Clockwork Pi Launches the PicoCalc Kit, a Raspberry Pi Pico-Powered Handheld From "The Golden Age"
Designed for those who found the company's earlier GameSHell, DevTerm, and uConsole a little modern, the PicoCalc is a loving throwback.
Clockwork Pi, creator of the GameSHell, DevTerm, and uConsole portable computing devices, has unveiled its latest design: the PicoCalc, a Raspberry Pi Pico-powered handheld designed to evoke "the golden age of computing."
"Code in BASIC, explore the magic of Lisp, taste the elegance of Unix, play retro games and digital music all in just 260KB memory," Clockwork Pi writes of its newest creation. "In that golden age, BASIC made programming accessible to everyone and powered legendary machines like the Apple II, Commodore 64, and IBM PC. Now, with PicoCalc, you can write BASIC code like the pioneers anytime, anywhere, learn about the roots of modern computing with a retro UNIX clone, and discover what makes Lisp so unique, even enjoy MP3s and play retro games on minimal hardware."
The PicoCalc is relatively compact for an all-in-one portable computer, though large for the calculator device its name implies. Inside the custom housing is the company's latest board design, the clockworkPi v2.0 — designed, this time around, to host a Raspberry Pi Pico or Raspberry Pi Pico W microcontroller board, rather than a fully-fledged computer-on-module as with previous devices.
Using the first-generation Raspberry Pi Pico means the gadget is limited to two 32-bit Arm Cortex-M0+ cores running at a stock 133MHz — though recently given an official specs boost up to 200MHz via an optional compiler setting — and just 264kB of RAM. That might not sound like much, but the devices Clockwork Pi names as inspiration weren't any more well-specified: the Apple II and Commodore 64 were based around the single-core eight-bit MOS Technology 6502 and just 48kB and 64kB of memory respectively, while the original IBM Personal Computer 5150 launched with a single-core eight-bit Intel 8088 processor and a maximum of 256kB of RAM.
To help alleviate memory capacity concerns, the carrier board, which accepts Raspberry Pi Pico board with 0.1" pin headers fitted, includes 8MB pseudo-static RAM (PSRAM) and uses a full-size SD Card slot for storage. There's an on-board STMicroelectronics STM32 coprocessor, with unused general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins brought out to a header on the side next to those of the Raspberry Pi Pico's RP2040 microcontroller. A 320×320 4" IPS color display is connected over an SPI bus, with a rubber QWERTY keyboard underneath. There are dual amplified speakers above the screen, and everything is powered by a pair of 18650 lithium-ion batteries.
For those who need more power, Clockwork Pi says the design is also compatible with the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 family — which swaps out the older Arm Cortex-M0+ cores for the user's choice of Cortex-M33 or free and open-source Hazard3 RISC-V cores running at 150MHz and near-doubles the RAM to 520kB while doubling the on-board flash storage to 4MB. "Compared to the [Raspberry Pi] Pico 1 series," the company says, "the Pico 2 series may have better performance, higher memory and larger storage space, and may be more suitable for RTOS [Real-Time Operating Systems] and game emulator development."
On the software side — which has never been Clockwork Pi's strong suit, the company having launched its previous DevTerm and uConsole devices with partially-functional Linux builds that are rarely if ever updated — the company claims the PicoCalc has been tested with interactive BASIC and Lisp programming environments, a UNIX System 7 clone, as an MP3 player, and with firmware developed in C/C++, Python, Lua, Golang, JavaScript, and Rust, plus the official Raspberry Pi Pico Software Development Kit (SDK) and the Arduino IDE.
The PicoCalc kit is available to order now from the Clockwork Pi store at a considerably lower price than its more powerful stablemates: the kit, which includes everything you need bar batteries including a Raspberry Pi Pico with pre-soldered headers, is priced at just $75. The company has pledged to make the board schematics available under an open hardware license, but at the time of writing it had yet to release the designs.
