Hi
With Pico / Enviro+ / PMS5003 the time when working on battery is always something like 21.01.01;00:10. How to add a real time clock to this setup? It needs to work in high temperatures, outdoor, under a roofed area.
Also Pico has only 2MB flash memory. How to add an SD card, along with the clock, to this setup?
Thanks so much for any input on this!
Anna
I’ve added one of these too several of my Pi Pico setups. Just set it and forget it. It works via i2c.
RV3028 Real-Time Clock (RTC) Breakout (pimoroni.com)
I have zero experience with using a card reader on a Pico.
For an SD-card you can use any of the available breakouts. They all use SPI and you will find suitable libraries, sample code and tutorials all over the net. The libraries don’t depend on the specific breakout, because that is just a mechanical part.
I really like these: Adafruit microSD Card BFF Add-On for QT Py and Xiao. They are small and cheap and well built. You don’t have to use them with any of these MCUs (qt-py or xiao), they just work with every device (as long as you have SPI). But I also used other SD-card breakouts I picked up somewhere else.
Another options are displays. If you want to add a display to your setup: many displays have an additional SD-card slot. I very seldom use these, but they should work the same.
Thank you. I don’t think I have SPI available. On top of Pico there is the Enviro+. From what I gathered I have I2C and I have to connect both - RTC and SD card - to it somehow.
Also I am a newbie, I don’t understand which ports I have available and what I can connect to them. I would not know which cables to use or other additional components. So I am looking for someone who knows for sure how to put it together.
No way to use the SD-card with I2C. What enviro+ product do you have exactly?
I have this one: Pico Enviro+ Pack.
Looking at the schematic, I must admit that you have no chance. You could use the Pico Omnibus to gain access to the pins (SPI and two free pins), but Pimoroni made a very bad hardware-design decision to misuse the SPI-RX pin for something else.
What I would do: use the network to get your sensor-data out of the device. The internal flash is not only size-limited, but also not ideal for a lot of writes.
Ok thank you for the honesty! It hurts but what to do.