This project involves the use of the Pico Pi board and the Thonny Integrated Development Environment. Please follow the subsequent instructions properly and carefully to successfully set up your project environment.
Install micropython using this documentation
Thonny is a Python IDE for beginners which will help us interact with the Pico Pi board.
- Download and install Thonny IDE from here: https://thonny.org/
- Once installed, open Thonny IDE.
- For communication with the Raspberry Pi Pico, go to the
Tools > Options > Interpreterand selectMicroPython (Raspberry Pi Pico).
Raspberry Pi Pico is a microcontroller board based on the Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller chip.
- Plug your Pi Pico into the USB port of your computer.
- It will appear as a removable drive.
- In the Thonny IDE, you can now directly open files from the Pico and save files to it.
Create a secrets.py file in the Thonny IDE to store the WiFi SSID and password.
ssid = "your_wifi_ssid"
password = "your_wifi_password"Replace "your_wifi_ssid" and "your_wifi_password" with your actual WiFi credentials. This file should not be shared or made public for security reasons.
Copy and paste the provided install.py and server.py code into your Thonny IDE files, save them, and then run install.py before running server.py.
Note: If the LED does not light up when the Pi Pico is connected to WiFi, please check your internet connection and make sure that the Raspberry Pi Pico can communicate with the internet.
This Python code is utilizing a number of modules to connect to a Wi-Fi and deliver a server that can toggle an LED on or off over the internet.
The first couple of lines of the code are importing necessary modules.
from secret import ssid, password
from phew import server, connect_to_wifi, get_ip_address
from machine import Pin • secret module contains the network's SSID and password, which are
required for Wi-Fi connection.
• phew module provides a lightweight Python HTTP server, as well as two
utility functions for connecting to Wi-Fi and getting the IP address.
• machine module is used to interact with hardware components. Here, it's
used to control an LED.
Next, an LED object is defined which is set to output mode.
led = Pin("LED", Pin.OUT) The LED is referred by its name ("LED"). The argument Pin.OUT means that
the pin setting is defined to output mode which means it can output power to
other devices.
Then, the functions connect_to_wifi and get_ip_address are called by
using the SSID and password from secret module. This code will establish a
Wi-Fi connection.
connect_to_wifi(ssid, password)
ip = get_ip_address() Now that the Wi-Fi connection is established, routes are set for the server:
@server.route("/led", methods=["GET"])
def led_toggle(request):
led.toggle()
return f"{led.value()}" This function responds to GET requests to "/led" path and toggles the LED.
It returns a string representing the current state of LED. led.toggle() is
a function to change the state of the LED from ON to OFF or from OFF to ON.
led.value() is a function to get the current state of the LED.
This function catches all requests to paths other than "/led" and returns a 404 error:
@server.catchall()
def catchall(request):
return "Not found", 404 Finally, the server is started with the server.run() command. The server
will now continuously listen for incoming requests until it is manually
stopped.
server.run()For more information, please refer to the following links:
- MicroPython Documentation: https://docs.micropython.org/en/latest/
- Thonny Documentation: https://thonny.org/help/
- Phew Documentation: https://github.com/pimoroni/phew
- Pico CSS: https://github.com/kodicw/ttc-pico-led
- HTMX: https://htmx.org
In case you encounter issues or need further assistance, please refer to the documentation first.