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Groups > comp.sys.raspberry-pi > #26001 > unrolled thread

£3.60

Started byAndy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk>
First post2021-01-21 15:49 +0000
Last post2021-01-23 01:53 +0000
Articles 20 on this page of 45 — 22 participants

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Contents

  £3.60 Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> - 2021-01-21 15:49 +0000
    Re: £3.60 Nikolaj Lazic <nlazicBEZ_OVOGA@mudrac.ffzg.hr> - 2021-01-21 17:25 +0000
      Re: £3.60 Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> - 2021-01-21 19:39 +0000
        Re: £3.60 Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> - 2021-01-21 20:50 +0000
      Re: £3.60 gareth evans <headstone255@yahoo.com> - 2021-01-21 20:40 +0000
    Re: £3.60 Chris Green <cl@isbd.net> - 2021-01-21 17:21 +0000
      Re: £3.60 gareth evans <headstone255@yahoo.com> - 2021-01-21 20:39 +0000
        Re: £3.60 A. Dumas <alexandre@dumas.fr.invalid> - 2021-01-21 21:51 +0000
          Re: £3.60 gareth evans <headstone255@yahoo.com> - 2021-01-21 22:54 +0000
            Re: £3.60 Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> - 2021-01-22 01:01 +0000
            Re: £3.60 A. Dumas <alexandre@dumas.fr.invalid> - 2021-01-22 06:51 +0000
              Re: £3.60 Joe <joe@jretrading.com> - 2021-01-22 09:33 +0000
                Re: £3.60 gareth evans <headstone255@yahoo.com> - 2021-01-22 13:22 +0000
                  Re: £3.60 The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2021-01-22 13:34 +0000
                    Re: £3.60 gareth evans <headstone255@yahoo.com> - 2021-01-22 15:03 +0000
                      Re: £3.60 Tauno Voipio <tauno.voipio@notused.fi.invalid> - 2021-01-22 17:19 +0200
                        Re: £3.60 gareth evans <headstone255@yahoo.com> - 2021-01-22 15:24 +0000
                          Re: £3.60 Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> - 2021-01-22 16:25 +0000
                        Re: £3.60 Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> - 2021-01-23 19:56 +0000
                          Re: £3.60 Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> - 2021-01-23 20:25 +0000
                          Re: £3.60 Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> - 2021-01-23 20:31 +0000
                      Re: £3.60 Chris Green <cl@isbd.net> - 2021-01-22 15:34 +0000
                      Re: £3.60 Björn Lundin <b.f.lundin@gmail.com> - 2021-01-22 17:17 +0100
                        Re: £3.60 Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> - 2021-01-22 16:30 +0000
                        Re: Re: £3.60 stephen@mpeforth.com (Stephen Pelc) - 2021-01-22 17:47 +0000
                  Re: £3.60 Chris Green <cl@isbd.net> - 2021-01-22 15:00 +0000
                    Re: £3.60 gareth evans <headstone255@yahoo.com> - 2021-01-22 15:18 +0000
                      Re: £3.60 Chris Green <cl@isbd.net> - 2021-01-22 16:02 +0000
                    Re: £3.60 Joe <joe@jretrading.com> - 2021-01-22 20:05 +0000
                  Re: £3.60 "A. Dumas" <alexandre@dumas.fr.invalid> - 2021-01-22 16:07 +0100
                  Re: Re: £3.60 stephen@mpeforth.com (Stephen Pelc) - 2021-01-22 15:53 +0000
                    Re: £3.60 gareth evans <headstone255@yahoo.com> - 2021-01-22 16:17 +0000
                      Re: Re: £3.60 stephen@mpeforth.com (Stephen Pelc) - 2021-01-22 17:25 +0000
                Re: £3.60 Scott Alfter <scott@alfter.diespammersdie.us> - 2021-01-22 22:14 +0000
        Re: ??3.60 Jim Jackson <jj@franjam.org.uk> - 2021-01-21 22:04 +0000
      Re: £3.60 Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> - 2021-01-21 21:03 +0000
        Re: £3.60 Theo <theom+news@chiark.greenend.org.uk> - 2021-01-22 10:38 +0000
          Re: £3.60 "A. Dumas" <alexandre@dumas.fr.invalid> - 2021-01-22 16:13 +0100
            Re: £3.60 Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> - 2021-01-22 20:04 +0000
              Re: £3.60 "A. Dumas" <alexandre@dumas.fr.invalid> - 2021-01-22 23:39 +0100
                Re: Re: £3.60 Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> - 2021-01-23 00:23 +0000
                  Re: £3.60 Folderol <general@musically.me.uk> - 2021-01-24 19:22 +0000
                    Re: £3.60 David Higton <dave@davehigton.me.uk> - 2021-01-25 18:46 +0000
              Re: ??3.60 not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev) - 2021-01-22 23:18 +0000
        Re: £3.60 ray carter <ray@zianet.com> - 2021-01-23 01:53 +0000

