Land Boards Launches a New PiPicoMite Carrier to Turn the Raspberry Pi Pico Into an MMBasic PC

Land Boards' Doug Gilliland, best known for the FabGL project, has launched a carrier board for the Raspberry Pi Pico designed to turn it into a "PiPicoMite" computer running MMBasic.

"[It's] based on the PicoMiteVGA reference design," Gilliland explains of his latest board design. "It's really cool with a bit of retro and modern together in one design. And the Raspberry Pi Pico is inexpensive and widely available."

The third PiPicoMite board Gilliland has designed, after earlier versions with a 16-bit port expander and 32-bit input/output (IO) on a DB-37 connector in the first and second revisions, the new carrier board accepts a Raspberry Pi Pico or the new Raspberry Pi Pico W and offers a VGA video output at 640×480 monochrome or 320×240 16-color.

For inputs, there's a PS/2 keyboard port compatible with standard 5V keyboards; for storage, a full-size SD card slot supporting up to 32GB cards. There's even a 3.5mm jack for analog stereo audio, generated using a pulse-width modulation (PWM) output on the Raspberry Pi Pico with an analog filter to improve quality.

The main reason for the board's existence: to serve as a means to get the most out of Geoff Graham's MMBasic, a Microsoft BASIC-compatible programming language with floating-point support, 64-bit integers and strings, long variable names, multi-dimension floats, and performance on the Raspberry Pi Pico approaching 100,000 lines per second — plus support for embedded C programs if you need something even faster.

Gilliland's PiPicoMite is now available on the Land Boards Tindie store at $12 PCB-only or $24 assembled and tested but without Raspberry Pi Pico, and is designed to slot into a standard extruded aluminum enclosure. More information on MMBasic on the Raspberry Pi Pico, and Graham's earlier Maximite and Micromite single-board computers, can be found on the project page.