Touchpads, or trackpads, have been around since the 1980s. Today, you can often find them in laptops and notebook computers as pointing devices. With no moving parts, a trackpad are easy to integrate into the body of a portable computer. they’re much smaller than the traditional mouse. Until the advent of multitouch and gestures over the past two decades, though, they were generally poor substitutes for an actual mouse. These days, trackpads have enough features that some users prefer them even on their desktop computers. If you’re that type of person and don’t want to shell out a big pile of money for an Apple, Logitech, or other off-the-shelf trackpad you can always build your own.
The Raspberry Pi has been around for over a decade now in various forms, and we’ve become plenty familiar with the Pi Pico in the last three years as well. Still, these devices have a great deal of potential if you know where to look. If you wade beyond the official datasheets, you might even find more than you expected.
Kumar is presently a software engineer with Google, having previously worked for Analog Devices earlier in his career. But more than that, Kumar has been doing a deep dive into maxing out the capabilities of the Raspberry Pi and the Pi Pico, and shared some great findings in an excellent talk at the 2023 Hackaday Supercon.
When we think of programmable hardware, we think of FPGAs. But they’re not the only option. [Oliver Schmidt] has been exploring how the Raspberry Pi Pico can serve in such a role for the classic Apple II. The talk was presented at the KansasFest event this year, and it’s well worth diving into!
[Oliver] has developed A2Pico. It’s a series of Apple II peripheral cards that are based around the Raspberry Pi Pico, as you might have guessed. [Oliver] has been working in the area since 2021 with one [Glenn Jones], with the duo experimenting with connecting the versatile microcontroller directly to the slot bus of the Apple II. [Ralle Palaveev] then chimed in, developing the A2Pico hardware with solely through-hole components for ease of assembly.
A number of cards have been developed based on A2Pico, including a storage device, a Z80 CP/M card, and a specialized card to play Bad Apple on the IIGS. It’s all thanks to the versatility of the programmable I/O (PIO) peripheral inside the Raspberry Pi Pico. This device enables the Pico to be reprogrammed to handle all sorts of complicated tasks at great speed. This is particularly useful when using it to bit-bang a protocol or talk with another machine, and it serves perfectly well in this role. Basically, by reprogramming the Pico and its PIO, the A2Pico design can become any one of a number of different add-on cards.
It’s well worth diving into this stuff if you’ve ever contemplated building your own peripheral cards for 8-bit and 16-bit machines. We’ve seen some other great add-on cards for vintage machines before, too.
How hard is it to make a fully standalone SDR? [101 Things] shows you how to take a breadboard, a PI Pico, and two unremarkable chips to create a capable radio. You can see the whole thing in the video below.
The design uses a standard Tayloe demodulator. There’s also an encoder and an OLED display for a user interface. You might also want to include some PC speakers to get a bit more audio out of the device.
From the “why didn’t we think of that” department comes [dupontgu’s] pong mouse project. The mouse appears and acts like a normal computer mouse until you click the scroll wheel. When you do, the mouse rapidly moves the cursor on the connected computer to play pong. Obviously, though, the paddles and the ball all look like your cursor, whatever that happens to be. So, how do you tell the score? Well, when a score happens, the cursor shows between the two paddles. In the middle means the game is tied. Otherwise, the player closest to the score indicator is winning. Continue reading “Mouse Doesn’t Play Pong… It IS Pong!”→
Raspberry Pi’s first foray into the world of microcontrollers, the RP2040, was a very interesting chip. Its standout features were the programmable input/output units (PIOs) which enabled all sorts of custom real-time shenanigans. And that’s not to discount the impact of the Pi Pico, the $4 dev kit built around it.
Today, they’re announcing a brand-new microcontroller: the RP2350. It will come conveniently packaged in the new Pi Pico 2, and there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that the new chip is better in every way, and that the Pico form factor will stay the same. The bad news? It’s going to cost 25% more, coming in at $5. But in exchange for the extra buck, you get a lot.
For starters, the RP2350 runs a bit faster at 150 MHz, has double the on-board RAM at 520 kB, and twice as much QSPI flash at 4 MB. And those sweet, sweet PIOs? Now it has 12 instead of just 8. (Although we have no word yet if there is more program space per PIO – even with the incredibly compact PIO instruction set, we always wanted more!)
Two flavors on the same chip: Arm and RISC
As before, it’s a dual-core chip, but now the cores are Arm Cortex M33s or RISC-V Hazard3s. Yes, you heard that right, there are two pairs of processors on board. Raspberry Pi says that you’ll be able to select which style of cores runs either by software or by burning one-time fuses. So it’s not a quad core chip, but rather your choice of two different dual cores. Wild!
Raspberry Pi is also making a big deal about the new Arm TrustZone functionality. It has signed boot, 8 kB of OTP key-storage memory, SHA-256 acceleration, a hardware RNG, and “fast glitch detectors”. While this is probably more aimed at industry than at the beginning hacker, we’re absolutely confident that some of you out there will put this data-safe to good use.
There is, as of yet, no wireless built in. We can’t see into the future, but we can see into the past, and we remember that the original Pico was wireless for a few months before they got the WiFi and Bluetooth radio added into the Pico W. Will history repeat itself with the Pico 2?
We’re getting our hands on a Pico 2 in short order, and we’ve already gotten a sneak peek at the extensive software toolchain that’s been built out for it. All the usual suspects are there: Picotool, TinyUSB, and OpenOCD as we write this. We’ll be putting it through its paces and writing up all the details next week.
There are many ways to build your own Macintosh clone, and while the very latest models remain a little inaccessible, there are plenty of Intel-based so-called “Hackintoshes” which deliver an almost up-to-date experience. But the Mac has been around for a very long time now, and its earliest incarnation only has 128k of RAM and a 68000 processor. What can emulate one of those? Along comes [Matt Evans], with a working Mac 128k emulated on a Raspberry Pi Pico. Such is the power of a modern microcontroller that an RP2040 can now be a Mac!
The granddaddy of all Macs might have been a computer to lust after four decades ago, but the reality was that even at the time the demands of a GUI quickly made it under-powered. The RP2040 has plenty of processing power compared to the 68000 and over twice the Mac’s memory, so it seemed as though emulating the one with the other might be possible. This proved to be the case, using the Musashi 68000 interpreter and a self-built emulator which has been spun into a project of its own called umac. With monochrome VGA and USB for keyboard and mouse, there’s MacPaint on a small LCD screen looking a lot like the real thing.
If you want a 1980s Mac for anything without the joy of reviving original hardware, this represents an extremely cheap way to achieve it. If it can be compiled for microcontrollers with more available memory we could see it would even make for a more useful Mac, though your Mac mileage may vary.
