Will These Pico Boards play nice together?

1

Hi There,
I have a RTC Module

A E-Paper 2.13 Module

And I’m awaiting delivery or a LORA Module

I plan to connect all of these to a Pico Omnibus board however it seems that the LORA module and the RTC both try to use GPIO20.
Will these boards happily share GPIO20 or will I need to reconfigure something or will they simply not work together. I can leave the RTC out of my project but it would have been nice if it could log the time of day.

Thanks
David

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2

Hi David,

Out of the box, there will be some conflicts, namely the main SPI pins GP11 and 12.

What library were you planning on using? In most, you can redefine pins (but you’ll have to shift the connections with jumper wirers (or some have onboard solder jumpers).

3

Hi Liam,
I haven’t looked into librarys yet. I’m finding micro python easier than c/c++
If that narrowest the field any. I’m a programmer not an electronics expert so I can easily change my programmer “hat” and rekindle my C skills.
If there are going to be conflicts I’ll just start off with the pico hooked straight to the lora module and worry about the screen and RTC down the track.

Will the battery on the lora module also power the pico?
Will the battery charge from the USB port?

For those who are wondering what I’m working on it’s a front gate “Door Bell” style of thing. My front gate is around 300m from the house and in a clear line of site so from what I read lora should be able to do this no problem. I’ll trigger the sound in the house with a micro switch on the gate when someone opens it.

Thanks
David

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4

Hi David,

Sounds like a great application for a simple LoRa device!

Yes to both.

It looks like the main pin assignment conflict is between the LoRa module and the display. The RTC module should work alongside either as it uses different pins.

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5

Hi David,

perhaps this display might work a little better: Pico Inky Pack | Pimoroni PIM634 | Core Electronics Australia

It looks like it doesn’t conflict on the SPI (based on this https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0174/1800/files/inky_pack_schematic.pdf?v=1658312725)

It looks like it’s only GP20 that conflicts

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6

@Doug Just the one show stopper then :slight_smile:
The screen is not essential.
One of my pico’s is a wifi model. I just looked up a way to create a very basic web server on it. I can put my non wifi pico down at the gate and send messages via lora to the pico w in my house. Perhaps the pico w can get the time of day from the network and the RTC can go down at the gate.
The pico w can log the gate open events and output the details to html for the web server to publish. There will be a small buzzer to indicate when the gate is opened and the details written to a file to review in a browser.
I hope to also log things like battery level or what ever else I can think of.
I’ll post again as this project takes shape.
I’ll need to also figure out a solar panel to charge the battery at the gate or come up with a battery that will last for a ridiculous amount of time. :cowboy_hat_face:

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