Can you make a Picosystem with regular Rasp Pi Pico?

Support
1

I’m new to all of this pico stuff, coming from Arduino. Can we use a regular Rasp Pi Pico and add peripherals like vga, gamepad, etc., to make a diy picosystem?

I like what I see with the Picosystem, but would like to add my own peripheral components such as a larger screen or vga, and costume controller gamepads, etc.

Sincere thanks for any advice,
TonyAme

2

Have you seen this?
PicoVision (Pico W Aboard) – PicoVision + Accessory Kit (pimoroni.com)
Might be a good starting point.

3

I’d second that - possibly pairing with an I2C gamepad to save yourself having to make sense of bluetooth on a PicoW :-)

4

Thank you. What is the difference between the Regular Rasp Pico and the Picosystem? Is it just the installed firmware on the Picosystem? (and the peripherals?)

Can I install the picosystem firmware on a Regular Rasp Pico and program it using the libraries made for picosystem?

Sincere thanks,
TonyAme

5

Your going to want to use the PicoVision firmware. I would think anyway? I don’t own one and would have to read up on how it works to figure out what firmware the stock PR2040 needs to talk to other RP2040 that does the video stuff.

6

From memory the PicoSystem just has a regular Pico at it’s heart so yes, in theory if you got all matching peripherals things would be much the same - that said, much PicoSystem dev tends to take place using the 32blit API stuff, which supports an (ever?) growing range of hardware.

The PicoVision is a whole lot more complicated (a pair of Picos with a chunk of shared memory and a lot of witchcraft), although ultimately what you’re programming on is “just” a regular PicoW and a fairly standard PicoGraphics API to drive the display.

7

Ok, I see. Thanks for the info. I appreciate it.

TonyAme