The Raspberry Pi Pico certainly dove the cat in 2021, but it lacked one key feature: Wi-Fi. You can certainly hack your own solution, but we had to wait until mid-2022 for the Raspberry Pi to announce the Raspberry Pi Pico W to receive official support.
The Raspberry Pi Pico W was released with robust MicroPython firmware, circuit python, our favorite microcontroller Python release was unfortunately not supported. It may have taken months @Jeff Pler Now there is CircuitPython 8 Beta 2 which provides Wi-Fi support for Pico W while maintaining the familiar CircuitPython ecosystem.
To celebrate this milestone, we put together a project highlighting CircuitPython on the Raspberry Pi Pico W. Convert live data from RSS news feeds to JSON and display it on a small OLED screen.
circuit construction
For this project you will need
The circuit is basically an OLED screen connected to the Raspberry Pi Pico via an I2C connection. The only additions to the circuit are two 4.7K ohm resistors that connect to the + rail and the Pico’s SDA and SCL pins. This rail is tied to 3.3V and uses a resistor to pull the pin high, ready to send or receive data.
Here is the connection:
| wire color | Raspberry Pi Pico W | bread board | Organic EL display |
| green | GP0 (SDA) | none | SDA |
| yellow | GP1 (SCL) | none | SCL |
| red | 3V3 out | + | Vin |
| black | earth | none | earth |
CircuitPython settings
1. Access CircuitPython official page of Raspberry Pi Pico W. When Download the latest released UF2 firmware image.. At the time of writing this was CircuitPython 8 Beta 2.
2. While holding down the BOOTSEL button, connect the Raspberry Pi Pico W to your computer. New drive, RPI-RP2 is coming
3. Copy the downloaded CircuitPython UF2 file to RPI-RP2. This will write CircuitPython to the Pico W’s internal flash storage. A new drive, CIRCUITPY, will appear.
Before we continue, we need a number of CircuitPython libraries. These libraries of pre-built code add extra functionality to your project.
1. download Library bundle Same version of CircuitPython installed on Pico W. I installed CircuitPython 8, so I downloaded the version 8.x bundle.
2. Unzip the bundle to your desktop When then open the lib folder contained within.
3. Copy the following files/folders from this lib folder to the lib folder of your CIRCUITPY drive.
adafruit_bitmap_font
adafruit_display_text
adafruit_displayio_ssd1306.mpy
adafruit_requests.mpy
Working with CircuitPython
1. Download and install Thonny if you don’t already have. Thonny is a Python editor covering Python 3, MicroPython and CircuitPython.
2. Open Thonny and[ツール]>>[オプション]Go to.
3.[インタープリター]set the interpreter to CircuitPython, the port to auto, and[OK]Click. Thonny connects to Pico W running CircuitPython.
The project code consists of two files: secrets.py and code.py. The secrets.py file is basically a Python module with two variables containing the Wi-Fi access point’s SSID and password. We recommend storing your Wi-Fi details in a separate file called secrets.py. This reduces the risk of accidentally sharing credentials. This process works for CircuitPython and MicroPython.
1. Create a new file and there Create two objects, ssid and password.
2. Assign the ssid object the name of your Wi-Fi access point/router.
ssid = “YOUR WI-FI AP NAME HERE”3. For Password, assign a Wi-Fi password.
password = “YOUR SECRET PASSWORD”4. Save the file as secrets.py to your CIRCUITPY drive.
Secrets.py code listing
ssid = "YOUR WI-FI AP NAME HERE"
password = "YOUR SECRET PASSWORD"The code for this project is contained in a file called code.py. This file will auto-run when you turn on the Pico W. This is a feature of CircuitPython. In MicroPython, name the file main.py for the same result. Now begins the process of writing the code that makes up the project.
1.[ファイル]>>[開く]Click. When Select the CircuitPython device. Open code.py in your CIRCUITPY drive. Remove all code in the file.
2. Import a module of pre-written code It handles code pauses (time), sets the IP address, uses Pico W’s Wi-Fi chip, and creates a web socket.
import time
import ipaddress
import wifi
import socketpool3. Import four more modules Modules containing secure connections, making web requests, Wi-Fi login details, and modules for interacting with GPIOs.
import ssl
import adafruit_requests
import secrets
import board4. Import the last group of modules Bus access acceleration, display library, terminal-style text module, text scrolling, and OLED display drivers.
import busio
import displayio
import terminalio
from adafruit_display_text.scrolling_label import ScrollingLabel
import adafruit_displayio_ssd13065. Hide CircuitPython after using it Specifies the GPIO pin to use for I2C.
displayio.release_displays()
i2c = busio.I2C(board.GP1, board.GP0)6. Specify the I2C interface and I2C address of the OLED screen. on the display bus Use it to create a display object. Remember to set the width and height to match your OLED display. To find his I2C address for an OLED display, refer to its datasheet or Search using the I2C scanner.
