Pico hardware bench

GPIO — a drawing of the Pico’s header; click a pin to drive it high or low, read it with a pull-up or pull-down, or start PWM (frequency and duty). Read every pin reads all levels without changing any pin’s mode. The page warns which pins share a PWM slice (and so a frequency).

I²C — pick SDA and SCL by clicking pins (the hardware block is worked out from the pins, or tick software I²C for any pair), scan, and see an address map with likely parts from the I²C address finder's list. Read and write registers (8- or 16-bit register addresses, so EEPROMs work) and dump all 256 registers. Plan this bus in the I²C address finder opens that tool with the parts you chose for each address.

SPI — choose the four pins, the mode and the clock; Read JEDEC ID sends 9Fh and decodes the manufacturer, the part (for about 70 common W25Q, MX25, GD25, IS25, AT25, SST26 and similar parts) and the capacity, and explains an all-FF or all-00 answer. Transfer sends any bytes and shows what came back.

UART — a second UART on the pins you choose, bridged to a terminal on the page (text or hex, your choice of line ending). Bytes travel to the board as hex lines, so a 0x03 in your data can’t interrupt the REPL.

1-Wire — search the bus for ROMs (family, serial and CRC check) and read every DS18B20, DS18S20, DS1822 or MAX31850 at once, optionally every 2.5 seconds.

ADC — plot GP26–28 and the internal temperature sensor live at 10–2000 samples per second, and download the samples as CSV.

PS/2 — sniff a keyboard’s scan codes on two pins. On a Pico a PIO state machine samples DATA on every falling CLOCK edge, so no frame is lost; the pin-interrupt mode also works on an ESP32. Each byte is checked (start, odd parity, stop), decoded from scan code set 2, and turned into typed text (US layout). PS/2 is a 5 V bus — use a level shifter.

Logic capture — sample 1, 2, 4 or 8 consecutive pins at up to 25 MHz with a PIO program (with an optional rising- or falling-edge trigger) into a buffer of up to 64 KB, moved by DMA on MicroPython 1.22 and later. The capture comes back over USB, is drawn on the page, and Open in logic analyser opens it in the logic analyser with the channels named after the pins the other tabs use (SDA, SCL, SCK, TX…), so its I²C, SPI and UART decoders set themselves up. Download raw .bin saves one byte per sample, which the analyser also opens.

Console — run your own Python and watch the output stream; Stop sends Ctrl-C.