PI PICO
Build your own weather machine
Les Pounder is normally a ray of sunshine, but is feeling a little under the weather. Perhaps this project will lift the clouds.
OUR EXPERT
Les Pounder is associate editor at Tom’s Hardware and a freelance maker for hire. He blogs about his projects at http://bigl.es.
YOU NEED
Pi Pico W I2C LCD 4x F2F jumper wires Code: https://github.com/lesp/LXF316/archive/refs/heads/main. zip
The Raspberry Pi Pico W excels at being used with online APIs for a myriad of data sources. T We’ve used it to read the news, tell us who is on the International Space Station, and now we are building a portable weather station that uses OpenWeather’s API to tell us if we need an umbrella.
W is for weather
Holding the BOOTSEL button, connect your Pi Pico to your computer. Go to https://bit.ly/LXF306Micro Python and download the version of MicroPython for your Pico/Pico W. Open your file manager, go to the downloaded file and copy it to the root of the RPI-RP2 drive. This flashes the new firmware to the Pico.
Using your distro’s package manager, install Thonny. For the latest Ubuntu release, we have to use a Snap: $ sudo snap install thonny
Open Thonny and connect the Pico to your machine. Go to Tools > Options > Interpreter tab. Set the interpreter to MicroPython (Raspberry Pi Pico) and Port to match the Pico’s location. Click OK. Thonny connects to the board and we can start writing code.