The Pico Touch Board Turns a Raspberry Pi Pico Into a Chunky MIDI Marvel for Touch-Based Music
Designed to be alligator-clip friendly, this carrier delivers 21 GPIO pins — all of which are touch-ready.
Mononymous musician and maker Kevin, also known as "diyelectromusic," has designed another carrier for the Raspberry Pico family and compatible microcontroller boards — this time delivering chunky connectors suitable for alligator clips.
"Ever since doing my Raspberry Pi Pico MIDI Touch Keyboard I've wanted something that would be crocodile clip/DIY friendly," Kevin explains of the carrier, "so this is the result. The key changes [are] the addition of headers to break out the Raspberry Pi Pico's GPIO [General-Purpose Input/Output] pins, and touch pads on all GPIO."
Designed with the original Raspberry Pi Pico in mind, though theoretically compatible with anything sharing its pinout, the Pico Touch Board breaks out 21 GPIO pins to chunky pads along two sides of the board — designed with larger-than-usual LEGO-compatible-spacing holes in order to ensure compatibility with quick-attach alligator/crocodile clips. Each GPIO is also touch-capable, "using the 'single resistor to GND' design that seems pretty common these days," Kevin explains.
The board also includes MIDI in and out connectors, with footprints for either tip-ring-sleeve (TRS) jacks or DIN sockets, and a 7-12V input feeding a 5V regulator with VSYS protection diode for the Raspberry Pi Pico. "I've also included a couple of solder jumpers which can be used to bypass the regulator (when not fitted to the PCB of course)," Kevin adds, "to get a 5V feed direct from the barrel jack, and another to connect AGND [Analog Reference Ground] to GND if required."
More information is available in Kevin's build guide for the board, while schematics and Gerber files are available on GitHub under the permissive MIT license; CircuitPython source code is provided in a separate repository under the same license.
