[HN Gopher] Fuzix on a Raspberry Pi Pico
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       Fuzix on a Raspberry Pi Pico
        
       Author : ewpratten
       Score  : 107 points
       Date   : 2025-12-15 06:31 UTC (5 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (ewpratten.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (ewpratten.com)
        
       | incanus77 wrote:
       | Fuzix came preintalled as one of the options on my ClockworkPi
       | PicoCalc, which has really been the most fun iteration of the
       | Pico that I've played with yet. I've also been enjoying uLisp and
       | MMBasic on it. The keyboard is quite good.
        
       | t43562 wrote:
       | The first computer I touched, and I'm not that old, had 1kb RAM
       | (ZX81) so the pico is a supercomputer next to that. It has all
       | happened gradually but in a way I feel a little bit sorry for the
       | whippersnappers that haven't experienced the incredible
       | advancements. Looking back is different to remembering how one
       | looked forward and how the actuality beat one's wildest dreams.
       | 
       | There are still older people than me who experienced an even
       | steeper curve but I hope that my daughter will enjoy the same
       | thing - to live in a massively better world than the one she
       | started in.
       | 
       | It's not better in the human ways - still lots of fighting and
       | evil - but it's great to be able to stay in touch with one's
       | family over huge distances and to be able to make boredom vanish
       | at the touch of a button, to want to fix something and instantly
       | get 100 videos of how to do it. To find some bit of code
       | extremely boring to write and to get a machine to write it.
        
         | regularfry wrote:
         | It's kind of crazy how much compute the Pico has. If you ignore
         | the dedicated 3d hardware, it's comparable to the original
         | Playstation.
        
       | Tepix wrote:
       | Very cool, happy to find out about Fuzix running on these dirt
       | cheap SoCs (I paid 0.57EUR per RP2040-Zero clone earlier this
       | year!) And someone is even working on adding TCP/IP. I'm assuming
       | there's no memory protection between processes due to no MMU. It
       | would be great to be able to use the USB port for the serial
       | connection instead of having to connect pins for a serial port
       | connection.
       | 
       | There's also https://github.com/tvlad1234/pico-rv32ima for people
       | who are into this kind of stuff, but it requires adding SPI RAM.
        
         | hxbdbebdb wrote:
         | How did you manage to pay that low, that's less then I pay per
         | rp2040 MCU without any peripheral
        
           | Tepix wrote:
           | It was on AliExpress in the coin store. With shipping.
        
       | verytrivial wrote:
       | This port of Fuzix to the Pico was done by David Given. In 2021
       | he also screen-recorded and narrated basically his entire effort
       | porting Fuzix to similarly-sized ESP8266. Really very interesting
       | if you are in to that sort of thing!
       | 
       | https://cowlark.com/2021-02-09-esp8266-fuzix/index.html
        
       | exasperaited wrote:
       | The Pico series is, IMO, the truest implementation of the
       | Raspberry Pi Foundation's broader goal to make physical computing
       | accessible to education. I am so glad that this is now such a
       | major focus for both the foundation and the trading company (a
       | pivot that was accelerated by the pandemic chip shortage)
       | 
       | The RP2350 is an awesome device but hypothetically it feels like
       | the _next_ one is where things will really kick off, because
       | there likely won't be a 90s computer it can't emulate, and it
       | feels clear from what Eben Upton says that retrocomputing,
       | historical device education and simple 90s-style computing
       | environments are part of the picture, and that absolutely dirt-
       | cheap simplified modern "home computer" environments on these
       | devices could have value to them.
        
         | 1-6 wrote:
         | +1 to simple machines.
         | 
         | As an analogy and anecdote, I've learned a lot about cars
         | through RC racing as a teen. Building differentials, CVDs and
         | Universal Joints, hydraulic shocks towers, and tuning radios
         | really gave me the baseline to know and fix cars as an adult.
         | 
         | I still lack a very basic understanding of computers which has
         | somewhat neutered what I'm capable of doing today. I'm now
         | sorta getting back into learning these things but it's kinda
         | hard when it is limited to weekends and holidays. I hope RPI
         | keeps going with their vision as a publicly traded company.
         | Kids need to learn these things.
        
       | 1-6 wrote:
       | Thanks for this writeup, I'm going to try myself as I have a few
       | Raspberry Pi Picos laying around myself. I'm going to try to
       | create a Google Colab Notebook for my virtual environment
       | instead.
        
       | Western0 wrote:
       | 2350 have better flashing system
        
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       (page generated 2025-12-20 23:01 UTC)