GeeekPiDeskPi PicoMate for Raspberry Pi Pico/Pico W, Learning Electronics and Programming Platform Based on Raspberry Pi Pico/Pico W, with 12 Detachable Modules

My son in law said it's great! Big Geek 🤓

Good sensors and great design of the PCB. Can test without wire jumpers then breakout sensors if needed.However the manual shows good examples but they are hard to read went they used a screen capture of dark mode. The photo looks much better than the actual book. The online version says you should cut&paste the sample code but each code sample is just the same dark image! The kit says it supports pico W and it does but the sample code for the LED demo doesn’t work as the GP pin is different.Links to required libraries aren’t links! Can’t use the RGB sensor without the library.This is not ready to be sold. Check all the first 10 reviews - free product.

I was surprised a solid kit from GeeekPi would be available through Vine so I jumped at the opportunity to get it. It is a near-perfect collection of sensors and peripherals that make a RPi Pico complete as a learning tool or hobbyist plaything. Please note that I show a kit with a Pico W inserted, but the kit does not include an actual Pico board of any kind.The kit comes with a battery case (3AA, not included) with a switch used to provide power. All the sensors and peripherals are connected via traces on the board. There are markings at the junctions for each indicating which Pi signals go to each sensor (e.g. GP14, GP15 for temp sensor). The various sensors, as you can see from the product pictures, are also detachable. The board itself is perforated to make this separation easier. Once the sensors are separated, a different means of connection is required and the kit provides several 4-line connectors to do this. Additionally the individual sensor boards have thru-hole openings to allow headers to be soldered to them. Also, the docking board has two rows of headers with a pair of pins for each signal available on the Pico. This is nice if you want to connect a scope to view what might be happening while you run a program.I looked on Amazon for a pair of Pico W boards to use but found the best deal at my local Microcenter. The Pico W is $5.99 there with no headers attached. I bought some headers and soldered them on myself to make these Pico boards easily insertable to the PicoMate board. One thing I wished that I had done is to put the headers in the PicoMate slots while I was soldering the connection to the Pico board. I didn't do this and ended up not having perfect right angles between the Pico and the headers, making it slightly harder to get the Pico inserted in the PicoMate.The included booklet has several exercises that you can go through using CircuitPython (MicroPython). The exercises are basic, but cover the majority of sensors as well as the display.Overall this is an excellent board with which to learn microcontroller-based programming and system integration.

The unit looks like a nice kit no soldering or assembly with a added RP Pico H. Good stops there.Every example in the manual and the DeskPi wiki is not right. They have spelling issues the one pictured tries to convert a tuple to an int.None sighted work out of the box.Instead of RP Micropython it uses Adafruit Circuit Python (7.1.X) if you care about that.Until deskpi goes through their wiki and corrects the examples just not worth buying.

This GeeekPi DeskPi PicoMate is a really nicely designed and versatile set of select components mounted on a circuit board, with an IC socket on board as well for plugging in a Raspberry Pi Pico or Pico W (newer version of the microcontroller with WiFi included on-board). The board is configured in such a way that the 11 select components are already interconnected with the PI and can be accessed by it - no wiring necessary! The components include: an RGB LED module, a buzzer, a digital PIR sensor, an RGB optical (light level) sensor, a temperature and humidity sensor, a 3-axis magnetometer, a six-axis gyroscope sensor, digital microphone, rotary encoder, an OLED display, and a simple push button.It's a great collection of useful components that can be easily used for prototyping, experimentation, learning about the Pi Pico or microcontrollers in general, and learning programming using the Python Language. The included components can be used as they are configured (meaning all connected together as part of the Breakout board), or if desired any individual components can be removed and used apart from the rest of the board. The each component is connected to the main board not only through electrical circuitry but also through tabs that hold them in place. Once they are removed, they can be connected back to the Pico breakout board by using the headers on each sub-board and the included connecting cables. Six of these cables are included in the kit for this purpose.Also included in the kit is a micro-USB to USB-A cable (which unfortunately didn't work for connecting the Pi to a PC) - it was either defective or intended to be for power carrying only (not data). But I had a "complete" cable at hand so I just swapped it out with the one included and was good to go. A 3-AA battery holder is also included so that once appropriately programmed with a desired application the Pi and associated components can operate without even being connected to a PC. A nicely printed instruction manual rounded out the package. The one in my kit was marked V1.0, and it shows, as there were a couple of typos therein. No big deal, though. It's nice to even include a full-color manual to get started with.Once the introductory information and overview from the manual is complete, it's probably best to move on to the online version of the manual found on the company's online site. I personally was eager to get started with the included code examples right away to test out some of the components. As other reviewers have already pointed out, this turned out to be a bit of a disappointment as there was no actual code text that could be copied and pasted into the MU IDE (integrated development environment). The code samples were only PICTURES of the code samples - the learner has to type the code in manually. I guess this is a good way to learn Python's syntax, but it's quite time-consuming and in many cases results in even more time debugging mis-types, missing or extra spaces, incorrect capitalization, etc.To add insult to injury, some of the components require the installation of utillity libraries that aren't part of the standard MicroPython build so they to be manually added. There appear to be links to where the libraries (and other information) can be found and downloaded, but these aren't real hyperlinks, but only underlined ordinary text - so clicking on them does nothing. In some case you can do an internet search using the library names and find the libraries, but in some cases they don't show up in a search. I guess I'll have to get more creative to find those. At any rate, if DeskPi wants to succeed in this business, they may want to have a look at their "learn" resources for this product and fix their "links" as well as provide actual text for the code examples. In the meantime, I sent an email request to DeskPi to find out if there is a repository containing the code somewhere accessible to owners of the PicoMate. Hopefully they will respond affirmatively and provide this information. If they do, I'll come back an update this review to five full stars.One of my development plans at work is to learn Python, and I hoped that this kit would help me more than it is. Nevertheless, it is a high-quality item, is very usable, and is MUCH better than plugging individual jumper wires into a breadboard to interact with a Pi. That's why I'm awarding four stars: for the hardware and for the concept. However, the learning resources really need to be fleshed out the way they ought to be with fake hyperlinks made active and actual code text provided.

If you're just getting into programming with microcontrollers and want something a little more sophisticated than the Blink an LED experiment this set is awesome! I can't believe how many cool things they managed to pack onto this one board. The central port for plugging in the raspberry pi is fantastic but also open enough where you could use a different board if you wanted to modify it a bit. All of the different components are described in the instructions and the instructions even have example code to get them all working right away. If you're really into tinkering and coding this is one of the best sets you could get yourself.

Fun kit to learn the basics. Might even end up with some very useful projects.