David, your tutorials are so wonderful. Love how you are explaining these concepts for us laymen. I was finally able to get a driver written for my HUB75 LED matrix, driven at 50MHz! This wouldn’t have been possible without an FPGA for me otherwise. Keep it up!

A very good video. I liked the Hollerith cards and Fortran, as I have been there and done that too ;-)

Thank you David! Wonderful series.

Enjoying all the series

amazing content really enjoyed vga output on pico.

I've really enjoyed your Pico videos. I picked one up a month ago, and used your videos to get me started on the right foot. I decided to use the Arduino IDE, which simplifies the build process. I built an AWG using PDM, and it worked ok, but required a lot of ram for the dma. I changed it to an 8 but DAC (resistor ladder) saving a ton of ram. My only issue was the added cycles every once in a while to perform the chaining and a few cycles in the dac state machine. Then it struck me... create a second state machine that provides the timing for the dac machine. The dac waits for an irq set, clears the irq and writes the data. That works like a champ, with no jitter on my output.

Thanks for this deep dive into PIO I have been trying to workout how to modify the VGA scanline code myself.

Pi Pico SDK environment using Visual Studio Code has improved quite a bit since when this video was created 2 years ago and I highly recommend installing the SDK environment using the Pico SDK installer. As long as you launch VSC using the shortcut the SDK install creates, and you have your CMAKE instructions set up correctly, the VSC will dynamically help you with coding mistakes even before you build/compile your code. It will even provide you the means of finding where a reference, such as a function or variable, is declared, defined or used rather than having to use plain Find all the time. I often make stupid syntax mistakes or misuse of data types, and in the past, such as in Arduino IDE, I would not find out about them until I ran a build. But with the VSC and CMAKE plugin, I find these out while I am writing, lowering the time to fix mistakes.

4:45 you can define it as a persistent variable. System Properties > Environment Variables > New

I love this series on Pico's PIO. It's really helping me wrap my head around it. Are you planning on doing more videos about video generation once you've figured it out? Or will you be moving on to other things with the PIO? I'd love to see more about video generation since as you noted the provided code is a bit complicated.

Thanks for the video. It shows some of the extreme lengths the folks at R-pi went to in order to make the RP2040 the success it is. I have a Pico or four, and I went down the C/C++ route almost from the off. I had major issues installing the toolchain onto W.10, but got there in the end thanks to UKposts, ending up with a viable VSC environment. Much easier (if only because there is a runnable script) was when I did the same thing on a R-pi 3b+ When I went back to the W.10 setup, I found it to be broken. Probably something I’d done, but I won’t be fixing it, instead staying on Linux for this type of thing (and everything else as soon as I can). It just feels “right”. I experimented (cut ‘n’ paste) with PIO and struggled to get my head around it. Not so much the “assembler”, but the C++ helper programs and how they all interact with one another. Beyond my capabilities, but I just know that the RP2040, with a relatively high clock speed (for a MCU), dual cores and 8 state machines - must be capable of some pretty stunning stuff in the right hands. Not mine though. I too worked on System 370 - on DOS/VS then MVS, getting pretty familiar with JCL, EXEC, EXEC2, REXX, VSAM and a lot of the utilities that were in use at that time. Happy days until the bean-counters arrived to spoil the fun. When I retired in 2016, it had become a dire existence. I still miss my early days though, and mucking around with the Pico and the R-pi kind of brings back those memories.

These videos are great. I just wish I could mute the background music.

Nice video, learned a lot about my new toy. The problem of the exact values for the resistors can be circumvented using an R-2R ladder for the DACs. A bit more bulky but as all the resistors are the same, the exact value is less critical.

I really enjoy your videos! However, there is one correction. 15bit color is not 225 colors but 32,768 colors. 🙂

Sick

👍👍👍

May I suggest I2S DACs for color signals to cut down on IO pin usage... Might be some with DC blocking, but I'm sure some don't.

A little control task is quite simple for me to do with it. The rest is quite complicated. At least I like to learn a thing or two more in that world at my own pace.

How would I do this with a 400 pin breadboard want to make it sleek

Does any chip generate excessive heat which requires a heat sink?

They probably use something like "racing the beam" rendering, without the need for video ram or a framebuffer.