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#26055

FromMartin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid>
Date2021-01-23 20:31 +0000
Message-ID<rui124$j57$1@dont-email.me>
In reply to#26053
On Sat, 23 Jan 2021 19:56:12 +0000, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

> On 2021-01-22, Tauno Voipio <tauno.voipio@notused.fi.invalid> wrote:
> 
>> FORTH is as much Reverse Polish (Lukasciewicz) as the older HP
>> calculators.
> 
> Forth love if honk then

I had a play with it years ago on a 6908 micro under FLEX09. It was 
interesting and ran well, though I didn't really like its filing system 
much: an array of 1K pages identified and referenced by page number.

What intrigued me most about it was the remarkably small amount of the 
system that was 6809 binary - from memory all a FLEX directory listing 
showed on the Forth floppy disk was the Forth loader and a very large 
file that contained the Forth filing system. The loader was a normal FLEX 
program that read page zero from the FORTH filing system and then passed 
control to the first Forth word in page zero. This and the next 20-30 
words were binary and did very low level stuff. Everything else was 
written in Forth, so effectively the Forth runtime built itself from 
source whenever it was started, and did so remarkably quickly.  

I never did much more than that with Forth because the programs I wanted 
to write were much easier to write in PL/9 (PL/M ported to 6809 FLEX) or 
assembler and IIRC that Forth version as published could only talk to the 
terminal and read or write pages in the Forth filing system, which was 
limited to a single file.


-- 
--  
Martin    | martin at
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

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#26037

FromChris Green <cl@isbd.net>
Date2021-01-22 15:34 +0000
Message-ID<ct7rdh-i61c.ln1@esprimo.zbmc.eu>
In reply to#26031
gareth evans <headstone255@yahoo.com> wrote:
> On 22/01/2021 13:34, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
> > On 22/01/2021 13:22, gareth evans wrote:
[snip]
> 
> ISTR that FORTH on an RCA 1802 is in the Voyager missions?
> 
> Now, that was a weird instruction set! ISTR 8-off 16 bit
> registers but no 16-bit moves, all having to be done in
> 8-bit chunks through the accumulator, and no conventional
> subroutine call but change which of the 16-bit registers
> at any time was the program counter!
> 
I worked on 1802 based systems from 1980 to 1987 in Oman.  It was all
done in assembler, I actually wrote an 1802 macro assember using the
very basic assembler that came with the RCA 1802 developement systems.

As you say it was a very odd instruction set.  You could use any one
of the 16 bit registers as the program counter which could lead to
some very confusing (and difficult to debug) code.

-- 
Chris Green
·

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#26040

FromBjörn Lundin <b.f.lundin@gmail.com>
Date2021-01-22 17:17 +0100
Message-ID<ruetpu$sdi$1@dont-email.me>
In reply to#26031
Den 2021-01-22 kl. 16:03, skrev gareth evans:
> 
> 
> ISTR that FORTH on an RCA 1802 is in the Voyager missions?