display_bus = displayio.I2CDisplay(i2c, device_address=0x3C)
display = adafruit_displayio_ssd1306.SSD1306(display_bus, width=128, height=32)7. Connect to Wi-Fi Use the ssid and password stored in the secrets module.
wifi.radio.connect(ssid=secrets.ssid,password=secrets.password)8. Create a pool of sockets available for connection Then create a new HTTP session Used when making web requests.
pool = socketpool.SocketPool(wifi.radio)
request = adafruit_requests.Session(pool, ssl.create_default_context())9. Create a while True loop Run the main project code. This loop continues as long as the Pico W is powered.
while True:10. Create a banner and save it in the toms object.The banner is a string of * followed by “Tom’s Hardware News” followed by 10 more *s.
toms = "*"*10+" Tom's Hardware News"+"*"*1011. Create an object to handle text scrolling Stored in the toms object. animate time handles scroll speed and scale is used to increase text size. The maximum value available on a 128×32 screen is 3.
my_scrolling_label = ScrollingLabel(terminalio.FONT, text=toms, max_characters=20, animate_time=0.1, scale=3)12. Set text position (horizontal, x and vertical, y).
my_scrolling_label.x = 10
my_scrolling_label.y = 1013. Display text on the OLED display.
display.show(my_scrolling_label)14. Scroll banner using for loop the entire screen. Use the length of the text stored in the toms object minus 6 to create comfortable scrolling. This will need to be tweaked to match your banner text.
for i in range(len(toms)-6):
my_scrolling_label.update()
time.sleep(0.1)
15. Object Creation, Feed To Stores the URL of a JSON feed containing news headlines. used rss2json.com Convert Tom’s Hardware RSS feed to JSON. This can be easily manipulated with CircuitPython.
feed =
request.get("https://api.rss2json.com/v1/api.json?rss_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.tomshardware.com%2Ffeeds%2Fall")16. Use a for loop to get the first 5 stories from the feed.
for story in range(5):17. Print Article Headlines into a Python shell.
print(feed.json()['items'][story]['title'])18. Update scroll text to scroll headingswith a buffer of 20 blank spaces before the text and a scale (text size) of 2.
my_scrolling_label = ScrollingLabel(terminalio.FONT, text=" "*20+str(feed.json()['items'][story]['title']), max_characters=20, animate_time=0.1, scale=2)19. Set text position (horizontal, x and vertical, y).
my_scrolling_label.x = 10
my_scrolling_label.y = 1020. Display text on the OLED display.
display.show(my_scrolling_label)21. Use another for loop to scroll the heading text. The iterations in the loop are set by the length of the heading plus 21 characters to build the buffer.
for i in range(len(feed.json()['items'][story]['title'])+21):
my_scrolling_label.update()
time.sleep(0.1)22. Add a final 30 minute sleep (1800 seconds). Set Pico W to check for new headlines every 30 minutes.
time.sleep(1800)23. Save the project as code.py. Go to CIRCUITPY and[実行]Click to start testing your code.
An OLED screen should appear, scrolling banners, then news headlines. I saved the project in a code.py file, so this code will automatically run when I turn on the Pico W.
complete code listing
import time
import ipaddress
import wifi
import socketpool
import ssl
import adafruit_requests
import secrets
import board
import busio
import displayio
import terminalio
from adafruit_display_text.scrolling_label import ScrollingLabel
import adafruit_displayio_ssd1306
# Setup the display
displayio.release_displays()
i2c = busio.I2C(board.GP1, board.GP0)
display_bus = displayio.I2CDisplay(i2c, device_address=0x3C)
display = adafruit_displayio_ssd1306.SSD1306(display_bus, width=128, height=32)
wifi.radio.connect(ssid=secrets.ssid,password=secrets.password)
pool = socketpool.SocketPool(wifi.radio)
request = adafruit_requests.Session(pool, ssl.create_default_context())
while True:
toms = "*"*10+" Tom's Hardware News"+"*"*10
my_scrolling_label = ScrollingLabel(terminalio.FONT, text=toms, max_characters=20, animate_time=0.1, scale=3)
my_scrolling_label.x = 10
my_scrolling_label.y = 10
display.show(my_scrolling_label)
for i in range(len(toms)-6):
my_scrolling_label.update()
time.sleep(0.1)
feed = request.get("https://api.rss2json.com/v1/api.json?rss_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.tomshardware.com%2Ffeeds%2Fall")
for story in range(5):
print(feed.json()['items'][story]['title'])
my_scrolling_label = ScrollingLabel(terminalio.FONT, text=" "*20+str(feed.json()['items'][story]['title']), max_characters=20, animate_time=0.1, scale=2)
my_scrolling_label.x = 10
my_scrolling_label.y = 10
display.show(my_scrolling_label)
for i in range(len(feed.json()['items'][story]['title'])+21):
my_scrolling_label.update()
time.sleep(0.1)
time.sleep(1800)
