PICO4K

The first 4K intro for the Raspberry Pi Pico.
Wild compo entry released at Function 2022.

• youtube
• pouet.net

This release comes with a new and shiny packer for Raspberry Pi Pico, see PICOPACK.md.

Platform

Raspberry Pi Pico - 264 KB RAM, 2 MB flash, 125+ MHz CPU (easily overclockable to 420 MHz and more)

The Pico Demo Base seems to be the standard way to do demo stuff on the Pico, it conveniently has everything you need (VGA, PWM Audio, a few buttons). KiCad schematics are available to build your own since ordering it is expensive.

This intro only uses the passive parts of the Pico Demo Base, everything else is unused.
Used:

• the VGA "DAC" resistor ladder
• the PWM Audio resistor-capacitor signal path

Building and Flashing

Dependencies:

• CMake
• arm-none-eabi-gcc (version 12 or later required! very scary constexpr magic required)
• pico-sdk (run git submodule update --init)
• exomizer (designed for exomizer 3.1.1, shipped in tools/exomizer/)
• upkr (designed for upkr 0.2.2, shipped in tools/upkr/)

Compile with:

cmake -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=MinSizeRel .
cd build && make

Flash via any of these methods:

• picotool load build/proj/pico4k.bin -t bin
• picotool load build/proj/pico4k.uf2
• drag pico4k.uf2 onto the Pico's virtual flash drive in bootloader mode

Pinout for manual Setup

If you don't have a Pico Demo Board or just want to feel the joy of having a mess of wires on a breadboard that works, here are the detailed pinouts:

• VGA Red: GPIO 0-4 (0 is LSB)
• not connected: GPIO 5
• VGA Green: GPIO 6-10 (6 is LSB)
• VGA Blue: GPIO 11-15 (11 is LSB)
• VGA HSync: GPIO 16
• VGA VSync: GPIO 17
• not connected: GPIO 18-26
• Audio Right: GPIO 27
• Audio Left: GPIO 28