Pimoroni Pico Explorer Base

Transform your Raspberry Pi Pico into a electronic adventure playground packed with physical computing goodies including an LCD screen, motor drivers, a mini breadboard, and much more!

Pico Explorer lets you play with circuits, build science experiments, prototype tiny robots and inventions and, most importantly, Figure Out How It All Works.

Pimoroni has incorporated tinkering essentials like a mini breadboard, motor drivers, ADC inputs, a built in speaker, general purpose inputs/outputs, switches, and two Breakout Garden slots so you can add on a couple of our wide range of Pimoroni breakouts.

They've also managed to fit in a vibrant 240x240 IPS LCD screen with four tactile buttons so you can easily monitor and control what your project is doing. It's all wrapped up in a nice, sturdy baseboard with a pleasingly compact footprint which won't involve nearly as many trailing wires as if you were experimenting with a traditional breadboard setup. Boo wires, yay Pico Explorer!

Their comprehensive MicroPython and C++ libraries will let you control every aspect of the board like a digital maestro. It's great for beginners, advanced users, and people who awkwardly sit somewhere in the middle and cannot be placed into a simple demographic bucket - we know who you are.

Pimoroni has really crammed all the functionality we could into this board - quite a few of us were lucky enough to have all-in-one electronic circuit kits when we were small and so we jumped at the chance to put together a bang up-to-date version.

A Raspberry Pi Pico is not included - click here if you'd like to buy one!

Features

• Pico Explorer Base
• Piezo Speaker
• 1.54" IPS LCD Screen (240 x 240)
• Four User-Controllable Switches
• Two Half-Bridge Motor Drivers (with over current indicator LED)
• Easy Access GPIO and ADC Pin Headers
• Two Breakout Garden I2C Sockets
• Mini Breadboard
• Rubber Feet
• Compatible with Raspberry Pi Pico.
• No soldering required (as long as your Pico has header pins attached).
• Dimensions: approx 117mm x 63mm x 20mm (L x W x H, assembled)
• Pinout
• Programmable with C/C++ and MicroPython

Getting started

The landing area on Pico Explorer Base will show you which way round to plug in your Pico - just match up the USB port with the markings on the board.

The most straightforward way of getting started programming the Pico add-ons is by downloading and copying the custom MicroPython image to your Pico, it includes all the libraries you'll need!

You can find our C/C++ and MicroPython libraries and code examples here.

About Raspberry Pi Pico

Raspberry Pi Pico is a flexible, low cost microcontroller development board from the folks at Raspberry Pi, based on their very own chip - the RP2040. It's easily programmable over USB with C/C++ or MicroPython, and ideal for using in all sorts of physical computing projects, devices and inventions - Pimoroni are so excited to see what you make with it!

Pimoroni has called their Pico-sized add-ons packs, as they're designed to attach to the back of your Pico as if it were wearing a very stylish backpack (or a miniature jet pack, if you prefer). They've also got Pico bases (larger add-on boards with a space to mount your Pico on top) and some other boards that let you do interesting hackerly things like using multiple packs at once - click here to view them all!

Your Pico will need to have male headers soldered to it (with the pins pointing downwards) to attach to the add-on boards.