Next week’s meetup is slated to be DC540’s first in-person meetup this year. We decided to schedule the in-person meetup in the backyard. Since we made that decision, the CDC advised that vaccinated people should be able to gather indoors maskless. But we’re fine with outdoors. Especially since, when we scheduled it, it was looking like it might rain Monday evening, but since then the probability has decreased steadily. Looking very promising now.
We’ll have enough Raspberry Pi Pico microcontrollers to go around, I’m trying to pre-solder a bunch of headers so you don’t have to waste time soldering and you can get started right on deploying programs onto it. I’ll also have some breadboards and LEDs to play with if you’re so inclined. If you want to be prepared to play with that, install Thonny on your laptop and consider bringing a standard MicroUSB cable. MicroPython is WAY easier to get started with on the Pico than C. Plug it in with Thonny running, Thonny will prompt you to flash MicroPython firmware onto it, and then you can just save your python programs straight to the USB-connected Pico and run them. Easy as Pi.
