This is now a thread in which I find my way around this wee beastie. I'm going to write simply so if you're after tech wizardry this is not the place. #RaspberryPiPico

Plug a USB cable, like the one you charge your phone with, into the pico, and into your computer. Simples.

It appears (on Windows at least) as a disk drive, just like if you plug in a memory stick. If you've got one someone has already played with, hold the "BOOTSEL" button on it while you plug in the USB.

Now we have Choices.
Use C which is very picky about punctuation and is sometimes not easy to read.
Use MicroPython which is slightly less picky and reads like a set of instructions for a human.

Me, I'm choosing Micropython now but later I want to try stuff with C.

To make things easy, the people at Raspberry Pi have bundled up all the bits the pico needs to be able to talk MicroPython. Download the file from their very helpful pages. Big green button labelled "Download UF2 file".

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/pico/getting-started/#getting-started-with-micropython

Now you need to drag that file onto the pico and bada bing bada boom, you're ready to speak MicroPython to it. Good stuff so far.

It is very unexciting when the copying is done, because all that happens is that the pico vanishes from your list of drives. Look! It's gone!

Now you have to wait while
A) I figure out the best way on a pc to feed it instructions (there are many editors and some of them get confused by boards)
B) attend a virtual parents evening by staring at a screen again.

OK, turns out parents eve is actually at 5.30 so back to this.

http://Thonny.org  is where I'm going to grab the magic talky box from. It's actually called an "IDE" but basically its a box you write instructions in and send them to the board.

The link is in the top box, version 3.3.3 for Windows (or mac or Linux if that's your thing). Good news is, if you want to program the pico with a raspberry pi, thonny is already installed. But I'm not, so let's press on. Note the warning.

When it's downloaded you click on the thonny-3.3.3.exe, whereupon Windows will have a "moment" and show you this error box.

If you click on "more info" and then "run anyway" you get a little setup wizard. Click Next on everything, and choose the tick box if you want a desktop icon. It takes about 2 minutes to install. Hit "finish" and now we have the magic talky box!

Just a quick note, installing things which make your computer have a "moment" is generally not advised at all. There's not much choice for the pico at the moment.

OK. We have a talky box. Like we told the Pico what to speak (micropython), we need to tell the talkybox what to talk to. Click "run" in the Thonny menu, and then "Select interpreter".

Woohoo! This talkybox knows how to talk Pico! Select it from the drop down menu and click OK.

Oh! That's helpful. If you've missed out on telling the Pico how to speak micropython, it offers you another chance to do it. Told you I was doing this in real time...
I'm gonna hit cancel but you could follow the instructions it gives you and load micropython if you want.

At the bottom of the Thonny screen it says it can't find the Pico! Never fear, this is not a disaster. I'm guessing we've left it in "be a disk drive" mode, which is called bootloader mode (now you know what the button means).

Nope. I forgot to tell it where the Pico is plugged in. Derp.

Go in the run -> select interpreter menu again, and this time tell it you've plugged it in the USB port.

Now we're good! In the talkybox at the bottom (space for directly talking to the board instead of handing it a set of instructions) I'm going to tell the Pico to be nice to me.

I've typed:
Print('Hello I am Pico and you look lovely today')

SQUEE!!

It seems to be developing a personality now. We've bonded.

We are back and it's time to OONTZ the BLINKENLIGHT!

There's a little LED on the board that's supposed to blink and stuff as an indicator.

On the datasheet (which is a handy technical kinda manual where they say what's connected to what, and the kind of signals it's ok with) the LED is labelled GP25.

This does not mean it's a doctor. The GP stands for General Purpose, and it's number 25 in their labelling system.

So, we are going to use the talkybox at the top, which is a place to write stuff before we send it to the Pico. We can make messes and fix them, which suits me well.

# means "ignore this writing, it's my own thinking out loud, or code comments".

Handily the people that made the board have done an example, which you can find here. https://github.com/raspberrypi/pico-micropython-examples/tree/master/blink/blink.py

I've copied theirs into the talkybox but have added some notes to myself.

When I find a demo program I like to figure out what I can mess with.

The pin thing is useful, because later we could change the number and plonk another LED on to do blinking. A BIG ONE.

So Tim the timer has a frequency of 2.5, which is blinky speed. The mode is periodic - maybe there are other modes to try?

Oh. I have looked on the micropython documentation and found that Timer has two modes. Periodic (blinky) and one_shot (yeah, that).

But wait! We haven't even given poor little Pico the code instructions. Let's do that and see what happens.

Poke the green "run" button.

Decisions, decisions. Later it might be useful to keep a copy on the computer but for now let's go wild and save it straight into the Pico. It's like a little memory stick, remember

WHY YOU SLOW ME DOWN?

OK, I'll give the program a name and press OK and now can I have my blinky light?

MORE SQUEE!
Only it's not in time with Kraftwerk. Let's fix this. Remember the frequency was 2.5? If I change that number I bet you I can get it dancing to Autobahn.

I changed it to 5 instead of 2.5. Bit frantic. You get the idea. I am neither a musician nor a lighting designer!

(Nor a proper technical person according to some grumps. Eat some cake and watch a good film. You'll feel better.)

Oh, to stop your program running just click "Stop" on the top menu in Thonny.

I'll try some more tinkering tomorrow. I'll show how you can find out what words the Pico will understand, and start connecting stuff up to the pins.

In the meantime, there really is some great documentation out there (most of it uses sensible words and gets to the point).