I was at a fascinating talk in Madrid in 2015 by a guy at ESA
and he said (I can't remember which - or both) that either Rosetta or 
Philae was coded i Forth, with design/coding started in 1994 and 
launched 10 years later.


-- 
Björn

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#26043

FromMartin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid>
Date2021-01-22 16:30 +0000
Message-ID<rueuj8$7st$3@dont-email.me>
In reply to#26040
On Fri, 22 Jan 2021 17:17:02 +0100, Björn Lundin wrote:

> Den 2021-01-22 kl. 16:03, skrev gareth evans:
>> 
>> 
>> ISTR that FORTH on an RCA 1802 is in the Voyager missions?
> 
> I was at a fascinating talk in Madrid in 2015 by a guy at ESA and he
> said (I can't remember which - or both) that either Rosetta or Philae
> was coded i Forth, with design/coding started in 1994 and launched 10
> years later.

I don't see why not - IIRC FORTH originally came from the astronomy 
community, who used it to control telescopes. 

 



-- 
--  
Martin    | martin at
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

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#26045

Fromstephen@mpeforth.com (Stephen Pelc)
Date2021-01-22 17:47 +0000
Message-ID<600b0ccb.10199265@news.eternal-september.org>
In reply to#26040
On Fri, 22 Jan 2021 17:17:02 +0100, =?UTF-8?Q?Bj=c3=b6rn_Lundin?=
<b.f.lundin@gmail.com> wrote:

>I was at a fascinating talk in Madrid in 2015 by a guy at ESA
>and he said (I can't remember which - or both) that either Rosetta or 
>Philae was coded i Forth, with design/coding started in 1994 and 
>launched 10 years later.

Philae used 10 RTX2010 CPUs, an ADSP21020 and two 80C3X devices.

Forth on an RTX2010 was far and away the best choice for performance
and ease of test - the CPU was designed for Forth. An RTX2010 is
a rad-hard 16 bit dual stack machine made by Harris/Intersil. It
clocked at 8 MHz (probably rather less for flight use) and could
address 1 Mb of memory.

These days rad-hard development focuses on processors in FPGAs.

Stephen

-- 
Stephen Pelc, stephen@vfxforth.com <<< NEW
MicroProcessor Engineering Ltd - More Real, Less Time
133 Hill Lane, Southampton SO15 5AF, England
tel: +44 (0)23 8063 1441, +44 (0)78 0390 3612
web: http://www.mpeforth.com - free VFX Forth downloads

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#26030

FromChris Green <cl@isbd.net>
Date2021-01-22 15:00 +0000
Message-ID<gs5rdh-42tb.ln1@esprimo.zbmc.eu>
In reply to#26028
gareth evans <headstone255@yahoo.com> wrote:
> On 22/01/2021 09:33, Joe wrote:
> > On 22 Jan 2021 06:51:03 GMT
> > A. Dumas <alexandre@dumas.fr.invalid> wrote:
> >
> >> gareth evans <headstone255@yahoo.com> wrote:
> >>> On 21/01/2021 21:51, A. Dumas wrote:
> >>>> gareth evans <headstone255@yahoo.com> wrote:
> >>>>> ... and it's a great disappointment to me that it's not a 64-bit
> >>>>> processor
> >>>>
> >>>> Name one.
> >>>
> >>> As the Pi4 is a 64 bit processor, one assumed that all future
> >>> developments by that company would be 64 bit.
> >>
> >> That's a general purpose CPU for use in general purpose computers
> >> (like the Pi 4). This new thing is a microcontroller chip for use in
> >> microcontrollers. There are currently no 64-bit microcontrollers on
> >> the market. I can imagine it one day moving that way, maybe for
> >> portable image recognition stuff? For now, it would be a very, very
> >> specialised niche and that's not Raspberry Pi's aim.
> >
> > Indeed. I've yet to find a need for more than eight bits in a
> > microcontroller, along with a maximum of 2KB of RAM. If I need more
> > power, it's a RPi.
> >
> 
> It is 50 years ago this year that I cut my teeth on a naked
> PDP11/20 with no OS and only an assembler. Everything I did
> was up to me.
> 
Ah, but the normal process would be to enter the boot loader by hand,
then a bigger/better loader from paper tape and then the actual OS.

