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Raspberry Pi Pico Pinout Explorer

Run the Raspberry Pi Pico Pinout Explorer MicroSim fullscreen

About This MicroSim

A Pico has forty pins and the board itself labels almost none of them. A student holding one for the first time cannot tell a ground pin from a GPIO pin from the 3.3 volt supply -- and connecting the wrong pair is how kits get damaged.

This explorer puts the board on screen with every pin labelled and colour-coded by role. Click a pin and the panel below gives its number, its alternate functions, its voltage, and a line of MicroPython that would actually use it. The filter buttons narrow the board to one category at a time, which is the fast way to answer the question a student actually asks: "where do I put the black wire?"

How to Use

  • Click any pin to see its number, functions, voltage, and a MicroPython example.
  • Show All returns to the full board.
  • GPIO, Power, and I2C pins filter the board to one category, which makes the ground and 3.3 volt pins easy to find at a glance.

Lesson Plan

Bloom level: Understand (L2) -- identify

Learning objective: Given the Raspberry Pi Pico board, the learner identifies the function of each labelled pin -- power, ground, and GPIO -- and states which pins are safe to connect a component to.

Before the sim (5 min). Pass a real Pico around. Ask: "Which of these forty pins is ground?" Nobody can tell from the board alone. That is the problem this sim solves.

With the sim (10 min). Click Power first, so the group sees the eight or so pins that are not general purpose. Emphasise that these are the pins that cause damage when miswired. Then click GPIO and note how many are left -- there is no shortage, so there is never a reason to guess.

After the sim (15 min). Give each pair a component from a kit and ask them to name the exact pins they would use and why, before touching any hardware. Check their answers against the sim.

Check for understanding. Ask a student to name three ground pins by number. Being able to do that without looking at the board is the objective met, and it is the single most useful fact for avoiding a damaged kit.

Embedding This MicroSim

Paste this into any page of the book, adjusting the relative path to docs/sims/ for the page's depth:

<iframe src="../../sims/pico-pinout-explorer/main.html" width="100%" height="657" scrolling="no"></iframe>

Specification

The full specification below is extracted from Chapter 19: Raspberry Pi Pico, MicroPython, and the Moving Rainbow Kit.

Type: microsim
**sim-id:** pico-pinout-explorer<br/>
**Library:** p5.js<br/>
**Status:** Reused<br/>
**Source:** https://dmccreary.github.io/learning-micropython/sims/pico-pinout-explorer/<br/>
**Source Repo:** https://github.com/dmccreary/learning-micropython/tree/main/docs/sims/pico-pinout-explorer

Reused from the MicroSim catalog (WHAT match score 0.83). Learning objective: Given the Raspberry Pi Pico board, the learner identifies the function of each labeled pin — power, ground, and GPIO — by name and number (Remember).

References

Credits

This MicroSim is adapted from pico-pinout-explorer in the learning-micropython project by the same author (source). It is used here unchanged; the club context is supplied by the lesson plan above.