2.6 Tilt It!

img_tilt

The tilt switch is a 2-pin device with a metal ball in the middle. When the switch is upright, the two pins are connected; when it is tilted, the two pins are disconnected.

Required Components

In this project, we need the following components.

It’s definitely convenient to buy a whole kit, here’s the link:

Name

ITEMS IN THIS KIT

LINK

Kepler Kit

450+

Kepler Kit

You can also buy them separately from the links below.

SN

COMPONENT

QUANTITY

LINK

1

Raspberry Pi Pico W

1

BUY

2

Micro USB Cable

1

3

Breadboard

1

BUY

4

Jumper Wires

Several

BUY

5

Resistor

1(10KΩ)

BUY

6

Tilt Switch

1

Schematic

sch_tilt

When you put it upright, GP14 will get high; after tilting it, GP14 will get low.

The purpose of the 10K resistor is to keep the GP14 in a stable low state when the tilt switch is in a tilted state.

Wiring

wiring_tilt

Code

Note

  • Open the 2.6_tilt_switch.py file under the path of kepler-kit-main/micropython or copy this code into Thonny, then click “Run Current Script” or simply press F5 to run it.

  • Don’t forget to click on the “MicroPython (Raspberry Pi Pico)” interpreter in the bottom right corner.

  • For detailed tutorials, please refer to Open and Run Code Directly.

import machine
import utime
button = machine.Pin(14, machine.Pin.IN)
while True:
    if button.value() == 0:
        print("The switch works!")
        utime.sleep(1)

After the program runs, when you tilt the breadboard (tilt switch), “The switch works!” will appear in the shell.