Thread for all RP2040-based boards

Development Boards Raspberry Pi
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Greetings all,

Until forum traffic suggests splitting it up by board, I suggest that we discuss RP2040 boards, such as the Pico and the Thing Plus RP2040, here. What think you?

Initial setup for the SparkFun’s Thing Plus RP2040 board:

I’m starting to learn RasPi’s RP2040 chip; I have a couple of SparkFun’s Thing Plus RP2040 boards (hereafter TP2040.)

“Getting Started with MicroPython on Raspberry Pi Pico” assumes a RasPi host running a distro that contains Thonny. I’m on a Win10 machine right now, so I downloaded Thonny version 3.3.6 from thonny.org and that’s working well for me to play around with the TP2040.

A caveat for new Thonny users like myself:

Thonny comes with multiple python interpreters and defaults (at least it did for me) to running the built-in (and thus running on the development host) python interpreter – rather than any RP2040 hardware. To change this, look in the extreme bottom right corner where there should be some visible text (e.g. “Python 3.7.9” – that IMHO in no way indicates that it’s a clickable field!) and right-click on that text. If you select “MicroPython (Raspberry Pi Pico)” you’re set to run at least the pin-compatible Pico examples. I got those from:

https://github.com/raspberrypi/pico-mic … 0d1e6ab37a

At which point, one can cut&paste examples into the top panel of Thonny and run with either F5 or the (green-arrow) run icon. Gratifyingly easy.

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I am new to the RP2040 Thing Plus, I am wondering if anyone has had any success writing / reading from the micro SD card

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I spent a couple days on before discovering that the SD card I was using was my main problem. I was using a card that had been formatted using SDFormatter on Windows 8 and kept getting “EIO” errors. I finally swapped the card out for a brand new card fresh out of the package and it worked a treat. Using the sdcard.py library from https://github.com/OneMadGypsy/pico-sd-card, the following code worked on my Thing Plus - RP2040:

import sdcard

sd = sdcard.SDCard(spi=1, sck=14, mosi=15, miso=12, cs=9)