Raspberry Pico Adventures

In the next posts I will tell about my explorations with the Raspberry Pi Pico W using the C/C++ SDK. As a first project, I decided to adapt a piece of code I wrote using the Arduino libraries for an ESP8266 board. This code (that you can see here , with comments in Portuguese) get the current time and date from an NTP server. In this post I will give a brief explanation of the Simple Network Time Protocol that is used for that.

 With the general availability of the RP2040, it was only a matter of time until we got Chinese boards with the same form factor as the Raspberry Pi Pico. I review here one of the many options you can find at AliExpress.

The  MMA8452 sensor is a three axis accelerometer with additional functions to simplify its use. In this post we are taking a quick look at it and making a MicroPython module to use it.

Last post I talked about the amazing PicoVGA library. In this post I talk about my first experiences in using it to implement a text mode that I can use in may serial terminal. The first line is truncated, it turned out I only need to adjust the monitor.

Continuing my search for a way to implement an alphanumeric serial terminal with the Raspberry Pi Pico, I found the extraordinary   PicoVGA  project. It is a very complete library for generating video for VGA monitors, with incredible examples. PicoVGA demo

My first objective in studying video generation with the RP2040 is to construct a serial terminal to use with my retro microprocessor projects (based on Z80, 6502, etc). For this I want an alphanumeric color video with at least 24 rows of 80 characters. I tried to make something alike the CGA/EGA/VGA alphanumeric mode, storing in the video memory the characters code and an attribute byte and generating in real-time the corresponding pixels. This looked something viable with the official solution, but I ended up having a hard time making the basic scheme work and had to settle on 40 columns. It works - in 40 columns

Continuing my experiences with video generation, let's take a look what we got in the official documentation and repositories (notice that the software is marked as "worked in progress"). It works!