µctrl Raspberryπ pico & arduino

[Liam Hays]

EdS2 Wrote:Just a small point: it's not accurate to think of the Zero, or any other of the original Pi boads, as necessarily running Linux.

I remember once seeing a chess game that ran entirely in ARM assembly on a Pi, and like you say, it could boot in a fraction of a second. For a calculator, that's fine (look at the 48---every time I turn mine on, the screen flashes for about that long). That makes me wonder how power consumption is, between Linux and a dedicated program, on a Pi Zero.

EdS2 Wrote:A paired Zero and Pico might well be a common solution.

I don't know how this could be done, but it seems possible: a Zero for the screen, USB mass storage, and execution of programs, and a Pico for real-time hardware and keypad I/O and control. The speed of the Zero would give the machine modern calculator speeds, and the Pico would make infrared serial and other peripheral control easy.

I also thought of something else: the M0-based RP2040, as well as the ESP32, don't have hardware floating point support. I don't know about a Pi, but they're fast enough that I suspect software floating point, if needed, would not create tremendous overhead.

Maximilian Hohmann Wrote:but provining the Arduino programming environment (C / C++) via the "normal" Ardunio IDE.

I would like to see that, and I think it's likely, since there's already Arduino support for the raw M0. It would be really neat if they could incorporate the PIO assembly thing into the simpler Arduino environment, with all the same capability. Plus, if it means the board is compatible with the many Arduino libraries and peripherals...it could make the Pico promising for a lot of interesting projects.

That's all from me, for now. (Look! I figured out how to quote properly! )