Video intro to CANPico

Now that the CANPico board is available for order online from SK Pang we thought it would be good to make a short video on getting started with it.

Useful links

• The firmware, reference manuals, schematics and Kicad design files can all be found on the YesWeCAN GitHub repo.
• How to install firmware on the Raspberry Pi Pico
• The Thonny IDE
• The Canis Labs open source can2 CAN protocol decoder for Sigrok-compatible logic analyzers
• The canpico.py Python examples file (The examples file can be written to the Pico’s file system using Thonny)

Tips for using Thonny

Thonny by default disables multiple copies of it running, but when using multiple CANPico boards to make a CAN bus it’s useful to be able to have multiple Thonny instances running, so go to Tools.. Options.. General and uncheck “Allow only single Thonny instance”. Then connect each instance to each board.

The CANPico MicroPython firmware creates two virtual serial ports over USB, the first of these is for REPL and that’s the port that each instance of Thonny needs to connect on. The second port is a general purpose serial port that can be used to communicate with the host (in fact, the CANPico MicroPython firmware build includes a MIN API to make it easy to do this).

The specific serial port names will depend on which order the boards register with the host’s USB drivers. They may stick with the same mappings, or it may vary each time the host is powered on. To help identify which board is which the example Python code in canpico.py contains a method called identify that will flash the LED of the board the Thonny window is connected to.