Uri Shaked Is Developing a JavaScript Raspberry Pi Pico Emulator — in a Live-Coding Video Series

Written in JavaScript, Shaked's emulator for the Raspberry Pi Pico and RP2040 is to be developed in a series of live-coding sessions.

The Raspberry Pi Pico may only cost $4, but developer Uri Shaked is working on an emulator for the device which will be available for free — and is live-coding it, in JavaScript, in a series of video broadcasts.

Launched last week, the Raspberry Pi Pico is the first microcontroller development board from Raspberry Pi — and houses its first in-house silicon, the Arm Cortex-M0+-based RP2040. At $4, the device has proven popular — but for those who would rather have a play without spending any cash, Shaked's upcoming JavaScript-based Pico emulator is going to be of considerable interest.

"[This is a] series of livestreams where we'll be coding a Pi Pico simulator from scratch," Shaked explains. "Expect deep-dives into the datasheet, head-scratching and code-staring, a lot of frustration, and maybe a blinking LED at the end. You'll get to see my process for building MCU simulations, drawn from my previous experience working on AVR8js, an open-source AVR8 simulator written in JavaScript."

"For the first livestream [...] we'll use the following documents: Getting started with Raspberry Pi Pico guide (mostly for SDK installation instructions); RP2040 Datasheet; Arm v6-M Architecture Reference Manual. We'll also use the Pico SDK and Pico Examples repo."

The aim of the project: The development of a software emulator which will accept programs written and compiled for the Raspberry Pi Pico and run them entirely on a host device, no microcontroller required. As well as being a great tool for experimentation, the resulting simulator could also form the basis of a browser-based integrated development environment — allowing programs to be written and tested ahead of being flashed to a real Raspberry Pi Pico.

Shaked is broadcasting the first in the planned series of live-coding sessions on his YouTube channel at 2pm EST (11AM PST) on Tuesday, January 25th. Additional details can be found on the Hackaday.io project page.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
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