“I bought the Pico to complement a Pi0W to drive dc motors with encoders. By itself the Pi0W could not consistently give shaft speed because Linux would interrupt at random. So Pico instead of an Arduino as a trial. Much of the Pico is worthwhile, eg the ADCs and MicroPython. But some is poor, especially the BOOTSEL button. You need 3 hands to use it, and the button is fragile. Mine broke, so I had to solder a Captain Resetti to TP6. It would have been MUCH easier if the bootsel had just been “Press for 3 seconds” without the USB plug in complexity. I also find that the GPIOs are fragile, say compared with Arduino and the IRQ is massively sensitive to dc motor EMI. This meant I had to add many more decoupling caps. Finally I think it would have been better for prototyping if the GPIOs had all been along one edge as in the Pi0W.”
“Ordered from the USA. Shipped quick and I received the items in a timely fashion. The products were well protected and the counts were all correct. Very satisfied with the transaction overall and I would gladly order from Pimoroni again or recommend them to a friend. Fear not - order away.”
“Great board will be better in future, best used with stacking headers and a PTM switch Or Captain Resetti. onboard storage very good dont have to worry about types of SDcard, Will be more useful when machine.rtc is available, no wireless either so no networking yet. Dont apply external power when its connected to USB without a zener or some circuitry it gets upset by that sort of thing.”
“Nice little board to play with Python. Instead of the Pi, download MicroPython onto this board and use Thonny as the IDE and you even have a line by line entry. Sees where issues are in your code.”
“Great documentation covering all aspects of this device. And with the simple step by step instructions available on-line I was able to get my device into use very rapidly.
As far as the microcontroller goes it is a good first effort, obviously influenced by certain other devices. They seem to have chosen a very flexible configuration, and the amount of I/O subsystems is very good. Just a shame there is no DAC on board.”
