there does not seem to be any instructions or information around the pico vga demo board that i can find - no guides or demos (beyond raspberry pi’s foundation own).
For example:
Why the extra usb power connector and when should you use that or the pico onboard connector?
What does the run button do? Is it a reset button?
Can you use head phones with the audio or line out for testing
what resolution and frequency vga display is required for an image
what do the a b and c buttons do? Are they user code usable?
which of the pi foundation demos will run?
I would have thought there would be pimoroni demos and example code e.g. for access the sd card etc
If this information is available can you please point me in the right direction - I am no stranger to controllers but usually thats with some form of documentation to access the devices on the board
Have a look at the Pico hardware design guide. The VGA board is fully documented there.
I think the Pimoroni design follows this mostly.
I beleive the only examples are in the pico-playground directory. Some info in the repository GitHub - raspberrypi/pico-playground
Having siad that I have built some of the VGA examples and dropped onto the board but so far I am not getting any VGA output so would be interested if you have any sucsess! Going to try to find another VGA lead and also solder up another Pico to test. Will report back.
your link does not contain anything with regard to the VGA demo board - it is accessible in c++ only according to their website where as what you have linked only pointers to micropython examples for other boards.
Thanks for the pdf link for the vga, but thats only part of the answers we need - in particular pimoroni own examples on how to use their board would be favorite!! (or at least which examples show which aspects of the board)
Hi shifter
The hardware guide gives details for all of the board design not just the VGA. There are detailed descriptions of power options, audio circuits, user buttones etc. BTW the run button saves you unplugging USB to reprogram.
Hi, I agree it would be nice for Pimoroni to at least let us know which of the SDK examples thay have tested. So fare I can only get some of the audio examples to work. I cant get anything out of the VGA at all.
I have tried these examples from the Pico-Playground directory
Sound
Popcorn - get nothing
USB sound card - PC recognises pico as usb sound card and i get low quality audio out of PWM jack.
Sine_wave_i2c - Get a sine wave out of the PWM jack
Sine_Wave_PWM - Nothing
VGA
Demo1 - Nothing
hscroll_dma_tiles - Nothing
sprite_demo - Nothing
texmode -nothing
So after a bit of digging on the raspberry pi Pico forum it turns out you have to use a differend board configuration file to get the correct pin mappings for the Demos.
From there
“Just a reminder for folks playing with the VGA Board. If you’re building code for the VGA Board remember to pass -DPICO_BOARD=vgaboard to CMake. The default pin settings, which are for Pico, aren’t going to be correct. See Unable to run demo's on Pico Demo Board · Issue #9 · raspberrypi/pico-playground · GitHub. If you have everything connected up and you’re not seeing any VGA output, this is probably the problem.”
So, from the pico_playground build directory just run cmake -D"PICO_BOARD=myboard" …
After this I now have VGA output and proper audio from the DAC output.
Looks like some one at Pimoroni has updated the sales page now with the link to the pdf and the cmake compile -D as you mention above bobtrex.
Also having up-to-date version of extras is necessary apparently. I have a shell script now that does a refresh and rebuild of all folders and examples as there seems to be changes on a regular basis.
you didn’t build it right, there is a flag with cmake, you add it and all will work, USB sound card uses dac so yeah, add the pico vga flag and it’ll work(sorry for the bump, thought I would put the info out here)
*“Another question - is Pico VGA compatible with Pico 2 board ? Nothing on the Pimoroni site.”
Raspberry PI have updated the “Pico Playground repository” for the RP2350 so I would say yes. The only issue I would see is the “User buttons”. If no monitor is selected the “Hardware design guide” suggests using the internal pulldowns. This may not work due to “Errata 9” of the RP2350.
Thanks for suggestion, as I can see discussion about Errata 9 is still ongoing, but if GPIO are used for output should be no problem. I hope that Pimoroni will release Pico Demo XL based on RP2350B, so lack of pins is not a problem. We could have 24-bit VGA and DB9 joystick port for instance - great for retro emulation. For now I have ordered Pico 2 and another Pico Demo for test. ZXSpectrum emulator from post above is nice example for Pico Demo board - still checking features.