Or did you actually write naked assembler code to do things direct
with the hardware?

I started at a similar time (early 1970s) on a wierd device called the
PDP-12 (an odd marriage of a PDP-8 and a university developed machine
called a Linc-12).

-- 
Chris Green
·

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#26034

Fromgareth evans <headstone255@yahoo.com>
Date2021-01-22 15:18 +0000
Message-ID<rueqbj$29c$1@dont-email.me>
In reply to#26030
On 22/01/2021 15:00, Chris Green wrote:
>>>
>>
>> It is 50 years ago this year that I cut my teeth on a naked
>> PDP11/20 with no OS and only an assembler. Everything I did
>> was up to me.
>>
> Ah, but the normal process would be to enter the boot loader by hand,
> then a bigger/better loader from paper tape and then the actual OS.

Off the top of my head, having toggled it in so often (octal!)

16701
26
1272
352
5211
15711

EOE after 50 years!

> Or did you actually write naked assembler code to do things direct
> with the hardware?

First 10 years as a professional softy were PDP11 assembler
on SCADA systems. Most challenging ISTR was a cassette tape driver
to run under our own realtime exec.

> I started at a similar time (early 1970s) on a wierd device called the
> PDP-12 (an odd marriage of a PDP-8 and a university developed machine
> called a Linc-12).

Yes, I'm aware of that. Wasn't there some difficulty in on-the-fly
switching between the two instruction sets? I've the thing described
in a DEC sales clossy from 1971.

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#26039

FromChris Green <cl@isbd.net>
Date2021-01-22 16:02 +0000
Message-ID<5i9rdh-1c4c.ln1@esprimo.zbmc.eu>
In reply to#26034
gareth evans <headstone255@yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> First 10 years as a professional softy were PDP11 assembler
> on SCADA systems. Most challenging ISTR was a cassette tape driver
> to run under our own realtime exec.
> 
I was working on SCADA in Oman from 1980 to 1987, the PDP-12 wasn't
SCADA though, it was a in a hospital.


> > I started at a similar time (early 1970s) on a wierd device called the
> > PDP-12 (an odd marriage of a PDP-8 and a university developed machine
> > called a Linc-12).
> 
> Yes, I'm aware of that. Wasn't there some difficulty in on-the-fly
> switching between the two instruction sets? I've the thing described
> in a DEC sales clossy from 1971.
> 
Well it wasn't 'difficult' it was just rather odd because the whole
addressing structure changed, the PDP-8 had 12-bit addresses (i.e.
memory banks were 4k) whereas the Linc machine had 10-bit addresses
(i.e. 1k memory banks).  It was just a single instruction to change
from one mode to the other but the ramifications in addressing etc.
could be quite interesting! :-)

It's all a very long time ago now!

-- 
Chris Green
·

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#26047

FromJoe <joe@jretrading.com>
Date2021-01-22 20:05 +0000
Message-ID<20210122200501.64ca98ae@jresid.jretrading.com>
In reply to#26030
On Fri, 22 Jan 2021 15:00:00 +0000
Chris Green <cl@isbd.net> wrote:


> > It is 50 years ago this year that I cut my teeth on a naked
> > PDP11/20 with no OS and only an assembler. Everything I did
> > was up to me.
> >   
> Ah, but the normal process would be to enter the boot loader by hand,
> then a bigger/better loader from paper tape and then the actual OS.

Around 1980 I was working on a TV character generator based on the DG
Nova, another mini of that era. It had a rackmount main frame with a
front panel with octal pushbuttons, rather than the imposing row of
switches. About half a dozen manually entered codes, than it fired up
the paper tape reader.
> 
> Or did you actually write naked assembler code to do things direct
> with the hardware?

