Access the full workshop here: https://core-electronics.com.au/courses/raspberry-pi-pico-workshop/

Let's take a deeper look at our Pico, but first have a little walkthrough of the board itself. You don't need to remember everything in this video off by heart, we're just trying to build some familiarity here.

Starting off we have the most important part right here in the middle, the microprocessor. This is the brain of the board and is where all the number crunching happens. And the Pico is quite a fast board, it can run hundreds of millions of lines of code a second, which means that the Pico seems like it can react and perform calculations instantly.

At the top here we have the micro USB port, which is what we'll be using to plug the Pico into our computer to program it. Next to it, if you look here closely, we have a tiny little LED light, which we can control with code. We will be doing so very shortly. Then we have the boot select here, and of course, on the wireless variants of the Pico, we have this large silver wireless chip here.

Now this is the most important part of the board, the pins on the side. These are what we will be plugging our external hardware like motors and sensors into, and you need to ensure that you plug them into the right pins or you might damage your Pico or the hardware you are plugging into it.

Now there is something that catches a lot of beginners off guard, and that is there are two numbering systems for the pins of the Pico. The first is the physical pin numbering. There are 40 pins on the Pico, and each one of them has a number, which you can see labelled on the top here. Forget about these numbers. We will not be using them in this course, and we will never refer to that numbering system from now on. We will instead use the GPIO numbers. These will be labelled as either GP or GPIO, and you can see that numbering system on the bottom of the board. This is the numbering system that we will be using for this course, and it is the numbering system that you will most commonly encounter.

If you can't see your pins on the bottom of your Pico because you've got one of these headers in the way, don't worry because there are plenty of diagrams of the pins available. We have one linked on the course page on our website, or you can find one with a quick Google search of something like Pico pins. Or if you bought a Pico from us, there's a good chance you'll have one of these cards floating around. It's just a really handy reference sheet. Here is a Pico pinout diagram.

Just for practice, if I said connect a wire to GPIO4, it means to connect that wire to the pin labelled GP4, not pin 4. Those are very, very different pins. If I said connect a wire to pin 10, you would connect it to the pin labelled GP10. If I said pin 16, I mean connect it to GP16, and so on. Just make sure that your Pico is also orientated in the same way that the diagram is with the micro USB at the top here.

There are also some other important pins that we will be using. You don't need to know what they do right now, just how to find them. The first are these ground pins. They are spread out across the board. You can find them on the diagram. Or if you look closely at the copper pads of the pins, most of them are round, but the ground ones are more of a square shape. The other pins we will need to find are the 3.3 volt pin, which is the one labelled here, as well as the VBUS pin at the top here. These are the pins that we will be using to power things that we plug into the Pico.

Don't worry about memorizing all the pins off by heart, though. You can always come back and check on the diagram when you need to.