Porting ORCA to the PicoCalc?

PicoCalc
1

I don’t know how possible this is (especially for me). My background is I’ve done some coding in Java and JavaScript but very little to none in C, Python, or Lua. I’m also a newb to working with the PicoCalc so I might be over my head with this idea.

What I’d like to do:

Using Orca C and Midilancet as a starting point make a bare metal version of Orca for the PicoCalc that outputs Midi using the pico usb.

Questions:

Is this possible?

How difficult will it be?

What do I need to learn first?

Would anyone be willing to help?

I started to fiddle with LLM tools but I think I’d rather try to stretch my brain a bit more and learn how to do some or most of this.

Thanks for your time!

2

heya - I love ORCA!

I reckon your plan should be super achievable.

there’s an example pi pico midi controller example here- pico-example-midi/pico-example-midi.c at main · infovore/pico-example-midi · GitHub

You could probably get started quite quick using Blair’s starter project: GitHub - BlairLeduc/picocalc-text-starter: Get started on the PicoCalc using the Pico-Series C/C++ SDK. · GitHub

That would give you the ability to draw characters to the screen nice & quickly, although it’d need some tweaking to make it happy working with a text grid rather than a terminal-style interface

I’m happy to offer support if you get stuck along the way :slight_smile: