DIY Robotic Arm & Snake Game With Raspberry Pi Pico Proto Shield

Raspberry Pi Pico boards are increasing in popularity day by day. It's great that it has support for MicroPython and Arduino IDE. I decided to design a proto shield for myself to use the Raspberry Pi Pico board in my projects. I decorated your workshop by making Robot Arm and Snake Game project with this shield :) There are 18 GPIO Pins, 2 Serial(UART) & IIC ports, 5 buttons, 1 LED on the shield that you can use in your own projects. I generally prefer to connect SSD1306 OLED Display on the IIC port. You can also solder the board as SMD or DIP as you wish.

What will we do in this content?

1. Raspberry Pi Pico Proto Shield
2. Snake Game with Raspberry Pi Pico
3. Robotic Arm with Raspberry Pi Pico

As you can see in the video, we first need to solder our board. Then for the snake game, we will just insert an IIC SSD1306 into our card and load our python code. For the Robotic Arm; we need to print out some files from the 3D printer and assembly them. Let's go step by step in more detail.

The required components and equipment to be used in this project are as follows.

1. 4 X S90 Servo Motor
2. 1 X SSD1036 i2c OLED
3. Proto Shield PCB & main components(Click for All)
4. 1 X Raspberry Pi Pico

Required Tools:

1. Soldering Iron
2. Soldering Wire
3. Micro-USB Cable
4. 12V 1~2A DC Power Supply

Let's print the 3D files and combine them as in the video. I used PLA filament in this project, you can use ABS or other equivalent filaments. If you are going to use a different filament, first print the servo holders and check if the servos fit in the holders. Keep in mind that this project will steal from you on an average day.

You can access the PCB files on my GitHub page, and you can learn how to solder in the video. Thanks to PCBWay who provided the production support for the realization of this project. You can produce high quality pcb by clicking on the link. In PCB production, I did not make any changes, keeping the 1.6mm thickness and the standard values (FR-4) as the board.

After soldering the PCB board, let's connect the servo connections to the servo motors in order. Let's connect the base servo to 2, the first arm servos 3 and 4, and finally the gripper servo to 5. After making the connections, let's download and install the attached code. Also, let's not forget to install the library. If you don't know anything about pico, you can start quickly here; Getting Started Pico...

We don't have any complex connection for Snake game. We will just place the SSD1306 IIC(i2c) screen on the i2c header. Then we download and install the attached code. Also, let's not forget to install the library. If you don't know anything about pico, you can start quickly here; Getting Started Pico...

We made our projects, the rest is just to enjoy the projects by using the buttons on the board. Follow me for more details about this project and for more projects.

To fabricate the PCBs in this project, go to this page : PCBWay/ronin

YouTube : youtube.com/@by1ronin

YouTube for this project: youtu.be/SCy5gge8_cE

GitHub : github.com/byronin

Git page for this project : github.com/byronin/Pico_ProtoShield