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I am proud to announce that my latest book is now up for sale on lulu.com or on Amazon
Click here to buy Raspberry Pico W Simplified on Lulu
Click here to buy Raspberry Pico W Simplified on Amazon
The book is about the, last july, released Raspberry Pi Pico W. The Pico W is, for those in the dark, a microcontroller like the Arduino but with lots of IO ports (26) a fast processor (up to 133 Mhz), 264K ram and 2Mb flash memory, I2C and SPI and best of all Wifi. The main programming languages are MicroPython and C++. And it is dead-cheap (around 8 USD) and locally available. Summarizing: this is a serious competitor for the ESP32.
The book is a book for beginners, although seasoned hobbyists might find some neat tricks in it.
Six sensors and actuators are used throughout the book. These are: button, led, dallas DS18B20 thermometer, LDR, Pir and Vibration sensor. Each of these are explained, set up on a breadboard and demonstrated with a small program. Later on in the book they are used to demonstrate how to send their data over Wifi to several internet services and of course your own web-server running on the Pico W itself.
The rest of the book focuses on pin layout, installing MicroPython and Thonny, and the MicroPython language. The book is 275 pages so you can imagine that just a small part of MicroPython is addressed. A small part but yet enough to make some interesting projects.
The Wifi part discusses:
- How to use Ping to check if you are at home and then set a light on
- Get the values of cryptocurrencies from 2 different websites
- JSON decoding
- Sending data to Thingspeak and displaying that data on a webpage
- Getting notifications on your phone (alarms) with Pushbullet
- Sending text and data to Telegram
- Sending and obtaining data from Dweet
- Building your own webserver that displays sensor data
- Building your own webserver with buttons to set on a light
There are some specialities in the book.
For sending data from the webpage to the server I use the POST method. Advantage is that no info is seen in the URL, and data is not stored in the browsers history. So a different approach as usual.
Dweet is an anonymous service to post and receive data. Dweet has been discussed on this weblog before. It is free but stores only the 5 latest data sets and no longer as 24 housr. So great for anonymous posting. Even no log-in is required.
For decoding JSON a pathfinder is discussed that decodes JSON code and gives the analysed path so you
can easily turn it into MicroPython code.
All code is written in MicroPython and all breadboard setups made with Cirkit Designer which has also been discussed on this weblog: http://lucstechblog.blogspot.com/2022/08/create-new-component-in-cirkit.html
I invested a huge amount of time in this book. Next to that the paper and energy prices are rising. Despite this all, I tried to keep the price as low as possible
You can order the book direct from Lulu's webshop and it is available now:
Click here to buy Raspberry Pico W Simplified on Lulu
Click here to buy Raspberry Pico W Simplified on Amazon
The Holiday season is coming up. The price of the book and the price of the Pico W and the used sensors are so low that this might be the perfect gift for your kids, relatives or anyone interested in the Internet of Things and electronics.
Till next time
Have some reading fun
Luc Volders