I’ve had my eye on the PicoSystem, the Raspberry Pi RP2040-based games console platform, for some time. It surfaced back in the Spring and was long marked “coming soon”. But now it’s here, mine showed up yesterday while I was at work, and this morning I’ve been messing about with it.
In part one we saw how the young Clive Sinclair created Sinclair Radionics — twice — and built it into a successful business that launched hi-fi products in the 1960s and the first ever pocket calculator in 1972. In part two, we investigated the genesis of the Radionics microcomputer. Read on to learn what occurred when Radionics finally went under, and how the ZX80 came about…
In part one, we saw how the young Clive Sinclair created Sinclair Radionics — twice — and built it into a successful business that launched hi-fi products in the 1960s and the first ever pocket calculator in 1972, but soon suffered badly as its digital watch efforts foundered and competition crushed its calculator sales. Read on to learn how Radionics met its end, but (almost) gave birth to a new microcomputer…
Clive Sinclair formed the first company to bear his name in 1961 while he was a 21-year-old electronics journalist. He had received no formal education in the subject, but as a highly intelligent autodidact, he had developed a passion for electronics during his teens. He also had an entrepreneurial bent, and even in his youth spotted a business opportunity in designing and selling kits to fellow electronics enthusiasts.
In part one, I described an IoT demo setup based on the Raspberry Pi Pico and the Waveshare Pico SIM7080G Cat-M1/NB-IoT cellular add-on board, and wrote about some of the design goals. Now it’s time to implement that design with some C++ code: a host application, drivers for the modem, the HT16K3-based display and the MCP9808 temperature sensor, and some third-party libraries to decode incoming commands formatted as JSON and encoded in base64 for easy SMS transmission.
To turn the Raspberry Pi Pico into an Internet of Things (IoT) device, you need to add wireless connectivity. I thought I’d give it go, to see how straightforward it might be to connect the Pico to cellular networks and have a bare-metal app written in C++ run the show. For a modem, I chose to use Waveshare’s suitably sized Pico SIM7080G Cat-M1/NB-IoT.
You asked for it and you got it: following the ZX80 and ZX81 keyboard layout T-shirts comes my ZX Spectrum version — giving you the chance to steal a march on April 2022’s 40th anniversary!
All three of my PreviewApps — PreviewMarkdown, PreviewCode and PreviewYaml — got big updates this week. Headline features: significantly improved font, style and colour selection, across-the-range stability improvements, and faster PreviewCode theme preview presentation.
A little while back I wrote about Adafruit’s QT Py RP2040 and how it makes a nice, compact Picoprobe. That’s a Raspberry Pi RP2040-based device used as a bridge between your computer and a target device for debugging work using Single Wire Debug (SWD). I first used the QT Py RP2040’s side-mounted GPIO pins, but SWD hosting is a great role for the device’s QT Stemma connector.
How do you safely interrupt a command-line program written in Swift? This question was posed to me this week by a reader who got in touch to point out that boilerplate code included in my How to write macOS command line tools in Swift post might not be totally safe: it could leave a program and system in an undefined state, which is never a good thing. So I took a closer look.
