Now that we have two boxes open we can carry out the first project which is to take the supplied Pico, LED block light, breadboards and cables and wire them together.
As with last year’s calendar, the projects come with an excellent set of tutorials which you can find on the PiHut website. These walk you through not only the project but also come with an explanation as to what the components are and how they work. This is useful for beginners and acts as a nice refresher for experts too.
Today’s project was to take the block LED, which apparently has two lights contained within it, and get them to flash on and off. I say “apparently” because, as you will see from the video below, I wasn’t able to get the green LED to work at all. I don’t know whether that is because I have a faulty component or I haven’t put them together correctly. I have reached out to PiHut to try and find a solution.
As I said in the video I also had difficulties with Thonny, the IDE that is used to interact with the Pico. I had difficulty getting Thonny to respond to mouse clicks and was generally pretty unresponsive. Since the last time I used Thonny I have updated to MacOS Sonoma and when I moved to the latest version of Thonny everything started working as expected again. If you have any issues then I recommend that you do the same.
I’m now hoping that PiHut can provide a solution to the green LED as I know the next projects build on this one and it could be difficult without it working.
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