Two-time governor of Alta, California and prominent businessman after the U.S. annexation, Pío de Jesus Pico was a politically savvy Californio who thrived in both the Mexican and the American periods. This is the first biography of Pico, whose life vibrantly illustrates the opportunities and risks faced by Mexican Americans in those transitional years. Carlos Manuel Salomon breathes life into the story of Pico, who—despite his mestizo-black heritage—became one of the wealthiest men in California thanks to real estate holdings and who was the last major Californio political figure with economic clout. Salomon traces Pico’s complicated political rise during the Mexican era, leading a revolt against the governor in 1831 that swept him into that office. During his second governorship in 1845 Pico fought in vain to save California from the invading forces of the United States. Pico faced complex legal and financial problems under the American regime. Salomon argues that it was Pico’s legal struggles with political rivals and land-hungry swindlers that ultimately resulted in the loss of Pico’s entire fortune. Yet as the most litigious Californio of his time, he consistently demonstrated his refusal to become a victim. Pico is an important transitional figure whose name still resonates in many Southern California locales. His story offers a new view of California history that anticipates a new perspective on the multicultural fabric of the state.

During 1873 a jury trial took place in San Diego to decide whether Pio Pico, the last Mexican governor of California, had been the victim of a fraud by his brother-in-law, John Forster. Pico claimed title to the huge Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores land grant in southern California, located approximately 208 square miles north of San Diego on the California coastline, and today occupied by Camp Pendleton. Pico's battle to retain that grant in the face of formidable legal challenges from John Forster and others, provides an absorbing view of California during its transitional era and Americanization. The introductory chapters are a sweeping view of early California history with an account of the important roles the Pico family and John Forster played in it. Based on meticulous research, including many records, letters, and photographs never before published, the intimate lives and foibles of some of California's most colorful historical figures are examined in unprecedented detail. After a full description of the trial, a definitive analysis of the evidence is given which proves that the controversial verdict should have been different. The underlying circumstances and motives of the struggle between Forster and Pico are fully explained.

Includes reports, etc., of the Southwest Society of the Archaeological Institutes of America.

The Raspberry Pi Pico is a remarkable microcontroller. It has a power and sophistication that would have been unthinkable just a short time ago. For the sort of jobs it is ideal for, it has plenty of processing power and enough memory to make tasks that would have once required careful planning, relatively easy. Instead of struggling with the machine, you can now focus on getting a good implementation of your algorithms. To enjoy all of its power and sophistication there is no better language than C. It wastes none of the power and it gives you what you need to get at the new features. However, getting started with the Pico with C is no easy feat, which is what motivated this book about creating programs so that testing and debugging is easy. Programming the Raspberry Pi Pico in C uses the highly popular VS Code as its development environment and shows how to use a Raspberry Pi or a desktop PC running Windows as your development machine. The purpose of the book is to reveal what you can do with the Pico's GPIO lines together with widely used sensors, servos and motors and ADCs. After covering the GPIO, outputs and inputs, events and interrupts, it gives you hands-on experience of PWM (Pulse Width Modulation), the SPI bus, the I2C bus and the 1-Wire bus. One of the key advantages of the Pico is its PIO (Programmable I/O) and while this is an advanced feature it is included in this book. After finding out how the PIO works, we apply it to writing a PIO program for the DHT22 and the 1-Wire bus. One current drawback of the Pico it is that it doesn't have a network connection. To solve this problem there is a chapter on using the low-cost ESP8266 as a WiFi client and web server. The two devices together make the Pico a true IoT device. Harry Fairhead has a hardware background and, having worked with microprocessors and electronics in general, for many years, he is an enthusiastic proponent of the IoT and embedded computing. He is the author of two books intended for C programmers, Fundamental C: Getting Closer To The Machine and Applying C For the IoT With Linux and four books on the using the Raspberry Pi in an IoT context, two using C and two using Python. He is now working on a Python version of this book for the Pico.