I finally chased down a code snippet for getting the battery status on my picocalc under micropython.
In my particular case, it has an rp2350w board.
code:
from machine import I2C, Pin
i2c = I2C(1, sda={Pin(6), scl=Pin(7), freq=100_000)
def battery_percent():
i2c.writeto(0x1f, b"\x0b")
response = i2c.readfrom(0x1f, 2)
return response[1]
print(“Battery: {}%”.format(battery_percent()))