Powering multiple acessories on Raspberry Pico

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ER17
 
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Powering multiple acessories on Raspberry Pico

Post by ER17 »

Hello,

I have 1 servo, 1 sensor and 1 OLED display I wish to connect to a Raspberry Pi Pico.

What I learnt so far is that I can get 5V power supply for the servo from the VBUS pin and connect the servo ground wire to the regular RPi Pico GND pins
Then there is the 3V3(OUT) pin that I can power the OLED display with.

But now I need one more (5v or 3.3v) for power supply to the sensor.
What is the most practical, easiest way to do this without using external power supply accessories?

Can I use some technique using PWM or PCM for this? GPIO pins? Is there some example circuitpython code to show how to do it?

Thanks,
ED

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adafruit_support_mike
 
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Re: Powering multiple acessories on Raspberry Pico

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

You can connect mulitple devices to the Pico's 3V pin, as long as the total current is less than 300mA.
ER17 wrote:Can I use some technique using PWM or PCM for this?
Technically a step-down (buck) voltage converter is PWM with a really strong low-pass filter at the output. You can do the same with a microcontroller's GPIO pins, but only for loads of a milliamp or two and voltages lower than 3V. It's almost certainly not what you want for an external sensor.

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ER17
 
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Re: Powering multiple acessories on Raspberry Pico

Post by ER17 »

Hi Mike,

Thank you. The easiest way to do this is with soldering the 2 wires to the one pin, or are there other simpler ways?

Thanks
ED

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adafruit_support_mike
 
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Re: Powering multiple acessories on Raspberry Pico

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

There are lots of options but the most convenient is usually to solder one wire to the Pico, one wire to each of the boards you want to use, and connect them at the free ends. You can make the connections with terminals, cold splices, soldering to a piece of copper tape, or another piece of wire:

https://www.adafruit.com/product/874
https://www.adafruit.com/product/1074
https://www.adafruit.com/product/1495
https://www.adafruit.com/product/1494
https://www.adafruit.com/product/1128

That method gives you a lot of freedom to move the boards relative to each other, and most important, to disconnect one board without messing up any of the other connections.

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