“Good little gubbins. Very neatly and sturdily put together. The little display screen is excellent. A more comprehensive documentation of the version of micropython would be a welcome improvement.”
“I have never bought anything like this before so it was a bit of a gamble. I hoped it would help me get started with my Pico. However, I'm no expert so I actually found it quite tricky to get up and running. Maybe I should have got familiar with the Pico first and then purchased the board at a later date. One thing I will say, the team at Pimoroni are very active at updating their code and documentation. The build quality of the base is top-notch.”
“I bought this to help me experiment with a few design ideas based around the Pi Pico. For that purpose it's ideal. Having the display on board is particularly helpful.”
“This board is a great piece of kit and allows the users to quickly get to grips with the new Pico micro controller and start using MicroPython. Build quality is superb and the screen is pixel packed, bright, colourful and fast. The small bread board has enough room for three potentiometers and an RBG LED. It is plenty big enough for initial experiments in physical computing. The addition of motor drivers is an added bonus.
I was mainly attracted by the screen. The 240 x 240 space, with square pixels providing true circles rather than ellipses, has plenty of room hone your graphical skills. The character set provided has on lower case letters, which came as a surprise. The small piezo speaker provides rather quiet tones.
Few screen commands are provided so you will need to write your own code for lines, graphs and hollow circles and rectangles. Such routines are now appearing on the excellent Pimoroni forum, if you need some help. Better documentation would have been helpful.
I’ve already got Conway’s Game of life running with a dish of 48 x 48 cells, can plot graphs, dynamically update bar graphs and scroll strings of characters along a sine curve. This is great fun.
My only disappointment is that there is currently no support for the two I2C breakout sockets. I hope that support in the form of MicroPython drivers appear soon or we will need to switch to CircuitPython to make use of them.
I give this base 4.5 stars at the moment but this will rise to 5 once I can use a BME280 sensor in Breakout 1.”
