just ordered the picocalc, my first thought is that im going to have to make some sort of interposer board and cram Meshtastic into this thing! kinda perfect hardware for it!
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That’s a great idea! I’m still going to wait to see what the community comes up with. We’re still in the early days.
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I third the Meshtastic idea. I’d hate to have to drill an antenna hole in the top, although the back does appear to be plastic so maybe we could probably get away with having the antenna inside, there’s plenty of space by the looks of it.
I have absolutely no idea haha 
Hoping for an incredible battery life and suspend/instant on which with this kind of config seems plausible. Just a general note taking thing, simple programming, interactive fiction playing machine?
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I’ll be drilling a hole so I can reflash the Pico without having to open the case. I’m also putting in a Pico 2 W to replace the 1 H. That way I’ll have Wifi and a lot more memory.
Maybe It’s possible to use it as emergency keyboard for my Mac Mini (i used it as portable computer because a MacBook Air was too expensive and I loved to have swappable batteries and a lot of ports)
This is 100% doable, might even be able to get something like qmk running
Calculating scores for teams trying to qualify for https://rocketcontest.org/ is kind of a pain. I did a Google Spreadsheet but, if it comes in time, I’d like to put a scoring app into a PicoCalc for use at the range head.
I confirm, it is plastic.
You dont need to drill a hole. The Pico USB port is exposed.
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Great! It saves me the work of making careful measurements to make sure the hole is exactly over the button.
let me know if you want to know anything else
I may be wrong but I think @Toml_12953 was concerned with access to the BOOTSEL button on the Pico in addition to access to the USB port.
However instead of using the BOOTSEL button you can also cause a Pico to enter software upload mode by connecting to the USB and opening a 1200 baud serial connection. I think this behaviour is built into the Pico … if not, it is certainly available after the PicoMite firmware has been flashed for the first time.
Ordered one, see what the delay will be in shipping. My uConsole took over a year, but a replacement main board & CM adapter was shipped in less than a week.
Interested in LoRa and looking at the Pico LoRa module from Waveshare: https://www.waveshare.com/wiki/Pico-LoRa-SX1262 Could receive and process data, and/or use if for communication with Meshtastic or Reticulum (https://unsigned.io/) preferred.
Thoughts or ideas?
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I’m really interested in building something like the hitchhiker’s guide:
Basically taking all of wikipedia, travelpedia, and several others, store them on an SD card (likely in a simplified format - maybe troff like man pages or something else?), and use a simple text interface to browse them.
I’m not sure the rpi2040 will have the power to do this, but i’m hoping so.
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I want to port qemacs to fuzix and use the PicoCalc for taking notes and managing todos with orgmode.
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@benklop, A Hitchhiker Guide to the Galaxy is an interesting idea. I loaded Kiwix on my uConsole to accomplish this. There are a couple of text mode zim file readers like zimpy, which is written in python. MicroPython has not been ported to the PicoCalc yet, but I suspect that it would not be too tough to pick it apart and rewrite it in MMBasic. On the other hand, I am sure a MicroPython patch is coming so it will run on the PicoCalc.
This was my immediate thought when I saw it, too. If it can run MBasic and take a moderately-sized SD card then I don’t think it would be a huge undertaking to put together a browser/reader application. If I were doing this (and I’m not volunteering unless I somehow why are a fast supply of free time), I’d convert the files to a simplified format.
Anybody remember Project Galactic Guide? It was basically a less formal, pre-Wikipedia, Wikipedia. I’m not sure if it’s appropriate to discuss it in the past tense, but it saw more action on the other side of the year 2000 than it does now. I always wanted a PicoCalc-like device to make a PGG reader, but every time I’ve considered actually doing it I’ve been thwarted by my own inertia and the fact that I already have an Internet connected supercomputer in my pocket.
I, too, was thinking Reticulum for this.
The other would be a small serial console for bringing up cisco routers and the like.
I also ordered it, first I want to try to make an internet radio… it would be good to somehow connect dictionaries - a dictionary in your pocket wouldn’t hurt)