Just arrived and looking good. Anyone succesfully added this to a Picocalc ?. Will this just drop in and take the latest Picomite/MMBasic v6 build without modification or issue ?. Hopefully the larger 16Mb flash will be of use one day…
I flashed the 6.x picomite to it and it worked fine.
From what source ?, sound working ?.
So the fact it is a ‘B’ version processor isn’t an issue ?, I read somewhere it had to be an ‘A’ like the Pi Pico2…
It is compatible with uf2 compiled for Pico 2, however it will not have the PSRAM available to supplement board RAM without compiling yourself using the board definitions compiled by Pimoroni.
I was going to work on compiling Picomite for my Pimoroni with PSRAM support tomorrow, I can keep you updated if you want.
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Absolutely !.. I’ve often wondered how the psram on this board would either clash with that on the Picocalc main board OR hopefully and seamlessly add to it (and be of use to MMBasic) ?
The TLDR is that from my understanding they cannot be used in the same way, and would not conflict.
Longer answer is that from my understanding Pimoroni uses a different interface to their PSRAM (QMI) which allows it to act as a seamless extension to the Pico’s RAM if configured correctly. The clockwork external PSRAM is however not capable of this, and must be interacted with as an explicit memory block. I could be wrong though
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I didn’t work with the Pimoroni, but on some stm32 devices I worked with, you can configure a virtual memory address range to correspond to the PSRAM and let the hardware handle it. It was through QSPI, but I guess you can do similar things with the pico2 (pico1 does not have it).
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I am unsure about its possibility with a firmware like picomite, but for micropython most of that is already in place and it “just works” if you compiler it with the definitions provided by Pimoroni. No idea how to enable it on other firmware though.
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