I have been plugging away with CircuitPython an the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and loving it. My project requires running a web server and matrix, calling out to the internet, all of which the Pico is doing well. But it requires soldering and is a bit messy, and separate power for the matrix and Pico is also messy.
I saw some Adafruit products and have run into the following problems Adafruit RGB Matrix Bonnet for Raspberry Pi - Using a Pi Zero getting Circuit Python running was a bit of an effort, but it appeard the native board modules were not on the Board anyway.
Adafruit Matrix Portal M4 - No where near enough memory, adafruit_datetime ran it out of memory before I even started running code, and I need time delta’s.
Adafruit Matrix Portal S3 - is retired? Has enough memory but the reason I am doing this is all the stuff I did a couple of years ago is now not available, and dont want to go there again.
Any thoughts as to what is the best appraoch here. Is the S3 actually available? It says Adafruit has retired it, but it also says the M4 is older than the S3. Should I just figure out how to power the pico off the matrix power???
How much memory are you chasing? I’ve recently been investigating running openCV on the Pico and was planning on testing out the Pimoroni Pico Plus. It should be pretty much the same as a regular Pico 2W, but it has about 16x more memory.
Soldering is only as messy as you make it. It is also a pretty much required skill if you are going to dabble into electronics any way seriously
soldering is also a lot more reliable than some other methods like using a breadboard for a more permanent installation. Depends on how long you expect anything to last before problems start to happen.
Typically the board modules aren’t included with the boards but can either be added via Pip or else downloaded from the official website. There’s usually a github link that you can download from.
As for the S3, I believe Adafruit have retired it, but we still have a couple in stock.
And I echo Robert’s point, soldering is far cleaner and easier than people give it credit for. Once you have embraced soldering you have a lot more options for working with electronics.
Yeah - OK, just need to do some soldering. I just saw the Adafruit boards and the fact they were using USB C and neatly didn’t have to have separate power was quite attractive. I bought one and didn’t realise how much memory my code was using - now I know!
But given you have to solder the pins for the pico anyway, my soldering is rapidly improving.
Thanks for the rapid feedback, really appreciate it.
I was actually the convenience of the Adafruit boards and not having to wire/solder and their usb-c. The Pico has more than enough for what I want - I think I am just going to do some soldering.
Just a side comment here, from what I was reading there is the Adafruit board that was using an ESP32 S3. While Adafruit’s board my be retired the ESP32 S3 still has many years before it goes EOL. So if that is a chip worth using, then there is always the path of self development (thus you are more incontrol).
