I have a question for the PicoCalc community: What are you all actually doing with your devices? I’ve ordered one myself, primarily for tinkering and as a platform to learn embedded programming. For me, the appeal lies in having an integrated screen and keyboard in that compact form factor, which is much more convenient than bread-boarding and dealing with loose wires. Is this the general sentiment, and are others purchasing it for similar reasons?
I ask because, while following the forum, much of the discussion seems centered around getting various software or firmware versions running – often, it appears, for the inherent satisfaction of making it work. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that; I anticipate I’ll be one of those enthusiasts soon enough!
However, I haven’t yet envisioned a specific “real-world” application for the PicoCalc in the same way I’ve seen the uConsole being used as a solution for practical problems. To be clear, I’m not suggesting the PicoCalc is without purpose. Rather, I’m curious to know if others have found any unique or perhaps even “radical” real-world use cases for it, beyond the enjoyable realm of tinkering and learning.
I suspect there is no real answer to this question. The PicoCalc is designed to be a development platform. Certainly I think a goodly number of people will settle in on making it a game console of some kind, but beyond that I thinks its real power comes from its flexibility. The project here that shows the most promise is the SDcard boot launcher. Why settle on one use for the PicoCalc, when we can switch firmware on the fly. If you want to have a look at how this might work, check out the Cardputer by M5Stack, the M5Launcher firmware is what makes that little thing worth the money to have one around.
Yes. I’ve got mine talking to my home assistant, and I’ve actually been able to glance over at it plugged in on my desk to answer a few spontaneous inqueries. Simple things, like “what time is it” or “were the garage lights left on?”: Using PicoCalc with Home Assistant
Though to admit I’m very much in the “satisfaction of making it work” camp still. My ‘fun’ technique/goal has been to find little bits of functionality to add/address without detracting from the current functionality. Hopefully building up to something truly useful someday. Curren’t we’re at: less-useful than a smartwatch, but more useful than a dumb watch .
My end-goal is to be able to turn my picocalc on, and as soon as it’s connected to a network, become a dashboard/remote control for my Home Assistants devices.
Waiting on mine. I’m hoping to make a Midi / serial monitor for devices connected to GPIO. I feel like the big screen, keyboard and GPIO is great for monitoring / sending commands to DIY hardware.
More ambitious: I am hoping to build a kind of generative midi sequencer, where you can write short looping functions that generate midi data, and manipulate the variables in real time.
An SSH client via one of the Linux boards would also be an extremely useful thing to have.
Oh yes, back in the 80’s my trusty old Sharp pc-1360 ran a startup menu with links to all kinds of basic programs I’d written on the beast while dreaming of much more speed and storage. It did have working sprite commands though !. Back to the PicoCalc and we have…
Plans for lots of internal i2c cards, RTC, light sensor, temperature, humidity, maybe distance measuring, IR port to control the TV etc. Game emulators on bootup. Oh yes Wi-Fi/bluetooth control of an electric shock device to keep the Mrs under control. At some point I’ll try a 256Mb Lyra and a Pico 3W when they get round to making one (4x speed, 4x memory, built in RTC, fast 2Tb SD card support and high quality audio circuitry all at 1/3rd the power please lol)
I am hoping to develop utility gadget for my son GA plane.
Additional info display for speed. Air speed and ground GPS speed
big digits and trend graph bellow.
Im hoping to turn mine into an AI edge device. Im also wondering how possible it would be to create something like a text editor that will allow me to upload simple Python code to another RP2040/2350 as a code.py file.
I wasn’t kidding when I said that it was the Pocket Computer I wish I could have had back in the 1980’s because I did have a Pocket Computer back in the 1980’s. A TRS-80 PC-4 with 1.5K of RAM (I got the memory upgrade for it). And I used it - a lot - through college for many things, like helping with calculus, chemistry and others.
I’ve got software for the TRS-80 PC-2 (more powerful and more RAM than the PC-4) that was used by HVAC salesmen to provide quotes.
yeah, that needs to be recharged every day, instead we got device that can run custom software, custom firmware for weeks on two 18650 batteries, also support every modern protocol and languages, even can run WebAssembly from the net or sdcard, that’s crazy.
Also I don’t see any QWERTY devices in the market in the smartphones area. Getting physical buttons and interactions is privilege right now In car industry it’s getting back to buttons again.
PS One thing can be differently be improved is the resolution of the screen and keyboard switches, display theoretically could be retrofitted, with keyboard it is not possible without heavy modding.
I am going to do a journaling “os”, with MicroPython. Basically i will utilize the pico calc as a digital journal, with some utilities like auto tagging for entries and prompt suggestions for daily entry. Also i was thinking of doing an OS that is a educational tool, basically an interactive console with multiple topics like a quiz (debugging code, math challenges, coding challenges and so on) that will change difficulty based on user input.
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In car industry it’s getting back to buttons again.
which one should i stato on first?