Such excitement when Raspberry Pi announced their new product, their Pico microcontroller. What's interesting is the it included simultaneous announcements from partners like Adafruit, Sparkfun... see https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-silicon-pico-now-on-sale/.

We ordered one from Pimoroni and PiHut with accessories. It's a race to see which one will reach us. Former was ordered via German site but we are not sure if it will be shipped from UK. If you are curious, PiHut's order gave us a tracking number, so they are pipped ahead. I'm also curious if we will be stung by customs if they are being shipped from UK.

I saw in #sbc channel on irishtechcommunity's Slack group that Easons has copies of the Hackspace with free Pico. So I headed out and picked up a copy (there were 4 copies in Eason's in Blanchardstown Shopping Centre).

BTW, you can download it as a free PDF if you want to read this month's Hackspace: https://hackspace.raspberrypi.org/issues/39

A few days later, Mick suggested we should play with Pico, so that's what we did last night. I was planning a whole unboxing and demo video. Will do that when our orders arrive from either Pimoroni/Pihut (or both). This is like a sneak preview.

You don't see it here in this pic, but we were trying to get the neopixels light up, and we did, but only the first few, we haven't done much more with it. I'll try and take lots of pics and document our tinkering with Pico and the rest of its accessories arrive.

P.S.: This post was in draft for a bit, and since I started this draft, the pico from Pimoroni arrived and we hope the PiHut one will arrive this week (probably tomorrow as it's still held in An Post in Dublin).

P.P.S.: Raspberry Pi had a recent live chat with Eben Upton on Youtube, here it is: