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Makers Peter Mather, Geoff Graham, and Mick Ames has added one other string to the Raspberry Pi Pico’s bow: A BASIC interpreter, largely Microsoft BASIC suitable, turning it right into a tiny interactive microcomputer dubbed the PicoMite.
“The emphasis with MMBasic is on ease of use and improvement,” Graham explains of his customized firmware. “The event cycle may be very quick with the flexibility to immediately swap from edit to run. Errors are listed in plain English and when an error does happen a single keystroke will invoke the inbuilt editor with the cursor positioned on the road that precipitated the error.”
A blast from the previous: PicoMite turns your Raspberry Pi Pico right into a Microsoft GW-BASIC-style micro. (📷: Geoff Graham)
The PicoMite firmware’s implementation of MMBasic presents what Graham describes as “a big subset” of the performance present in Microsoft’s traditional GW-BASIC, and builds on Graham’s earlier work with the Micromite — an MMBasic implementation on Microchip PIC32 microcontrollers. “Most applications written for the Micromite will be run [on the PicoMite],” Graham guarantees, “with little or no change.”
On the Raspberry Pi Pico entrance, MMBasic contains assist for all the usual options of the RP2040 microcontroller: digital general-purpose enter/output (GPIO) pins, serial connectivity, I2C and SPI buses, the analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), adjusting the CPU clock, and even the programmable enter/output (PIO) blocks. It additionally contains assist for exterior {hardware} together with SD Playing cards, varied show panels and touchscreen panels, exterior battery-backed real-time clocks, infrared receivers, environmental sensor, the HC-SR04 ultrasonic distance sensor, numeric keypads, and WS2812 addressable RGB LEDs.
The software program contains instruments for creating graphical interfaces, full with touchscreen assist. (📷: Geoff Graham)
The PicoMite venture is not the primary various programming language to land on the Raspberry Pi Pico: For the reason that board’s launch we have seen block-based visible MicroPython environments, the Mecrisp-Stellaris port of Forth, a proof-of-concept Lua atmosphere, and extra.
A compiled PicoMite firmware for the Raspberry Pi Pico is on the market, together with a formidable 160-page consumer handbook, free of charge obtain on Graham’s web site; the supply code, which in principle must be moveable to different boards constructed across the identical Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller, is on the market on GitHub underneath a customized open supply license.
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