I have been in discussions with a coder who goes by the handle of Lunarc3 and he has made a preliminary port of MMBasic to the Cardputer ADV .  If you have not heard of this it is a tiny battery powered computer that manages to pack a 1.14" LCD, 56 key QWERTY keyboard, SD card slot and much more in a tiny package the size of a credit card (but thicker).

The price is also small at US$30.



The port has a lot of work left to do but it is a promising start.



His current reddit post is: https://www.reddit.com/r/CardPuter/comments/1u23w1l/release_mmbasic_port_for_cardputeradv/
and his GitHub page with bin only is: https://github.com/lunarc3/MMBasic_cardputer
When the port is stable and complete we may publish the source.

Watch this space.

Geoff

Amazing  

I like the M5Stack products (I have the M5Stack Tough)

I was going to use it with Annex32 but then I learned about the license restriction.

I see the ESP32 + PicoMite as a killer combination  

hi Geoff,
   a very cool port, the only problem is the display size is way too small for my not-so-great eyesight these days! now if the Cardputer folks could come up with a hardware design similar to the Sharp PC-1262 pocket computer, that would be just perfect...



i see the Cardputer ADV has a set of pins brought out on the top edge of the housing, i wonder if a plug-in dot-matrix LCD display that folded down over the keyboard could be added there?


cheers,
rob   :-)

I use a bunch of M5 stack stuff. Great quality products. But I don't have a cardputer ... yet.

I think I'm going to have to remedy that situation now  

This would be fun to tinker with.

Sounds promising. I have the original M5 Cardputer, which is very similar - same ESP32-S3, 1.14 inch screen,  micro SD card slot, WiFi. Keyboard. The ADV model added LoRa, external antenna, improved audio.

Hopefully all Cardputers are supported by MMBasic

I think it is great, but a gadget.
Buy it, show off with your friends, and put it in the box of forgotten toys.

I learned this the hard way owning 2 rp2040 geeks. Very rarely they get used. Too small, too limited.

My eyes cant see, and most likely cant type with my aging thick vingers.

Sorry Geoff…. Wasted on me.

If anything then picocalc.

Volhout
Edited 2026-06-26 05:26 by Volhout

  Volhout said  

I think it is great, but a gadget.
[...] My eyes cant see, and most likely cant type with my aging thick vingers[...]

i'd not be quite so quick to dismiss it, from the same manufacturer and in same family of devices there is their "Tab5" for us$60:
https://shop.m5stack.com/products/m5stack-tab5-iot-development-kit-esp32-p4?variant=46276989255937
along with a us$11 clip-on keyboard:
https://shop.m5stack.com/products/keyboard-for-tab5?variant=49210670940417

this combination gives you a 1280x720 screen capable of 80 columns of text, along with a small but perhaps-more-accessible keyboard. once a Cardputer port is complete, these other variants are much closer to being a possibility:



also, i presume that one of the ideas behind the Cardputer is that once a project is running on it, you can just unplug the ESP32-S3 module from it and plug the bare module into your own custom carrier board. much like what many folks did (and still do) with the MX170/micromite mk2.


cheers,
rob   :-)
Edited 2026-06-26 06:44 by robert.rozee

Thanks for the tip.

The tablet uses a ESP P4 (dual RISC-V @ 400MHz). And does not seem to be "modular" in this sense. But it is a neat product. And it has expansion ports.
- M5 bus
- RS485
- "Stamp expansion pads". Maybe that is for the ESP-C6 wireless module.

So you may be able to do something practical with it. They show it on the wall, working as a home automation terminal, maybe controlling the air conditioning.

If that could be made to run mmbasic.. but there is much in it MMBasic does not support. So that is a big challenge.

Volhout
Edited 2026-06-26 17:08 by Volhout

  Volhout said  

[...] but there is much in it MMBasic does not support. So that is a big challenge

it is not necessary for mmbasic to support every feature of the hardware that it is running on.

consider the relative failure of mmbasic on the RPi Linux SBCs - in good part this was due to a desire for mmbasic to be able to 'do everything' and 'run on every RPi' (from the original right up to the RPi3). if the goal had instead been restricted to (for example) just running on the zero/A+, and just supporting: file I/O to the onboard SD card, HDMI frame buffer video output, USB keyboard, and rudimentary control of the 40-pin connector, then we would have had a pretty nice little $15 1980's machine but with near infinite RAM (256Mb) and that ran blindingly fast.

likewise: for the Tab5+keyboard, all we need is for mmbasic to access the screen, keyboard, SD card, and (possibly) rudimentary control of the exposed I/O pins.


cheers,
rob   :-)
Edited 2026-06-27 01:08 by robert.rozee

this is worth a look (i'm just interested in the hardware), if nothing else to see the form-factor:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=280aRG05qug

it is Cardputer ADV with what looks like a 5" 480x320 external display hinged at the back edge. this should give 53 columns of text at 9 pixels wide per character, or 48 columns at 10 pixels wide. a really big bonus would be if the mmbasic editor were swapped out for one that supported horizontal scrolling and/or seamless continuation lines, at which point having less than 80 columns of text wouldn't matter.

i'm getting a little excited to see where this mmbasic port goes...


cheers,
rob   :-)
Edited 2026-06-29 01:55 by robert.rozee

  Quote  

if the mmbasic editor were swapped out for one that supported horizontal scrolling

The editor in the latest 6.03.00 release candidates does