Pimoroni Pico Display Workout

In this Instructable I'm going to demonstrate the capabilities of the new Pico Display from Pimoroni. It is a fast, bright and colourful 240 x 135 pixel screen with an RGB LED, four useful control buttons and can fit directly onto a Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller, be connected by wires or via a Pico base. (I used a Pico Decker as this provides additional pins extra components such as potentiometers, sensors, Neopixels etc.)

I am going to assume that you have installed the Pimoroni UF2 file (currently version 0.0.7) to your Pico, installed the Thonny Editor on your computer, know how to connect your Pico to your computer's USB port, load, enter, edit and run code from Thonny.

Pimoroni have supplied a few graphics commands - screen clear, filled rectangles and circles, pen colours, pixel, text string and text character printing to the screen. This demonstration adds lines, hollow rectangles and circles, bar and line graphs, user defined characters and how to combine them in various ways to scroll text cross the screen and react to physical changes as buttons are pressed.

Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller with legs soldered on

Pimoroni Pico Display

Optional base to join them together

The first few sections run automatically. You need to break out of the scrolling text by pressing button Y. Hold it down until the scrolling stops and the program moves on.

In the bar graph section you can increase values by pressing/tapping button A and decrease with button B. This moves the bar in the graph and changes the colour of the bar and of the built in RGB LED by using PWM. The Y buttons terminates the program with a 'tidy up' section to turn off the LEDs and clear the screen.

The code has many comments and should be pretty straight forward to follow. Thonny supports printing so it might be an idea to print out the script and add addition comments of your own.

Load into Thonny and press the run icon (green with arrowhead).

If you have any questions or comments I will be delighted help if I can. Much of the code is similar to my previous Instructable for the Pico Explorer, with has a bigger screen and breadboard. It contains some additional information.

I hope you find this useful. Have fun. I have. It's a great little board.