Educational Butterflies and Raspberry Pi’s RP2040 

In this week’s Community ProjeX, Eamon catches up with STEM educator and embedded engineer Alexandra Covor, who we first met at Maker Faire Rome 2023 and discussed a few of her builds based on Raspberry Pi’s RP2040 microcontroller 

This segment continues our discussion about PicoFlutter, a butterfly-shaped wearable that Alexandra designed to encourage girls to engage with the world of electronics and embedded programming. 

As Alexandra explains, the Raspberry Pi Pico board reference design was the starting point for this project, before she added 64 ultra-compact RGB LEDs to serve as a visual indicator of successful programming for educational settings. It also makes the wearable very eye-catching. 

Eamon and Alexandra continue by discussing several other aspects of embedded design and Alexandra’s experiences working in this field. These topics include: 

• The complexities of multiplexing 
• Code execution speed in CircuitPython and MicroPython 

• How Alexandra aims to improve future versions of the PicoFlutter board 
• PCB design and manufacturing 
• Why the Raspberry Pi Pico is a great educational tool 
• Renesas boards and programming with C for RTOS 
• MicroPython vs C++ 
• The freedom of hobby projects versus customer projects 

Enjoy this discussion and learn more about Alexandra’s projects on her website pikacircuits.com. 

If you’ve got an interesting project or topic of discussion that you wish to share with the ipXchange community, reach out as we’d love to chat with you for another Community ProjeX. 

Keep designing! 

Enjoyed this video? Check out our original chat with Alexandra here: 

#MFR2023 – Beautiful RP2040 builds to encourage girls into STEM!