I put the Arduino project on hold for a bit, while I broke out another project from Crafting Table (formerly inventr.io) that integrates the Raspberry Pi Pico WH. I’m heading towards another project (in future) with building a Raspberry Pi 5 system with AI board.
20251011 Basic setup steps:
Current Mac OS (10.13.6, MacOS High Sierra:
-This is where I’ll have some workarounds needed, because I remembered I needed to have Thonny version 4.1.4 (released 20231119), as the newer version doesn’t work on this MacOS. And, I can’t upgrade the MacOS because the hardware is circa 2011.
Firmware install:
-Downloaded the firmware from CraftingTable
-Held down BootSel button and plugged in the USB cable to Mac
-Dragged the firmware file over to the folder that appeared
-Had to unplug the cable and back in again, in order for Thonny to recognize the Raspberry Pi Pico
-MicroPython 1.26.1 (release 20250911)
Picozero library:
-Instructions say go (inside Thonny) to Tool, Manage Packages, and search for picozero
-That only returns something called Pickle, and not picozero by PyPy
Note: I read somewhere that this was fixed in the newest version of Thonny, but I can’t use that
-On crafting table, someone posted to go to https://pypi.org/project/picozero#files and download the picozero 0.4.2 file (picozero-0.4.2.tar.gz). Note: This version I’m also seeing on other sites.
NOTE: That didn’t work for me, as the .tar.gz. file wasn’t clickable (grayed out). Also, someone on boards posted an issue with having a Mac, and needing to go to Github to download the picozero.py file.
“Tools/Manage Packages… does not work for me. (Using a Mac) I downloaded picozero from github, saved the file as picozero.py, then went to View, clicked on Files, went searching for my new picozero.py file, right-clicked on it, and chose Upload to… It seemed to work. But I still can’t find picozero in Tools/Manage Packages.”
Referencing this for instructions:
https://picozero.readthedocs.io/en/latest/gettingstarted.html
Instructions like this annoy me – “Either clone the picozero GitHub repository or copy the code from the picozero.py file and save it on your main computer.”
-They don’t say how you clone something from GitHub…
From the list of repositories, click the repository you want to clone. To select the local directory into which you want to clone the repository, next to the “Local Path” field, click Choose… and navigate to the directory. At the bottom of the “Clone a Repository” window, click Clone.
How to clone a repository:
https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/creating-and-managing-repositories/cloning-a-repository
Terminal; went to a folder
git clone https://github.com/RaspberryPiFoundation/picozero.git
Well… that was a pain.
I think I resolved it by just focusing on the file ‘picozero.py’
There are instructions to open the folder and find the file for picozero.py (within Thonny); right click; upload. That places picozero.py within Thonny and you can write code that references the library.
Within Manage Packages, it still doesn’t show picozero.