October has had a theme, and I only spotted it when I lined the videos up. Everything I’ve built this month is about knowing when to wake up and when to go back to sleep. A Halloween skull that gets bored and dozes off. A Pico 2 W that spends most of its life in dormant mode. An IoT protocol choice that decides how long a battery lasts.
So that’s the theme for this month’s livestream, on Sunday 25 October at 2pm GMT. The clocks go back that morning (in UK), so you’ve got an extra hour to get the kettle on. Here’s what’s been happening.
🗞️ Pico News
A Raspberry Pi Pico Halloween. Raspberry Pi have rounded up their favourite spooky Pico builds: LED pumpkin eyes, a skull bottle on Pimoroni’s Plasma 2350 W, an ultrasonic skeleton, and a portrait whose eyes follow you round the room. Almost all of them sense people with ultrasound or a PIR sensor, which makes a nice contrast with this year’s skull. More on that below. Read the round-up
DSPi turns a Pico into a sound card. Weeb Labs have released open-source firmware that makes an RP2040 or RP2350 into a USB audio device with parametric EQ, crossovers and room correction. What I love is the side-by-side: the RP2040 version does it all in fixed-point maths with hand-tuned assembly, while the RP2350 uses its hardware floating point and gets 110 EQ bands to the RP2040’s 70. A great example of what the extra silicon buys you. Read more on CNX Software
Romu: an RP2354A the size of a fingernail. Bitmerse are crowdfunding a 15.5 × 12 mm board that plugs straight into a USB port. No GPIO, just a touch button and an RGB LED, aimed at security keys, MIDI controllers and macro pads. The RP2354’s flash inside the package is what makes something this small possible. Would you back it? Read more
🛠️ Projects on the Bench
The skull that watches you. This year’s Halloween build became a three-part series. An empty plastic skull from the supermarket turns to follow you round the room, with eyes that go from green to red as you get closer. There’s no camera and no PIR inside: it’s a 24 GHz radar that sees straight through the plastic and tracks up to three people. Then it gets bored after 30 seconds and falls asleep.
ThingsBoard: HTTP vs MQTT for low power. Which protocol lets a battery-powered sensor sleep the longest? I put both side by side on a Pico 2 W. Watch the video
Pico 2 W down to 3.5mA. The new low-power library in Pico SDK 2.3.0 let me take a Pico 2 W from 38mA on WiFi down to 3.5mA in dormant mode, measured live at every step. Then two SDK bugs crashed my WiFi cycle, so the video shows both workarounds too. Channel members have it already; it goes public on 29 October.
Work in progress: PSRAM, revisited. It turns out I was running PSRAM wrong in my first RP2350 video: the bus was still in single-bit SPI mode. With the SDK’s PSRAM library and the right system clock, it’s 5.3 times faster. The full video is coming soon.
🤖 A New Tool: Claude
Some of you have asked how I’m keeping up with a weekly schedule. Part of the answer is Claude. I’ve built a knowledge base from my video transcripts, my Udemy courses and a couple of recorded interviews, and Claude works from that to draft scripts, blog posts, slides and social posts in my voice. It also wrote the Python that publishes them to the blog, LinkedIn and Instagram. I still review and edit everything, and the soldering is still all mine. I’ll talk about it in more detail on Sunday’s livestream.
📍 Breaking Breadboards, Wednesday 28 October
I’m presenting the skull live at Breaking Breadboards in Brighton: “This Skull Watches You, and There’s No Camera Inside”. It’s at Freedom Works on Black Lion Street, from 6:30pm, with pizza, talks from Ben Snipe (Patents for Makers) and Tudor Jenkins, and a live demo where the skull will be watching the whole room. Can’t make it to Brighton? There’s a livestream for everyone who signs up. Sign up on Meetup
📺 YouTube Updates
Livestream: Sunday 25 October, 2pm GMT. Pico news, the skull live on camera, the new tool, and your questions
Weekly videos are back, every Thursday at 2pm
- Channel members get every video the day I upload it. They watched the whole skull trilogy weeks before it went public. If you’d like early access, and to help get the droids to Open Sauce, join here.
That’s October. Thank you for reading, watching and building along. What should I build for Christmas? Reply or leave a comment and tell me. I read every one.
Keep tinkering,
Jon