Quick Prototyping with Seeed’s Grove Shield for Raspberry Pi Pico

There has been a lot of discussion about the new Raspberry Pi Pico, as it comes with a powerful RP2040 chip and costs just $4 USD. Hence, Pico is an ideal choice for beginners due to its variety of applications at a very low cost. So, the applications have to be first prototyped before making permanent connections. As any mistake while making a connection can cost us the whole device.

Grove Shield for Pi Pico v1.0 supports quick prototyping before building permanent applications with Raspberry Pi Pico. The shield comes as the base on which the Pico board is assembled for increasing the connectivity and scope of usage of the Raspberry Pi Pico board, The Grove Shield for Pi Pico is a “plug-and-play” kind of shield which supports many types of Grove Connectors. This includes I2C, UART, digital and analog ports.

Key Features of Grove Shield for Pi Pico

• Quick Prototyping with easy debugging function with plug and play feature for grove connectors and SWD pins.
• Dynamic connectivity with many peripherals. This includes 2 × I2C, 2 × UART, 3 × Digital, 3 ×Analog, SPI, and SWD Debug interface.
• No need for soldering as it has all pin led out. The plug-and-play Grove connectors support multiple data protocols, including IIC, UART, and analog or digital.

Demonstration of Use Cases

The Grove Shield is just a component to explore the endless possibilities and applications that could be built using Raspberry Pi Pico. Thus there is a need for sensor components for prototyping specific use cases. If the prototype use case works properly, then an end-to-end product can be built from the same. Hence, the Grove Shield comes as a single board for $3.90 as well as for $44 which is a development kit that comes with temperature sensors, relays, LEDs, buttons, and an LCD screen all using the Grove connector standard.

The article on Tom’s Hardware has unveiled the overall review of the Grove Shield along with its use cases with the development kit. However, there is also an official youtube video by Seeed Studio demonstrating all the applications. These can be designed using this development starter kit with various sensors that are compatible with Grove connectors. Some of these include ‘Blinky’ using LED and button, temperature and humidity monitoring on OLED display, and rotary angle switch to control the buzzer.

The Grove Shield for Pi Pico thus opens up many options for building various use cases and applications. It allows quick prototyping of projects without the need for soldering and using jumping wires. The Grove Shield is available for $3.9 USD on Seeed Studio’s website. For more information visit the official product page. Images and technical specifications have also been taken from the product page.

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