Nothing compares to old-fashioned computing. Thanks to maker and developer Gary Explains, you can now relive his classic coding experiences from the 80’s and his 90’s. raspberry pi pico Basic interpreter. The name of the project is Piccolo BASIC, Allows users to program simple projects using basic programming languages.
According to Gary, the project provides some simple functionality for users, including commands such as: let, if, print, for, goto, and gosub. Also, basically he can interact with the GPIO pins as well (I’m not kidding). With some limitations, users can perform well-known beginner projects such as Blinking Her LED and Hello World.
It’s worth noting that this project was not developed completely from scratch, but was inspired by another Basic interpreter called . uBASIC. This interpreter was created by Adam Dunkels, For those interested in learning more about how it works, his website and the project’s GitHub page have more details.
It’s just a simple interpreter, but there’s plenty of room to extend it with more features. Gary claims that anyone interested in contributing to PiccoloBASIC is very welcome.The project is hosted as GithubSo anyone who wants to fork the fork can do so.
How to set up PiccoloBASIC
Gary was kind enough to walk me through how to get started with PiccoloBASIC. Details on how to use it are also on the project page, but you should start there.
- First, make sure you have the Pico C/C++ SDK set up on your PC.
2. PICO_SDK_PATH should be defined as:
PICO_SDK_PATH=/home/pi/pico/pico-sdk/3. Clone the GitHub repository into a new directory. ‘build’.
4. Enter a new world ‘build’ Go to the directory and run cmake.
make -j45. This will create a uf2 file named “Piccolo BASIC.uf2” What you can flash to Pico
If you want to learn more about this Raspberry Pi project, please visit: PiccoloBASIC GitHub Visit the page and follow Gary Explains for future updates.
