Berkeley Raspberry Pi meeting this coming Sunday 02.21.2021Meeting Details:
11 am to ?
tom is inviting you to a meeting.
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https://meet.jit.si/Pi.BerkeleyLUG#config.startSilent=trueThis meeting's giveaway is a Pi Pico microcontroller. Just one, for this month. I bought 5 this time. Kind of thinking how the
Pi Zero is hard to get because every seller limits you to one per order. So the $5 Zero ends up costing more like $15 with tax
and shipping. When I saw that I was allowed to by more than one Pico at $4 I just went for it. Now they are sold out and you
are limited to one per order :-(
The Pico is a new device from the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Instead of a tiny computer this is a
microcontroller I tried to explain the difference between a computer and microcontroller at the last BerkeleyLUG. Maybe the
Wikipedia link will help. I think of a microcontroller as a brain for a machine or device.
Here is the official Pico announcement. The Foundation designed their own Arm chip for the Pico which they call the
RP2040. The RP2040 chip will be for sale too (not yet for the general public but soon on Digikey and the like)
So people will be able to design their own boards. Already Adafruit, and Sparkfun and Arduino have announced
Rp2040 boards. With Arduino on board you will soon see Pico support in the Arduino IDE.
For myself I am thinking I could use the Pico to make a Raspberry Pi laptop. My idea is to use an old Thinkpad
and replace the motherboard with a Pi 4. Then maybe I could have the Pico interpret the keyboard and touchpad.
But that is an idea on the backburner as I don't have much time these days.
My project for the meeting: I just got a new
USB microscope It has Wifi built in. But you have to use an app on
your smartphone to see it. I would like if I could see the microscope video without a special app. So far I figured out
that it creates an access point with a dhcp server. The microscope is at 192.168.29.1 It has ports 80 and 8081 open.
Port 80 has a web server with admin panel. There it looks like you can change the IP and configure the dhcp server.
And maybe change from access point to client mode. I don't know what is on 8081. I thought the video stream would
be there but didn't see it. I am thinking to install Google Android tools and then bring up a virtual phone and see what
the viewing app is doing. It would be nice to just open a new browser tab and see the video there.
So if I can get the new USB 'scope working I'll give away my old USB 'scope.
Reply back if you are interested in the Pico, and I can deliver to you this weekend before or after the meeting,
Thomas