2. Light up

The RGB Board is a component that does not communicate in SPI or I2C, and it needs to handle things at a much lower level.

Pico has a solution for this: Programmable IO(PIO).

As well as the two main Cortex-M0+ processing cores, there are two PIO blocks that each have four state machines. These are really stripped-down processing cores that can be used to handle data coming in or out of the microcontroller, and offload some of the processing requirement for implementing communications protocols.

You can’t program these cores with MicroPython - you have to use a special language for them - but you can program them from MicroPython.

  1. The code to control RGB Board using PIO is shown below. You can copy the above code into Thonny or open the rgb_2_light_up.py under the path of pico_4wd_car-v2.0\examples\learn_modules.

    Note

    You can visit Programmable IO - MicroPython to learn more about the functions involved in the code below.

    import array, time
from machine import Pin
import rp2
from rp2 import PIO, StateMachine, asm_pio
# Configure the number of WS2812 LEDs.
LIGHT_NUM = 24
LIGHT_PIN = 19

@asm_pio(sideset_init=PIO.OUT_LOW, out_shiftdir=PIO.SHIFT_LEFT,
autopull=True, pull_thresh=24)
def ws2812():
    T1 = 2
    T2 = 5
    T3 = 3
    label("bitloop")
    out(x, 1) .side(0) [T3 - 1]
    jmp(not_x, "do_zero") .side(1) [T1 - 1]
    jmp("bitloop") .side(1) [T2 - 1]
    label("do_zero")
    nop() .side(0) [T2 - 1]

# Create the StateMachine with the ws2812 program, outputting on Pin(19).
sm = StateMachine(0, ws2812, freq=8000000, sideset_base=Pin(LIGHT_PIN))
# Start the StateMachine, it will wait for data on its FIFO.
sm.active(1)

# Display a pattern on the LEDs via a color value.
ar = array.array("I", [0 for _ in range(LIGHT_NUM)])

for i in range(LIGHT_NUM):
    ar[i] = 0xffaa00
sm.put(ar,8)

  2. To run the script, click the thonny_run button or press F5. When you power up the Pico 4WD car, you will see 3 RGB boards lit up in cyan color.