On Board LED Blink

PicoCalc
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It’s no bid deal, but I’m just a bit confused… well,what else is new :grinning_face:… about the onboard LED. The Pico 1 that came with my PicoCalc blinks, aka the heartbeat, while it’s running, but when I replaced it with a Pico 2W, it doesn’t. It did blink when I played around with other Picomite versions, so I though it was just the PicoCalc firmware, but I’ve seen some other peoples where it appears to be blinking. Is it a difference between the “Official” and “Unofficial” versions?

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For some reason Peter decided to turn the blink off in WebMite yet on in PicoMite !?. Try ‘option heartbeat on’…

1 Like
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The LED on a Pico 2W (and Pico 1W and Pimoroni Pico Plus 2W) works differently from the LED on a Pico 1(H), Pico 2(H), and Pimoroni Pico Plus 2. On the latter boards it is tied to GPIO25 of the RP2040 or RP2350, but on the former boards it is tied to GPIO0 of the CYW43439. Therefore, to access the LED on the former boards you need to have a CYW43439 driver, in this case as part of WebMite, installed and working, and the software behind it is completely different even if it looks the same at an API level to the user.

As a result, if you install PicoMite on a Pico 2W there is no way the LED will work, because it will be attempting to control GPIO25, which on a Pico 2W is tied to the CYW43439 rather than to an LED.

As for whether WebMite blinks the LED on a Pico 2W, that is something I really do not know about myself, but I would not be surprised if it did not because the control and data paths for controlling the LED on a Pico 2W are significantly more complex than those for controlling the LED on a Pico 1(H), Pico 2(H), or Pimoroni Pico Plus 2.

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Hi everyone,

Just a quick tip for anyone using a Pico 2W: the on-board back LED blinks by default. This is the “heartbeat” feature, and you can easily disable it with the command: OPTION HEARTBEAT OFF

I have 2 question for Pico 2W:

  1. is that back LED accessible from MMBASIC?
  2. is the front status LED also accessible from MMBasic? Has anyone found a way to control it?

Thanks!

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LED on the Pico 2W’s I’ve used have never blinked.

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You better connect some leds to the extension port
there is some interesting stuff on this forum

On my pico 2w from webmite the option heartbeat works as attended

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Yes, I can confirm that both LEDs do work: the heartbeat works on the back LED and the front status LED works too.

I wanted to use one of the vanilla LED.

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