I wrote a disassembler in machine code, then did some analysis of some
of the supplied programs.

There was an optional one or two hard drives, 1.25MB in those big IBM
cartridges.

The (TTL-based) Nova actually went out of production while I was with
the character generator company, so they made their own using AMD
bit-slice microprocessors, AMD2901, if I recall correctly. I believe DG
also did this for a later Nova model.

-- 
Joe 

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#26032

From"A. Dumas" <alexandre@dumas.fr.invalid>
Date2021-01-22 16:07 +0100
Message-ID<600aea3d$0$11318$e4fe514c@news.xs4all.nl>
In reply to#26028
Op 22-01-2021 om 14:22 schreef gareth evans:
> It is 50 years ago this year that I cut my teeth on a naked
> PDP11/20 with no OS and only an assembler. Everything I did
> was up to me.
> 
> Over the years I have been involved in real-time OS
> development and language interpreters to the extent
> that in my retirement I've an N-I-H stance towards
> others' software.
> 
> I'd like to relive my youth but with the 64-bit instruction
> set of the ARM but without being imbrangled in all the
> bolt-on (Lancashire?  :-)  ) goodies that the RPi4 has.
> 
> I don't have the capability to produce the PCB and
> solder down a BGA myself, despite a radio ham's
> junk box of nearly 60 years' standing.
> 
> In my retirement, I have some ideas on language
> development, essentially interactive as was BASIC
> and FORTH but running at the speed of compiled
> code, and the 64 bit ARM instruction set looks
> like a good starter.

A Teensy 4.x might be a good start. ARM Cortex M7 600 MHz, floating 
point hardware, lots of RAM and flash. 
https://www.pjrc.com/store/teensy41.html

(It says 64-bit fp...! :) but I think that's "just" an accelerated 
simulation using 32-bit register pairs.)

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#26038

Fromstephen@mpeforth.com (Stephen Pelc)
Date2021-01-22 15:53 +0000
Message-ID<600af419.3876218@news.eternal-september.org>
In reply to#26028
On Fri, 22 Jan 2021 13:22:21 +0000, gareth evans
<headstone255@yahoo.com> wrote:

>In my retirement, I have some ideas on language
>development, essentially interactive as was BASIC
>and FORTH but running at the speed of compiled
>code, and the 64 bit ARM instruction set looks
>like a good starter.

MPE's VFX Forth family is a Forth compiler that generates
optimised native code. It is available for most operating
systems and deep embedded use. ARM64 support is coming.

Stephen


-- 
Stephen Pelc, stephen@vfxforth.com <<< NEW
MicroProcessor Engineering Ltd - More Real, Less Time
133 Hill Lane, Southampton SO15 5AF, England
tel: +44 (0)23 8063 1441, +44 (0)78 0390 3612
web: http://www.mpeforth.com - free VFX Forth downloads

[toc] | [prev] | [next] | [standalone]


#26041

Fromgareth evans <headstone255@yahoo.com>
Date2021-01-22 16:17 +0000
Message-ID<ruetrg$smh$1@dont-email.me>
In reply to#26038
On 22/01/2021 15:53, Stephen Pelc wrote:
> On Fri, 22 Jan 2021 13:22:21 +0000, gareth evans
> <headstone255@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> In my retirement, I have some ideas on language
>> development, essentially interactive as was BASIC
>> and FORTH but running at the speed of compiled
>> code, and the 64 bit ARM instruction set looks
>> like a good starter.
>
> MPE's VFX Forth family is a Forth compiler that generates
> optimised native code. It is available for most operating
> systems and deep embedded use. ARM64 support is coming.

... and can you take the compiled executing code and continue
to develop it interactively? (For which I do not mean
returning to a source file, editing it and then recompiling)

My thinking is that for any interactive program, there has to be
some form of tokenisation to represent the source program, so
why should not those tokens be the carefully-chosen unambiguous
machine code instructions that execute the code?

