I love my PicoCalc and playing around with PicoMite, but I have fat fingers and find the tiny PicoCalc keyboard to not be good for fast typing for me. I see in the PicoMite manual in the Keyboard/Mouse/Gamepad” section that:
“Note that a hub is not required. If you only want to connect one device (for example a keyboard) you can just plug the device (using an adapter cable) directly into the Pico’s USB connector.”
“USB Keyboard
When a USB keyboard is connected it will be immediately recognised (no configuration required) and MMBasic will allocate it to channel 1 by default– there is nothing extra required
it appears that the PicoMite firmware sets up the micro-USB port to allow for it.
Before I buy a keyboard and USB-A-to-Micro-USB adaptor…. has anyone done this?
I type very fast on a regular keyboard so it would increase my productivity immensely.
I am aware of the option of connecting another computer up and using a USB-serial connection for keyboard and display using a comm program like Putty or Minicom, but I don’t necessarily want that… I just want a proper keyboard.
They don’t. My understanding of it was that the USB keyboard support in PicoMite only works with the custom hardware builds people do on TheBackShed. The way the PicoCalc handles the keyboard with the STM32 and I2C communication is different than what the PicoMite hardware hackers have been doing. It migtht be possible to rig something up on the PicoCalc, but I’m not sure how much of the existing code could be used at all, and it didn’t seem like a “freebie” feature to add.
If your into being a little crazy, you might be able to take a board like the tiny 2040 or a second pico, and put the picomite firmware on it, and have it do the keyboard and send they keystrokes to the picocalc via serial….
There are two main variants of the PicoMite firmware. One uses the USB port as a USB CDC device. This is the version that has been converted for the PicoCalc. The other uses the USB port as a USB host. Looking at the make file it is the definition of USBKEYBOARD that triggers the build to create the USB host version. In host mode you can connect a USB keyboard direct to the Pico as long as it is sourcing 5V which means feeding 5V to the VBus pin. You would need some sort of micro-USB to USB-A adapter. Some of the builds on the Backshed incorporate a USB hub but this isn’t necessary. There doesn’t appear to be a USB host version for the Pico-W or Pico2-W (there is for VGA and HDMI)