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Forum Index : Microcontroller and PC projects : I just wanted to say thanks
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boznz Newbie  Joined: 09/01/2026 Location: New ZealandPosts: 4 |
I stumbled upon the PicoMite and this forum by accident when I was looking for a simple way of testing a new PCB I had made over Christmas, it was a personal project to repurpose an old Pioneer amplifier board. I created the account here to specifically say thanks to all the guys who wrote the PicoMite system, and the forum posts here that helped me get to the end a lot quicker than I would normally have done. The project was nothing exciting, just a replacement motherboard to change the use of a broken pioneer VSX-520K surround-sound amplifier to a audio jukebox specifically programmed for playing all my CD's which I ripped to a SD Card. I included a PICO2 in the design as it looked grunty enough to play MP3's and I had a clone board I bought at launch lying around. - I bought this board to use a new client project last year, however this coincided with a shortage of RP2350 chips so it was never used and was doing nothing. Testing the new various parts of the new board was actually quite easy using MMBASIC and I was going to then load up VSCode and use the SDK to write it "properly" but realised I actually had a whole program which just worked, and worked as well if not better than if I had written it in C. My blog post is here => https://rodyne.com/?p=3380 , I also wrote it up for hackaday so maybe it will get a couple more people excited. Anyway thanks again, to everyone. Edited 2026-01-12 07:00 by boznz |
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Grogster Admin Group  Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9910 |
Welcome to the forums.  Feel free to ask anything - newbies are welcome here, so no-one will give you a hard time for asking newbie questions, unlike some forums. Just be aware that one of the forum rules is no politics are to be discussed - that usually turns into offensive flame-wars, so politics are just outright banned. Other then that, I hope to see more of your posts on what you are doing!  Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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Geoffg Guru  Joined: 06/06/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 3348 |
Interesting blog. You certainly are big on reuse and fix rather than simply buying new, The only part that I struggled with was "I mostly play CD’s when I’m sat in the bath". The mind boggles! The idea behind the original Picomite (and the Micromite before that) was to make it super easy to automate some function without being a top programmer, and it is great that you used it for just such a purpose. Geoff Edited 2026-01-12 16:43 by Geoffg Geoff Graham - http://geoffg.net |
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| Grogster Admin Group Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9910 |
Perhaps he's only using battery-powered devices!  I really hope so.  BATH.... Edited 2026-01-12 17:12 by Grogster Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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| boznz Newbie Joined: 09/01/2026 Location: New ZealandPosts: 4 |
Hi guys, Thanks for the welcome. I cant believe I am the only person who hasn't wired his hi-fi speakers into his bathroom, but I did have the luxury of wiring my own house when I was building it, and I guess Bluetooth has made it all a bit irrelevant these days. I was surprised how easy PicoMite was to pick up and use, I was so used to getting down and dirty with datasheets, MAKE files and SDK's that I forgot how easy it all used to be, especially when you achieve the exact same results in the end. Anyway I have a few personal projects I would like to finish (including another re-purposing of an old piece of equipment) so I guess I will lurking in your small corner of the internet from time to time, and using MMBASIC a bit more in the future. |
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Mixtel90 Guru Joined: 05/10/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 8667 |
That's a lovely project in your blog! Well done. :) Yes, that's the beauty of using an interpreter rather than a compiler, development time can be much faster as the think-program-test loop is far faster. Coupled with the built-in editor in MMBasic, which puts the cursor on the line that has an error, it can be really fast. Of course, when you think about it, we used to be quite happy with a system clock of 1MHz for most embedded processing (e.g. a 4MHz Z80). MMBasic on a 150MHz RP2040 is usually faster than compiled code on those systems. :) Mick Zilog Inside! nascom.info for Nascom & Gemini Preliminary MMBasic docs & my PCB designs |
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