Pimoroni Pico Explorer issue with button A and Breakouts

Not sure if I have a faulty board but was wondering if anyone else has experienced the following issues:

  • Cannot detect input on button A, other buttons work fine
  • Cannot detect devise on either breakout 1 or 2. I connected a HC-SR04P and scanned for the devices but it appears nothing is detected.

I am wondering if there is a way for me to detect if a button and or the breakout connectors are faulty.

The breakout ports are for I2C breakout boards such as BME680 sensor. Unfortunately no drivers modules in MicroPython at the moment.

The distance sensor is not I2C.

The following checks the buttons on Explorer:

# A complete example for using the buttons

# Import a module which will let us wait for a few seconds
import time

#Standard boilerplate code for using the Display Pack
import picoexplorer as display   
width = display.get_width()
height = display.get_height()
display_buffer = bytearray(width * height * 2)
display.init(display_buffer)

# And now, lets check each button one-by-one for presses, and print a message if it is pressed

while True:                                 # Continuously loop through this code to check for button presses
    if display.is_pressed(0):               # Check if the A button is pressed (this is button 0 in the software)
        print("Button A is pressed!")           # If button A is pressed, print a message saying so!
    elif display.is_pressed(1):             # Otherwise, check if the B button is pressed (button 1 in the software)
        print("Button B is pressed!")           # If button B is pressed, print a message saying so!
    elif display.is_pressed(2):             # Otherwise, check if the X button is pressed (button 2 in the software)
        print("Button X is pressed!")           # If button X is pressed, print a message saying so!
    elif display.is_pressed(3):             # Otherwise, check if the Y button is pressed (button 3 in the software)
        print("Button Y is pressed!")           # If button Y is pressed, print a message saying so!
    else:                                   # If none of the buttons are pressed..
        print("No buttons are pressed...")      # Print a message saying that no buttons are pressed
    time.sleep(0.2)                         # Wait a short time so that the messages don't scroll p

Interestingly I have tested this with 2 Pico’s. One has a captain resetti button soldered on and A doesnt work. The one without the button works fine and detects A input. So strange.

Are you sure you have soldered the Captain Resetti to the correct pins? Although, looking at the pin-outs for both, it would have to be very wrong to affect the A button.

I’ve now daisy-chained a Pico Omnibus to a Pico Explorer so I can use the display and reset without having to do any soldering.

Yeah I believe so. The button works and I can see it’s on GND, GP22 and RUN.

Going to try and do some more tinkering later to see if any of my soldering is off on the board.

Darn it. I read This breakout is fully compatible with Pimoroni’s breakout garden and assumed it be ok. I am new to all this, should have done some extra reading.

Is that the Sparkfun HC-SR04P sold by Pimoroni? It doesn’t have the Breakout Garden-style connectors, but electrically it uses I2C which is what most of the BG connectors do. You’d either need to wire it manually or use an adapter like this.

No, unfortunately it was this one that I bought Ultrasonic Distance Sensor Breakout – Pimoroni

Connected it all back up this morning and now I cant get the screen to work. I can see its backlit, not no amount of code will render anything. Button presses are being recognised but that’s about it. Tried flashing both picos, but didn’t help. Really a strange one. Iv run the demo.py as a test in the pico repository and the motors work fine just nothing on the screen anymore.

Did some more testing at lunch. I checked all the GPIO pins on both picos and I can get a connection to light up an LED, so I believe the soldering on the pico’s is fine. I am wondering if I have a damaged board maybe. I have contacted CPC Farnell about getting a replacement.