work as if you live in the early days of a better nation
Nothing particularly new or innovative here, but if you’re making simple Raspberry Pi Pico circuits and need to explain them to folks, this little Fritzing template might help. It’s mashed up from:
Since both of these components are from the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Getting Started documentation, it’s supplied under the same licence.
This needs work, but I made this keypad part for Fritzing:
Part file (zipped): Generic_4x4_Keypad.zip
You’ll see these parts described as variations on “4×4 Matrix 16 Keypad Keyboard Module 16 Button†on ebay. They’re very simple: if you press a button (say S7), the row pins (R1-4; R2 for S7) and the column pins (C1-C4; C3 for S7) are connected. So pins R2 and C3 are connected when S7 is pressed. You can use the Arduino Keypad library to talk to these, but do remember they use up 8 I/O pins.
It’s not internally routed in Fritzing, and you likely won’t be able to use it for any kind of schematic work, but who uses Fritzing for anything other than pretty pictures?
For work, I blogged about Verbal Machines‘ Hand Clap Sensor VM-CLAP1 (“Clap on ðŸ‘ðŸ‘, Clap off ðŸ‘👠– Elmwood Electronicsâ€). I’ve made a preliminary part for Fritzing for the board: VM-CLAP1 Clap Sensor for Fritzing.zip
It should work in Breadboard and Schematic mode, but absolutely doesn’t work in PCB mode. This shouldn’t be a problem, as it’s only available as a standalone board. Fritzing doesn’t have any way to create new parts from scratch any more, so I had to base it on a somewhat similar-looking board, the SparkFun Electret Microphone Breakout.
I’m looking forward to see what I can do with gpiozero and the clap sensor.