6  Hardware Preparations

In this course we will be utilizing the new (as of August, 2022) Raspberry Pi Pico W board, which adds a WiFi radio to the previously released Raspberry Pi Pico board that the Rasbperry Pi foundatoin released in 2021. These boards are very low-cost (about 6 US dollars currently) and provide great functionalities for the kinds of projects and ideas we will be exploring through this course. In particular, the Pico W boards have the following interesting specifications:

• A microcontroller chip designed by Raspberry Pi (RP2040)
• A 133MHz dual-core Arm processor
• 26 General Purpose Input Output (GPIO) pins
• A 3-channel 12-bit ADC
• An on-board temeprature sensor
• A 2.4GHz wireless (802.11n) single-band radio

Much more information about the Raspberry Pi family of boards can be found here.

We will begin by be covering this tutorial: Getting started with Raspberry Pi Pico

Additionally, you may want to prepare the hardware by soldering the headers that come with the Pi Pico W kit that you received. Instructions for doing so can be found here.

Although we would like to ultimately connect the Pico W board to the wireless network on campus, we will deal with those steps later in the process.