Dspic33CK and FFT routines

[JonW]

Les, No insult taken at all.

You're spot on about the forced obsolescence — the Pico progression is annoying. Still, it's no different from Microchip's extensive device portfolio and its recent entry into Arm, but the RPX devices are supposedly backwards compatible and add more power.
But for what I'm doing with the RP2354, it's not really bloat. We use Padauk 5-cent flash MCUs for simple stacks. I get your walnut-sledgehammer point for simple projects but would you pay more for a smaller device?? The RP2354 with integrated flash is now £4.90 for 5 units! That's less than a pound! The PICO2W is about £6 for a fully built wifi enabled board...

(see https://thepihut.com/products/raspberry-pi-rp2354a-microcontroller)

I need the PIO state machines and DMA for 125Msps waveform playback to the DAC, that's real hardware you can't get on smaller devices without external timing support. You get dual Cortex-M33 cores, USB, all the standard peripherals, 12 PIO state machines, 512KB SRAM, 2MB flash, genuine overclocking headroom (378MHz proven), and all for the price. The DMA is genuinely superior — engineers are ditching STM32H7 boards for the RP2350 because the PIO+DMA combo is that much cleaner. Nothing on the market touches that real-time I/O capability at this price point.
Plus, you get access to CMSIS libraries — hand-optimised assembly for the Cortex-M33 core, not generic C bloat. The compiler integration with VSCode is slick, no HAL crap or a thousand lines of code to instantiate libraries either, for example, the USB libraries are a breeze to code in C, and I tend to think that's real value, not marketing.

I have been using CCS USB libraries before this; they are good, but are limited on too few devices, and nowhere near as simple as this little guy. 

CDC read and write..

Code Select Expand

#include <stdio.h>
#include "pico/stdlib.h"

int main() {
    stdio_init_all();
    char buffer[64];
   
    printf("Enter some text:\n");
   
    while (1) {
        if (fgets(buffer, sizeof(buffer), stdin) != NULL) {
            printf("You entered: %s", buffer);
        }
    }
   
    return 0;
}

and a Cmake and you're done!  There are not enough pages on the forum to get the STM USB running HaHa

[top204]

I've just ordered a PICO2W Jon, because I have found some open-source 8-bit computer simulators for it. Especially, the lovely Atari 800 and the Commodore 64 and the ZX Spectrum.

I'll need to try and dig out my VGA monitor for it.

Best regards
Les

[JonW]

HaHa Nice!!  The PIO is pretty unique for fast emulation of Roms etc

You could always build a positron compiler for it!!!