I am sure that this is not an original idea and that it has been
done many times over the years what with everyman and his
aunts, uncles and family pets all having a go at computer programming,
but it is an idea with which I dabbled back in 1986 and that now I
have the spare brain capacity to continue with!

ie, considerable exhaustion resulted then with intensive programming
in the daily round of my job and then attempting even more programming
in the evenings.

1986? Half a lifetime ago, I being 70 next month!   :-)


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#26044

Fromstephen@mpeforth.com (Stephen Pelc)
Date2021-01-22 17:25 +0000
Message-ID<600b0901.9228484@news.eternal-september.org>
In reply to#26041
On Fri, 22 Jan 2021 16:17:51 +0000, gareth evans
<headstone255@yahoo.com> wrote:

>My thinking is that for any interactive program, there has to be
>some form of tokenisation to represent the source program, so
>why should not those tokens be the carefully-chosen unambiguous
>machine code instructions that execute the code?

The compiled form includes the names and the compiled code. 
That's all.

Yes, you can keep on developing interactively. The tokens you
need are probably the source code. The compiler is very, very fast,
on most PC machines over 1 million lines of code per minute.

Stephen


-- 
Stephen Pelc, stephen@vfxforth.com <<< NEW
MicroProcessor Engineering Ltd - More Real, Less Time
133 Hill Lane, Southampton SO15 5AF, England
tel: +44 (0)23 8063 1441, +44 (0)78 0390 3612
web: http://www.mpeforth.com - free VFX Forth downloads

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#26048

FromScott Alfter <scott@alfter.diespammersdie.us>
Date2021-01-22 22:14 +0000
Message-ID<R6IOH.63$vO6.5@fx47.iad>
In reply to#26024
In article <20210122093310.2a6e8bc8@jresid.jretrading.com>,
Joe  <joe@jretrading.com> wrote:
>Indeed. I've yet to find a need for more than eight bits in a
>microcontroller, along with a maximum of 2KB of RAM. If I need more
>power, it's a RPi.

3D printers can definitely benefit from 32-bit microcontrollers, especially
if you're going beyond the usual Cartesian or CoreXY kinematics.

  _/_
 / v \ Scott Alfter (remove the obvious to send mail)
(IIGS( https://alfter.us/           Top-posting!
 \_^_/                              >What's the most annoying thing on Usenet?

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#26016 — Re: ??3.60

FromJim Jackson <jj@franjam.org.uk>
Date2021-01-21 22:04 +0000
SubjectRe: ??3.60
Message-ID<slrns0jujp.57i.jj@iridium.wf32df>
In reply to#26011
On 2021-01-21, gareth evans <headstone255@yahoo.com> wrote:
> On 21/01/2021 17:21, Chris Green wrote:
>> Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> wrote:
>>> New Pico Pi for ??3.60
>>>
>>> <https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-pico>
>>
>> Hmm, not a real Pi in any sort of way at all, it's a microcontroller
>> with no OS.  It's only a Pi because it's made by the same company.
>>
>
> ... and it's a great disappointment to me that it's not a 64-bit processor

:-)

(assuming you meant it as a joke)

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#26014

FromEli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com>
Date2021-01-21 21:03 +0000
Message-ID<eli$2101211602@qaz.wtf>
In reply to#26005
In comp.sys.raspberry-pi, Chris Green  <cl@isbd.net> wrote:
> Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> wrote:
>> New Pico Pi for £3.60
>> <https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-pico>
> Hmm, not a real Pi in any sort of way at all, it's a microcontroller
> with no OS.  It's only a Pi because it's made by the same company.

Looks like it aims to be an Arduino competitor, so yeah, it's a
computer, but not in the same "runs a desktop" sense as the others in
the "Pi" lineage. 

