Have I “bricked” my pico

Support
1

I have been developing a script to read temperature from a ds18b20temperature sensor and display on a Pico display pack 2.0.

So I installed the pimoroni micropython build and started testing on my PI4.

Basically it reads temperature, prints it and writes to a file, every 1 minute for now.

Left it running for an hour and when I came back thonny displayed a message along the lines of acm0 not available, as if the pico had been disconnected.

Whatever I do thonny does not detect the PICO, restart thonny , reconnect the pico and a different cable.
It does not boot up into boot selector mode.

Similar results on my MAC book as well. Although I did not get it into boot selector mode but then it disconnects.

So, have I somehow filled the memory on the board and bricked it, or is there a possible fix.

I can’t find a similar error on the internet, they all seem to be cable related.

Also, I do not see how it can be an issue with the micropython version, but do not know what else to try.

Steve

2

It’s not supposed to be Brick able. I have had my code crash a Pico so thorny can’t connect. And a reset not fixing it because it just crashes again. So far though, I have been able to put it in Boot mode and then flash_nuke it and start over. Re flashing with a uf2 file doesn’t always remove the main.py, it just leaves it there, and then your hosed again.
Check out the resetting flash memory here, there is a link to the flash nuke uf2 file. Drag and drop this uf2 to your pico and it erases “everything”.
Pico-series Microcontrollers - Raspberry Pi Documentation

3

So I have connected a wire to the Run pin and on power up connected it twice to ground within 200 msecs.

on a windows PC this puts it into bootloader mode.

However when I try and copy a uf2 file to the pico an error message
" E:/ is n ot accessible

A device which does not exist is specified
"

4

Where did you see instructions to ground the Run pin twice? Holding down the Boot Select while plugging the USB Cable (and then releasing it) works for me on my Windows PC.

5

That has worked for me in the past, it has stopped doing it, we did a search in perplexity.ai and it came up with that as something to try.

6

Ok, fair enough. I had never heard of that method, so it had me wondering. Does it show up as RP2 when you do that?

7

It opens up in boot loader mode, then when I try and copy the uf2 it says drive not accessible

8

Ok, it sounds like it actually has gone into some kind of failure mode. What voltage does the ds18b20 send back to the Pico?

9

I had it connected to 3v

10

Ok, that’s what I was wondering. The Pico isn’t 5V friendly. If you haven’t had that Pico for very long give Pimoroni Tech Support a shout. They may fix you up with a replacement.
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