Newbie and some confusions

PicoCalc
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Hello, I’m new to PicoCalc (with RP2040 and MMBasic 6.00.03), I’ve had it for three days and I’m still excited. I’m planning some HW improvements, so far I’ve only installed RTC (I’m a HW technician and developer, I have the experience and equipment for that). But I have a few questions that I can’t find a clear answer to:

  1. I have code in Flash 1, from which I would like to run a program on the SD card or A:. When PicoCalc is on and I reboot (CPU RESTART), the code from FLASH and then from A: or B: is loaded correctly. However, when PicoCalc is off and I turn it on with the button, the code from A: or B: is never run, the message “Error: Invalid address = resetting” is only displayed for a moment and only the code in Flash is executed. A long Pause doesn’t help either - I thought I needed to wait for HW initialization, but that’s not the case.
  2. Is it really necessary to use such a large card with such specific partitioning? Basically I only need a few hundred kilobytes for my programs and maybe a few more megabytes for data, I don’t plan to use anything other than MMBasic, I don’t want any on-fly .uf2 loader. I would like to use PicoCalc (also) as a UART logger and so it is very likely that I will wear out and destroy the card quickly. Small (and cheap) cards with one FAT32 partition are easier to replace…
  3. How do I know what version of keyboard FW I have loaded? My PicoCalc came with MMBasic 6.00.02 RC2 installed, so it is likely that the keyboard FW is not the first version either.

I will definitely have many more questions (even though I am trying to self-study), so please be patient.

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You can ignore the partitioning. That’s only needed if you want to run Fusix. For MMBasic a simple fat-formatted card is sufficient.

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Ah, so I can use any card with FAT32? That makes things easier, thanks.

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And I’ll add one more question:

  1. How do I set the display backlight from the program? I can only set the keyboard backlight (Option backlight kb 30), but how do I set the display?
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For my setup (Pico2 W, PicoMite 6.00.03, Keybd 1.4) the BACKLIGHT command (e.g. BACKLIGHT 40) does not work. The command is executed, but nothing happens - the brightness level does not change, even in extremes (BL 0, BL 100). If I want to change the OPTION LCDPANEL, I get a message that the LCD is already configured…

Is it possible to change this somehow, or is it really necessary to change the brightness only with the keyboard?

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This is a known bug. Currently the only way to change the backlight is with the keyboard shortcut.

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Waiting for your display backlight update @adcockm :smiling_face_with_sunglasses:, seems to just be a different address to the keyboard backlight ?. I’d be VERY interested in testing the i2c bus at over 10Khz too as slows down writing to FRAM somewhat (currently getting 1062 bytes/s). Even 20Khz would be great. I remember you had issues in the early days setting it to the MMBasic default 100Khz by accident ??

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So is this a bug in the keyboard “BIOS”? I think this function was fine before I updated the BIOS to 1.4.

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There has never been an option to change PicoCalc LCD backlight in the STM32 bios or ‘modified’ Picomite build via MMBasic commands. Only via the keyboard shortcut. Note the standard Picomite/MMBasic builds from the Backshed WON’T work as is on the PicoCalc and have to be modified…. @adcockm ‘s recent builds did add an MMBasic option for keyboard backlight though, hopefully LCD backlight soon too….