Last time, I talked about setting up my Pi Pico by soldering on the GPIO pins and wiring up an LCD screen. Having something work is obviously no fun. I need another challenge.

I decided to update the display to show the current temperature. I’d read that the Pico has a built-in temperature sensor, so how hard could it be?

I quickly took the sample code from the Pico website and plugged it in. It ran first time, which is quite impressive, and said that it was currently… 10º.

It’s been a productive weekend, at least if you consider doing unnecessary things productive.

For reasons that won’t become clear any time soon, I decided that I wanted to get some of my Arduino components working with my new Raspberry Pi Pico. Like the Arduino, but unlike other Pis, the Pico is a microcontroller. In practical terms – for a programmer at least – this means it doesn’t have a “proper” operating system like Linux but it does have lots of inputs and outputs, both digital and analogue.