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 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.

Pimoroni 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!

Pimoroni's 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 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.

Raspberry Pi Pico and breadboardable components like LEDs, jumper wires and extra buttons are not included

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

Features

• Pico Explorer Base
• Piezo speaker
• 1.54" IPS LCD screen (240 x 240)
• Four user-controllable switches
• Two H-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/Pico W.
• 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)
• C/C++ and MicroPython libraries
• Schematic

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 easiest way to get started is by downloading and copying Pimoroni's custom MicroPython uf2 to your Pico, it includes all the libraries you'll need to use our add-ons. The beginner friendly tutorial linked below will show you how to get to grips with pirate-brand MicroPython.

• Getting Started with Raspberry Pi Pico
• MicroPython examples
• MicroPython function reference
• PicoGraphics function reference
• C++ example

Pinout

Video