Your computer should immediately recognise that you’ve connected a storage device so you can release the BOOTSEL button and open up the RPI-RP2 drive in your normal file explorer application. Then hold down the BOOTSEL button on the Pico and plug the USB cable into it.
Plug a USB cable into your PC making sure that is not yet connected to your Pico. We now need to turn the Raspberry Pi Pico into a disk drive attached to a computer. This is the file we need to transfer onto the Raspberry Pi Pico, so download this and save it somewhere sensible on your computer. You’ll find a link to a downloadable UF2 file. This shows you the simple steps required to install the software. This page has links to lots of documentation about using MicroPython with the Raspberry Pi Pico, but if you scroll down the page a bit you’ll come to the drag-and-drop section. If you go to the microcontroller section in the Raspberry Pi documentation website you’ll find a link to the MicroPython information. All we need to do is copy a single installation file onto the device and it’s ready to go. So let’s get started! Installing MicroPython On the Raspberry Pi PicoĪs usual, the good people at the Raspberry Pi Foundation have made it incredibly easy to get MicroPython up and running on your Raspberry Pi Pico. In this tutorial will take a brand-new Raspberry Pi Pico, load MicroPython onto it, set up a Python development system on our PC and then get some basic input and output working using switches and LEDs. You’ll find full details of the language and the libraries that have been developed to run with it. If you head over to the MicroPython website at So you can do almost anything you could do with C++, but using a much more beginner friendly language. All of the core functionality is there with some added extras to allow you to control the extra hardware on the Pico.
MicroPython allows you to code your microcontroller using a slightly cut down version of Python. This is a very powerful language but can be a bit awkward to use, especially if you’re new to coding. If you’ve been using Arduinos you’ll know that they are programmed in C++. With this amount of processing power and memory the Pi Pico is also able to run MicroPython. With 26 multifunction GPIO pins providing analogue inputs, UARTs, SPI, I2C, PWM and even USB support, the Pi Pico is orders of magnitude more powerful. The Pi Pico is more like an Arduino where we need to add our own code before the board can do anything.īut unlike the Arduino Uno or Nano boards with their 20Mhz processor and small memory, the Pi Pico has a powerful dual core ARM processor chip running at 133Mhz with 2MB of onboard Flash memory for your code and 264KB of static RAM for your data. This is very different from the usual Raspberry Pis which are single board computers that run a full Linux operating system. The Raspberry Pi Pico is a very cheap, but powerful microcontroller board.
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