Taken from my book, Get Started with MicroPython on Raspberry Pi Pico: The Official Guide, the tutorial walks the reader through programming the Raspberry Pi Pico using MicroPython – starting with the physical computing equivalent of “hello, world,” lighting up an LED. No additional hardware is needed for this part: the Raspberry Pi Pico includes a surface-mount user-addressable LED at the top of the board.
The reader is then shown how solderless breadboards work, introduced to importing MicroPython libraries and handling delays, how external LEDs require resistors, how to read a button input, and finally how to put it al together into a simple circuit which can toggle the LED based on the user’s button presses.
The MagPi Issue 103 is available at all good supermarkets and newsagents, online with global delivery, or as a Creative Commons-licensed DRM-free no-cost PDF download on the official website.