The Raspberry Pi Pico has seen real success with it becoming a mainstay in microcontroller projects. It’s easy to see why: a large community of users sharing excellent projects, affordability and decent specifications. Increasingly it’s common to see the Pico being built into complex devices, often requiring a display of some kind. The Pico Display Base Board makes it trivial to add a TFT screen to a Pico project but also opens up a heap more options.
In essence, this is a PCB that makes it easy to connect a TFT to a Pico. Neither are supplied, but there’s a set of headers for the Pico and a 40-pin connector designed to interface with any SSD1963-driven LCD screen. This driver chip is pretty common and comes in a wide range of displays and sizes. In the picture above, we see the board with a 5″ 800×480 display.
Beyond the display connectivity, it’s worth checking out the documentation links as the board can also be connected to and host numerous add-ons including RTC devices and environmental sensors. The board has in part been designed to work with PicoMite/WebMite, a BASIC interpreter for Raspberry Pi Pico. WebMite is a part of that project that enables PicoMite projects to serve web pages and more.
The Pico Display Base Board isn’t supplied with the display or the Pico, but it does seem like a veritable Swiss Army Knife of capability for those looking to add displays and sensor inputs for creating IoT or home automation projects!
