Cornell students’ 2025 Pico projects

This past Maker Monday, we shared a selection of Raspberry Pi Pico projects from the latest issue of Raspberry Pi Official Magazine. This reminded us that it’s that time of year when Professor V. Hunter Adams gets in touch to tell us what his Electrical and Computer Engineering students at Cornell University have built. Each cohort learns by creating (often fun and silly) things with a Raspberry Pi Pico.

Cornell’s entire Digital Systems Design Using Microcontrollers course was written around RP2040, the chip embedded in our Pico boards. The Raspberry Pi Pico range is perfect for these sorts of projects — it’s tiny, fast, and versatile enough for both beginners and more experienced users. Here are just a few of the projects from last semester:

Pico-Pasture: A cow herding simulation

This project features lovingly generated pixel art of cows (plus some barn buildings, hay, and background animations). Pico-Pasture is a model-based simulation of cattle movement over time, inspired by the student team’s shared love for cows.

PicoChess

PicoChess allows you to play chess against your Pico using a physical chessboard. Your computer opponent detects the magnetic chess pieces on the board via a series of reed switches, asking the ‘Chess Engine’ to identify which piece was lifted and requesting all legal moves for that piece.

Monkey tower defence

The student team behind this project wanted to explore how tangible interactions can make technology more engaging and inclusive for people who learn best through tactile experiences; they turned a beloved online tower defence game into a real-life encounter with a 3D-printed mechanism.

Penny the Plotter

We love a good pen-plotter project, and this one utilises a differential swerve-drive robot and Wi-Fi to draw geometric patterns. The sophisticated omnidirectional movement capabilities of the robot allow it to draw complex paths, including curves and sharp turns. It’s quite the artist.

Heat-seeking quadruped robot

This Raspberry Pi Pico W–controlled robot features three servos per leg, integrated environmental sensing, and a wireless Wi-Fi controller. The custom 3D-printed frame is capable of environmental mapping and target detection with the help of several sensors, including a solid-state LiDAR sensor and a contactless infrared sensor.

Earie: TinyML audio localisation

Earie is such a clever and complex project that I’m just going to gracefully leave it to Professor V. Hunter Adams to explain: “These students built a fake head with ears, then trained a neural network to localise audio with those ears. Really hard, and really interesting, because this is probably (?) pretty much how our brains do it.” We’ll take your word for it, Prof.

If you’d like to see all of the Pico projects created since the course began, they’re compiled in this handy YouTube playlist. You can also find all of the students’ own write-ups for the projects, dating back to 2022, here.

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