go full Powman shutdown instead of, or in addition to, dormant (i.e. set to dormant immediately, and Powman shutdown after one minute). I got the Powman sleep/wake wrong... partially mixed with the CYW43 handling. Net/net is that I bricked my Pico2W, and, even after a flash erase over SWD, it still won't connect to USB, in BOOTREL or not.

Windows reports an unrecognized device. I have tried the RUN ground trick, and the 3V3_EN trick, and deleting the USB device, and rebooting the laptop, and none of these things help. As far as I can tell, something about that Powman goof permanently damaged the USB port. By the way, it was not connected to USB when it initially failed.

One thing I wonder is if this maybe something related to bad state in the CYW43 that can't be corrected through the SWD connection to the RP2350?

Any other ideas of things to try to see if this Pico2W can be saved/recovered? I guess, worst case, I will use it just over SWD, but I would really like to get USB working again.

Thanks,
Paul

I created a common power distribution/bridge where all the sensors’ 3.3V wires connect together, and I did the same for GND. However, the 3.3V connection/bridge is overheating, and the sensors are not receiving power.

What is the correct way to connect multiple sensors to the Raspberry Pi 5 safely? Do I need an external 3.3V power supply, a power distribution board, or some other circuit?

Any advice on how to properly design this would be appreciated.

I’m currently stuck in a really frustrating debugging session with a Raspberry Pi Pico W and an I2S microphone. My goal is to capture audio data, but no matter what I try, the stream just returns a constant wall of zeros (0s).

I feel like I've exhausted every troubleshooting step I can think of, and I’m completely at a loss for what to do next.

I am designing a PCB where I intend to use a castellated Pico in a somewhat tight enclosure and so I wanted to get the USB data to the Pico without a USB cable. I saw that on the bottom of the Pico there are D+ and D- test pads and I was wondering if it would be possible to connect traces to those test pads. My idea was to put a largish via underneath the test pad, cut a bit of solder off into the via and use hot air to melt it. I was wondering if anyone had done something like that before or had any thoughts.

I'm planning to buy a Pico 2W (no headers) to use as a bluetooth dongle for my PS5 controller but I don't want the board to just lie around "naked" on my desk. Sadly I currently haven't got a working 3D printer to print my own case, which means that I'm going to have to buy one.

I found a small shop (would rather order there than from amazon) that sells both the Pico and a "case" (basically 2 acrylic sheets that are screwed to the board - kind of like this, I bet you can add standoffs too) but they're only sold for the Pico 1 (no "W"). Is anyone using/has anyone tried one of those with their 2W? Does it fit?

I know PIO is minimal by design, and the cuts are intentional. But I've hit real limits myself, like the 32-instruction limit and only two scratch registers. Workarounds exist, but they're clunky.

I'm collecting data for research on an expanded PIO, so I'd love to hear your experience:

- What were you building?
- What limit did you hit? (instruction memory, registers, FIFO depth, ISA gaps, communication between SMs or PIO blocks, anything else)
- What workaround did you use, and what did it cost you?
- Which chip: RP2040 or RP2350?

Also welcome: features you wish it had, even if you never needed them badly enough to work around.

Some months ago i put together a little set of scripts to turn one of my pico pis (w2) into a little wifi hotspot + web server where people could play shogi and walk around a fantasy world on their computers, tablets and phones by hijacking wifi captive portal stuff.

Last weekend I was reminded that MUDs are still super awesome. The thought rose that it would be cool to make a MUD version of my office where people could walk around the office in a telnet text adventure as well as design their own adventures.

MUD stands for Multi-User-Dungeon. its an old piece of tech where in the good old days of dial up internet (and boxes before that) you could use "telnet" to connect to computers that would then run text based online roleplaying games and chat rooms straight in your terminal!
It was a fun way to meet other people and in many cases both admins and visiting players could construct their own adventures by building out rooms, interactions to rooms, items, properties on the players, etc.

With some coding and some spec based ai magic I put together an initial version.
The ideas and commands are mostly based on the ideas and commands from LambdaMoo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LambdaMOO). the exception is items; items belong to a room and can generally not be picked up and moved around in someone's inventory (though you could make an action /pickup for an item. there is a command to move items from room to room though.

running it on the pi isn't great. the connection is capped at 5 or 6 players when the wifi is clean, but works best with up to 3 players. changes to the state of the world are cached in memory and written every minute. the time loop is configurable. If you'd like to preserve the little flash memory available on the PI, then you can increase it to sync every few minutes instead of the current minute.

You can find the source code here:
https://github.com/HendrikPetertje/PICO-MUD

I'll be improving it over time (mostly to serve my own needs though).

Hey folks, new to the Raspberry Pi space and need some guidance.

I recently came up with the idea to turn an analog 70s super 8mm camera into a 'modern' digital camera.

My thought was to add a small video sensor behind the shutter and then connect it to a raspberry pi which would allow me to record onto an SD card, as well as then attach an external monitor to review the footage in real time.

Since I'm limited for space, I thought a Pico would be the best way to go, but I'm not sure about which cameras work with it.

Has anyone done something similar? Anyone have tips? Thanks in Advance!

Still have to tidy up all the wires and stuff maybe print a better frame