mini project: PICO-PI programmable Lab Switch - 5: use the USB Port as COM

RE: mini project: PICO-PI programmable Lab Switch - 5: use the USB Port as COM

Jan Cumps — Sat, 29 Oct 2022 20:39:11 GMT

If you are using a Pico-PI to drive your relay, and your relay break-out is for an Arduino, the "Relay May Not Click with Confidence". Check this post.

RE: mini project: PICO-PI programmable Lab Switch - 5: use the USB Port as COM

Jan Cumps — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 20:49:42 GMT

I've added a video of the device in action.

RE: mini project: PICO-PI programmable Lab Switch - 5: use the USB Port as COM

Jan Cumps — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 22:25:04 GMT

Here's an in-action photo (here with a PICO-H, the version with headers, without castellations):

The onboard LED is SCPI channel 0 (DIGI:OUTP0). The Dev Board LED is channel 1 (DIGI:OUTP1).

RE: mini project: PICO-PI programmable Lab Switch - 5: use the USB Port as COM

Jan Cumps — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 21:38:23 GMT

I just tested the setup on Shabaz' Pi Pico Eurocard Development Board Rev 2.0.

The LED on his dev kit is GP22. That happens to be the Channel 1 that I enabled in post #4.
It all works straight away. No config or code modification needed. The Dev Board with Pico-Probe is plug-in compatible. VSCode happily loaded the firmware and started a debug session.

I'm going to use this dev kit for the second chapter in this series: adding the relays to really switch things.

RE: mini project: PICO-PI programmable Lab Switch - 5: use the USB Port as COM

DAB — Sat, 22 Oct 2022 17:47:21 GMT

I am surprised that it does not let you use the normal interrupts, but I suspect that they have a tight timing window so they lock you out.

Back in my younger days, I always used interrupts to set up semaphores and then did all of the processing in non real time.

It worked fine as long as you had good buffer depth for the messages.

RE: mini project: PICO-PI programmable Lab Switch - 5: use the USB Port as COM

dougw — Sat, 22 Oct 2022 15:41:00 GMT

Nice flexibility.