Hi, what do you mean with “just plug it in”?
I thought this question was about the different layout of the GPIO pins of the full raspberry PI(zero) and the Raspberry PI Pico.
Because the “unicorn hat mini” pin layout is the same as the full Raspberry PI’s (zero) pin layout, I can attach the “unicorn hat mini” straight on that.
But now I want to attach the “unicorn hat mini” to a raspberry pi PICO, and the two rows of pins of the raspberry pi PICO are further apart than the rows of pins of the full raspberry pi (zero) so the “unicorn hat mini” doesn’t fit.
Hi michelvd
My original post (back in Feb '21) was about using the Pico Unicorn Pack display with the Pi-Pico (which I got working with the code snippets I posted)…
Other users posted about other displays, but I have not used the HAT display version which fits on the 40 pin GPIO pins (i.e. not the Pico) so unfortunately I am unable to help.
Ah, thanks very much for the clarification. I will continue my search then. Thanks for the quick reply.
Pimoroni don’t publish much on circuit diagrams etc. But they so put supporting code on Github for most of their products. You might need to go through the code to find out more on “How things Work” and “Pin Numbers” etc. but often the core drivers are in C/C++ with a ‘wrapper’ to interface to Python/MicroPython (something I have not needed to look at in any detail)
Ok, totally botched up that reply, sorry about that. Must have had a brain fart or something that day?
To connect a Pi Hat or pHat to a Pico you need to look up the pinout for the Phat.
Unicorn HAT Mini at Raspberry Pi GPIO Pinout
Then setup the pins on the Pico for those functions.
Raspberry Pi Pico GPIO Pinout
Then jumper from one device to the other matching the pin functions.
That’s the hardware part. Then you have to sort out the software side. That can be easy or hard depending on what the pHat is and does. In this case SPI is used. I’m honestly not sure how I would tackle that. You’d need to look at the equivalent Pico version and how it does its thing.
The “Pico Version” with the Unicorn Pack uses the PIO state machines to drive the control lines and data flow.
But the Pico does have SPI so maybe (guessing) the R-Pi GPIO drivers are ‘easier’ to port to the Pico.
If it was an LCD display it would be relatively simple. Setting up the correct SPI pins shouldn’t be too hard. I do it all the time with the Breakout Garden LCD’s, I’ve even run dual LCD’s on a Pico.
Sending those custom coded signals over SPI that the Pi Unicorn Hat wants will be tricky though. How good are your coding skills?