r/raspberrypipico

my pet project is a small 6502-based virtual computer running on a Raspberry Pi Pico / Pico 2

Current features include:

• 6502 CPU emulator
• Commodore BASIC support with custom BASIC commands
• Memory-mapped GPIO
• PWM
• I²C
• DMA engine
• PETSCII/ASCII compatible display

i dont want to emulate the whole machine, but to create a new retro-style development platform that keeps the simplicity of programming a 6502 while taking advantage of modern microcontroller, most of the features still need future testing.

There's still a lot of work to do (littleFS (like in micropython), debugger, coprocessor API, etc.)

https://github.com/atrex66/picoc64plus

the basic extensions make it allow to use hexadecimal numbers

to enable Basic Extensions: SYS 49152

GPIO control (sample to control the pico led):

PINMODE 25,1
PINOUT 25,1
PINOUT 25,1

DMA control (Sample DMA config, Fill the screen with the data on the memory location $FB):

DMASIZE 0
DMAINCR 1,0
DMACPY $FB, $0400, 1000

DMA control (copy one block of memory location to another location):

DMASIZE 0
DMAINCR 1,1
DMACPY $0400, $8000, 1000

One thing that always annoyed me was typing long terminal commands on a phone keyboard, so I finally fixed it in Open Pi.

Saved Commands lets you save your most-used commands with a short label, then run or paste them with a single tap.

Coming in the next update.

What do you think? Would this be useful for you? Let me know in the comments.

I never owned a Magic 8-Ball as a kid, so I decided to build my own from scratch.

Instead of relying on a standard random number generator, I wanted it to feel like a real object. I used an RP2350 and an accelerometer to simulate the physics of a 20-sided icosahedron. It tracks exactly how and in what direction you shake it to determine which "face" lands up. It makes the whole experience feel much more tactile and responsive than just having a script pick a number.

I’ve been documenting the build process and the physics logic over on my blog:

https://myembeddedstuff.com/custom-rp2350-magic-ball

I hope you like it! :)

I recently heard about this way to get your Dualsense controller paired to your computer wirelessly, but act as if it’s connected over USB. The project is called DS5Dongle on GitHub.

It works by using a cheap Pico 2W board as a Bluetooth receiver for your controller. The Pico 2W plugs directly into your computer and acts as a wired device.

Why would you want to do this? For me, I wanted a way to use the onboard microphone on the Dualsense controller as an input device on my computer. I already use my Dualsense as a mouse on my Mac, but I wanted to be able to do voice input on the controller for talking to coding AI agents.

I’ve been developing my Mac app ControllerKeys that turns your Dualsense controller into a mouse for the past 6 months. It works a bit like Steam Input, but really designed for productivity instead of gaming. So I can fully navigate my Mac using a Dualsense controller touchpad.

And now with the DS5 dongle, I can finally walk around and use my Mac on a TV with no problems! Freedom!

Hi, I am porting 8086tiny to raspberry pico 2 and using a PicoCalc device as a test bench. The problem is the PicoCalc screen is only 320x320, so only 40x25 text mode is usable, I am successfully running MS-DOS 6.22 now and trying to find software that works well in 40x25 text mode, please suggest programs for 8086/80186 cpu and 256k ram, EMS work in progress. Attached the photo of what it looks like with 8x8 font.

Building using an RP2040 and CH32v003 for power handling with tinyusb and picorvd.

The device has 2 modes, Inject and Edit. For inject I just chose the password I want, plug it in, and click the button. The computer sees the device as a keyboard and directly injects keystrokes wherever I have the cursor. Edit makes the device spoof a flash drive. I can drag passwords directly onto the device in plain text. They just sit in ram until you click eject at which point the device pumps the passwords through an encryption algorithm (pin derived pbkdf2 through aes), stores them directly on flash and zeros out the ram partition. This means the device needs no proprietary software at all and just piggy backs off of whatever OS you plug it into. And since the device contains no radio, bluetooth or wifi, the contents are only accessible to whoever has the device in their hand.

It is battery powered and charges whilst plugged in so that you can navigate the ui without messing up the USB ports on the computer, and never have to worry about charging. I also added an accelerometer so that the screen flips based on the way you're holding it. I haven't gotten the USB C port to work yet but the device HAS been tested on ios and android through a USB A to USB C adapter. Editing and Injecting both work fine.

A couple of things I want to add in the future: I want to add a hardware security chip like the SE050 that nukes the key after n attempts to make it uncrackable unless you know the code or can guess it in 5 attempts. That way if you lose the device you can just say "eh fuck it" and not have to worry about it. I also need to revise the battery components to a lipo pouch rather than a coincell. (long story). Right now it can store up to 1000 passwords so I'm thinking there definitely needs to be a way to add passwords to favorites.

I also want it to be able to load passwords by dragging a csv file onto it so that its easy to export from the browser and get everything onto it. Idk, my buddy and I have been working on this for a few months now. What do you think? Would you use it? If so what would you add?

We plan on open sourcing everything once the SE050 is implemented

It’s not much but it works and I made it.

After reaching a goal of being able to mill for QFN56s with a 3020 CNC, I made this RP2040 board as a proven template for larger projects.

Two firsts for me this go around were external flash and 16 pin USB-C with data transfer, which was almost as difficult as QFN. It’s only been micro USB in the past.

Other than that, it’s got a user LED, and addressable LED and a tiny potentiometer for testing the ADC.

Oh, and it’s got a reset button😉

I got a lot of cool ideas cooking now I have this and a proven ESP32-S3 template.

The cheaper, the better, but it has to work with typeC-to-typeC cables. So any options that save money by skipping the second pull-down resistor on the Type-C port are a no-go.

im trying to make a partial keyboard for playing some games, and im using a pico because i was also going to make an arcade hitbox with the 3 pack i got, but it just isn't working and im going insane. ive tried qmk and kmk, but im mostly just sticking with kmk right now, but no matter what i use, it constantly presses the windows key, the tab key, the shift key, sometimes the a key, and i just dont get it. the image explains most of it, but i just can't figure out what im doing wrong

I was exploring an implementation of a parameter-free text classifier on a resource-constrained Raspberry Pi Pico 2W using gzip compression rather than a heavy neural network.

• Inspired by a 2023 ACL paper, this technique relies on Normalized Compression Distance (NCD) and a k-NN lookup. The core logic is that a compressor like gzip will compress concatenated strings much more efficiently if they share similar syntax and patterns, allowing the system to classify text based on compression efficiency.

• To overcome the microcontroller’s strict memory limitations (2MB flash and 512KB RAM), I utilized a desktop to first generate semantic embeddings of the IMDB dataset via sentence-transformers. By running K-means clustering, the dataset is pruned down to 300 highly representative samples stored in a tiny JSON file.

• The standard MicroPython does not enable compression by default, the implementation requires compiling custom MicroPython firmware from source with the #define MICROPY_PY_DEFLATE_COMPRESS (1) flag enabled for the RPI_PICO2_W board.

• The primary limitation is that gzip analyzes repeating syntactic subsequences rather than deep semantic meaning, making it less effective for complex, long-form text like movie reviews.

Blog: https://shubham0204.github.io/blogpost/programming/gzip-text-classifier-rpipico

(written by a human, you can check my other projects here)

Someone can help me with this problem, what should I do?