BEAPER Pico – the all-in-one beginner Raspberry Pi Pico circuit

BEAPER (Beginner Electronics And Programming Educational Robot) Pico harnesses the power of the inexpensive and accessible Raspberry Pi Pico family to help you learn or teach microcontroller programming. It’s designed to take you from learning how to program simple input and output circuits all the way to creating robots and advanced IoT devices using the beginner-friendly MicroPython language!

BEAPER Pico hardware

BEAPER Pico is a modular, easy to assemble through-hole circuit that anyone can use to understand simple circuits and start learning beginner programming.

BEAPER Pico has all of the circuitry that beginners need to get started on-board, plus loads of features and expansion capabilities to challenge new learners as they progress and develop their programming skills!

Labelled photo of BEAPER Pico

Download the BEAPER Pico schematic.

BEAPER Pico assembly instructions.

Find all of the BEAPER Pico parts.

Programming BEAPER Pico

Start with the Thonny IDE, since it’s used in most beginner Raspberry Pi Pico tutorials.

Before programming your Raspberry Pi Pico for the first time, you’ll need to download and install the latest version of MicroPython. It’s easy to do by following the instructions in the MicroPython section of the Raspberry Pi Pico documentation.

BEAPER Pico Learning Activities

BEAPER resources and learning activities are available in our BEAPER Pico GitHub repository, with more coming soon.

Introductory learning activities:

  1. Input and output starter program

  2. Learning more about variables and constants

  3. Repeating actions using loops

  4. Creating and using functions

  5. Analog input and serial output

BEAPER Pico demo programs:

  1. BEAPER Pico I/O Test

  2. TFT Bar Graph display

Raspberry Pi is a trademark of Raspberry Pi Ltd.