Elijah
------
it even looks like an Arduino

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#26027 — Re: £3.60

FromTheo <theom+news@chiark.greenend.org.uk>
Date2021-01-22 10:38 +0000
SubjectRe: £3.60
Message-ID<uoo*pRQay@news.chiark.greenend.org.uk>
In reply to#26014
Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> wrote:
> Looks like it aims to be an Arduino competitor, so yeah, it's a
> computer, but not in the same "runs a desktop" sense as the others in
> the "Pi" lineage. 

I don't really get the market positioning of this.  'Arduino' is these days
a programming interface, which runs on a variety of platforms from the
original 8-bit ATMega to the x86 Intel Quark and MIPS chips running Linux. 
Users have been gradually moving from ATMega to ARM-based microcontrollers
like the STM32 on boards like the Blue Pill.

The Blue Pill doesn't have first party Arduino support, but the part is
widely available for cheap.  The RP2040 has slightly better specs, but
there's a whole range of STM32s to choose from if you're willing to pay
slightly more.  The STM32 is also widely available for production from the
usual distributors, while it remains to be seen whether you can buy the
RP2040 in production volumes from distributors, or whether you have to do
something 'special' (ie painful and awkward for a manufacturer).

Also the 'teaching' market for microcontrollers is a bit crowded, with all
the Arduinos, the BBC Micro:bit, as well as all the vendor platforms.

I can see the wish to own the ecosystem, as they do by being single-supplier
of the Pi SoC.  Maybe the software ecosystem will develop around this like
it has around Arduino, such that it's a no-brainer to use in a project
because of the high quality libraries and documentation available.  But
hardware-wise there's nothing particularly earthshattering here.

Theo

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#26033 — Re: £3.60

From"A. Dumas" <alexandre@dumas.fr.invalid>
Date2021-01-22 16:13 +0100
SubjectRe: £3.60
Message-ID<600aeb7d$0$11334$e4fe514c@news.xs4all.nl>
In reply to#26027
Op 22-01-2021 om 11:38 schreef Theo:
> Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> wrote:
>> Looks like it aims to be an Arduino competitor, so yeah, it's a
>> computer, but not in the same "runs a desktop" sense as the others in
>> the "Pi" lineage.
> 
> I don't really get the market positioning of this.

1. CHEAP without sending your money to China.
2. Really good performance with high clock, two cores (is this unique 
for M0 boards?) and two PIO banks (killer feature).
3. Last but not least: fabulously extensive & comprehensive & high 
quality documentation.

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#26046

FromEli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com>
Date2021-01-22 20:04 +0000
Message-ID<eli$2101221504@qaz.wtf>
In reply to#26033
In comp.sys.raspberry-pi, A. Dumas <alexandre@dumas.fr.invalid> wrote:
> 1. CHEAP without sending your money to China.

Where is it made? I could not find that. I see "designed in UK", but
that sould like Apple's "designed in California".

> 2. Really good performance with high clock, two cores (is this unique 
> for M0 boards?) and two PIO banks (killer feature).

I don't know enough to comment here.

> 3. Last but not least: fabulously extensive & comprehensive & high 
> quality documentation.

The documentation I've seen does look first rate. Still, competing
against Arduino with the wealth of existing code and experience will be an
uphill fight.

Elijah
------
only started using Arduino in the last six months

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#26049

From"A. Dumas" <alexandre@dumas.fr.invalid>
Date2021-01-22 23:39 +0100
Message-ID<600b542e$0$11334$e4fe514c@news.xs4all.nl>
In reply to#26046
Op 22-01-2021 om 21:04 schreef Eli the Bearded:
> In comp.sys.raspberry-pi, A. Dumas <alexandre@dumas.fr.invalid> wrote:
>> 1. CHEAP without sending your money to China.
> 
> Where is it made? I could not find that. I see "designed in UK", but
> that sould like Apple's "designed in California".

Sony Inazawa, Japan
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-silicon-pico-now-on-sale/#comment-1549758

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