The Pico brings something to the table that those alternatives do not: PIO peripherals. Those let you take most hardware protocols, including non-standard ones, and turn them into something that is supported in hardware by the microcontroller. (The PIO libraries for support of addressable LEDs are a good example.) Not bad for a board that costs $4. At some point it might make sense to engineer its RP2040 microcontroller (or the next generation RP2350) directly into the zBitx design to shave a bit more off the build cost; the chip costs less than $1 (though it also needs some support parts like flash memory), but simply adding a Pico board made it possible for HF Signals to respond to the display issue more quickly and keep the design on track.
On Mon, Mar 10, 2025 at 9:22?AM Shawn Rutledge K7IHZ / LB2JK via <social=
[email protected]> wrote:
In general, GPIO is not the best way to interface a display IMO: it might lead you away from being able to use the GPU, and even worse, maybe you’ll waste cycles with bit-banging. ?(It’s been that way since the first pi: they gave us a machine with a middling CPU and ok-for-its-time GPU, but people mostly neglected the latter and pretended that it’s a high-power microcontroller or low-powered PC.? Most of the software could have been better all along.) ?Of course in this case we can just say the pico is acting as the GPU for this little display: the main CPU can use some sort of language to tell the display what to show, and sending that out might be more efficient than actual rendering.? That leaves the main pi’s GPU free for doing SDR acceleration (well it could, probably won’t though), running the external HDMI display and so on.? But the wifi and bluetooth also seem redundant at first glance (when the radio and display are in the same box).? Setting it up as a remote head was mentioned: two more ways to connect it then, besides the gpio.
I suspect it will ship with some sort of one-off display protocol just for the zbitx (and then how often will its firmware need updating as the feature set improves?), but it’s a long-term interest of mine to come up with a more reusable remote-UI protocol that scales really well.
Alternatively, I would ask , why a PICO and not an ESP32 ? Cheaper also !
Regards
VU2UPX?
On Mon, 10 Mar, 2025, 5:47 pm Richard Neese via , <n4cnr.ham=
[email protected]> wrote:
Farhan might I ask whi the pico and not just add a pc8575 or pc8574 i2c gpio expander into the mix if you need more gpio.
I think the z2w over pico w is alot better and mre power performance.
Shirley Dulcey KE1L