The potentiometer in your box is a 10K potentiometer, meaning it can be set anywhere from 0 ohms to 10,000 ohms (resistance is measured in ohms). Now remove the light sensor parts from yesterday, leaving the LEDs and buzzer in place with the Pico on the main breadboard. Your circuit should look like this to start with: Copy it over to Thonny and give it a whirl. We find that if you sit perfectly still, then wave your hands around, you should be able to test the program without having to leave the room! # Imports

Once installed, select ‘Finish’ and then open the program. In Windows 10/11 you can select the Windows Start button and just type in ‘Thonny’. The program should open and look like the example below: These sensors are commonly used in home alarm systems - if your home has an alarm, have a look in the corners of the ceilings and you may see something similar. Now, get some rest and a good night’s sleep, for tomorrow we will continue the fun with day #2 (no spoilers here, and no peeking until the morning!). Note: You'll also spot ADC_VREF and AGND pins, but we're not going to go into those pins in this calendar as we don't strictly need to use those for our example - we'd rather not overcomplicate things whilst we're still learning. The CodeUses that delay variable to control how long the LEDs are left on and off to create a flashing sequence. This is one of the easier components to work with as we've included a custom pre-wired buzzer with male jumper wire ends. The holes in the middle are connected in vertical lanes, with each lane having 5 connected pins either side of the divider. The divider stops both sides connecting together. The Circuit

To make our if statement look for ' greater than or equal to', we use a >= operator, like this: if reading >= 40000 This leaves plenty of time for customers to receive their calendars in time for the 1st December start date.

Activity 3: Multiple Button Inputs with elif and else

This year we have a brand new blinky-themed Let it Glow Maker Advent Calendar alongside the original 12 Projects of Codemas Maker wiring diagrams make this perfect for anyone wanting to get started with the Raspberry Pi Pico, programming and electronics.

Both calendars include a Raspberry Pi® Pico H and assume no prior knowledge of coding or electronics - so they're great forFor your team - We think this will be a great gift for your teams of techies! Everything you need is included

So why do we add this? When we use a button, we're sending 3.3V to the GPIO pin to set it HIGH, however we need to make sure the pin is LOW in the first place or our code might not be able to detect the change and/or it might trigger itself randomly. Whilst there are more advanced ways of achieving this ( using lists for example which we'll cover in a future box), we’re going to keep things simple whilst we continue to learn MicroPython. You can of course be greedy and have both calendars, but there will be a little overlap between them (mostly the first few days as we introduce the Pico and some of the basics) FAQ The readings from the potentiometer are between 0 and 65535, and our buzzer duty (volume) uses the same range, so we can use the potentiometer readings to directly control the duty - handy!Argumentsare optional in functions. They allow you to pass information intoyour function, if needed. We pass the information to the function when we callit - that might be a bit confusing so let's jump to an example so you can see it working. Let's say we wanted to print " Not another function!" twenty times. Well, we could add twenty lines of print, or even run a counter adding +1 each time, but another ( nicer/shorter) way to do it is using range- and this is how it would look: for i in range(20): Hi the-pi-hut! We know it feels a little early to be talking about advent* calendars, however after the huge demand last year, The example below is purposely inefficient and uses a LOT of lines, mostly because each section of the jingle includes lines to turn the volume on then off as well as delays. Try this first, then we'll move on to a nicer way of doing things in the next activity. Our LEDs have two legs, one longer than the other, as they have a specific polarity - which means that electrical current can only flow in one direction (and if not, the LEDs can be damaged!).