PicoMite: Running BASIC on a Raspberry Pi Pico 

I am a very old man (65) who started in High School on a Digital Equipment Corporation, PDP1145. Our OS at that time was RST Basic. It was 1975 and I lived in Springfield Massachusetts. I am still active in the Computer field and take my word for it; We have come a long way. Been a Subscriber for a few years and look forward to your Sunday Video's. This will be a Nostalgic Fun Project! Thank You Very Much. Bill

For me, nothing beats an episode of Explaining Computers for clearing my mind of the week’s news from our sad world.

GW-Basic is my first love. So this video is like hello from my youth. Thank you!👍

Thx Geoff and Peter for all the fun .

Wow. Programs costing hundreds of $ aren't documented as well. This guy deserves a donation.

I can’t happily program in BASIC without line numbers. Your demonstration of with and without was a moment of happy-not-happy. I realized my coding acquisition is psychologically based if you call composing in BASIC coding. And it never occurred to me I might write in BASIC again. What a profound video!

My brother and I shared his Spectrum zx 81. Downloading games from tape and writing sprite games from magazine articles. Thanks for the memories.

All your videos are good, but even at your high level this one stands out as extra special. Thank you very much indeed.

I love BASIX. No pratting about with objects, no worrying about indents and half a dozen kinds of parentheses. It takes me back to my spectrum 48k days. I'm very tempted to have a go with this. It's also cheap and simple!

Old Basic langage, all my youth, I haven't seen you since a long time. Python and C++ are younger but you seem in good health. Long live to Basic !!

BASIC computing at its finest on a Sunday morning. Well done Mr. Barnatt. Thank you for that excellent web link.

Thank you for your link to Geoff. I am passionate about affordable electronics and Geoff looks like he has to be number one when it comes to value for money.

My first experience with Basic was on a Commodore 64 and in its early days it used a cassette tape to store and retrieve programs. Commodore Basic also used line numbers. I am sure MMBasic is much improved. I have not ventured into the Raspberry Pi Pico, so thank you for the introduction!

This brings memories back. I started out in '82 with a Commodore VC-20 and 8K Memory extension. All the that is sooo familiar.

Excellent episode. Informative, interesting and well presented. Thanks. Guess what my retirement lasted 10 days, I’ve accepted a position as an in-house field tech at “Control Micro Systems” notice the middle word, it was a sign. They have videos on yt, CMS laser. Thanks for getting me interested in high tech again. FYI, Artemis is back in the VAB. 🚀

Amazing ! At the same time.... 40 years ago... indeed, I did the same thing,... how time flies !

Whooo remember me my first program ever, in 1985, on a Thomson To7. I love the idea of this pico Basic. Nice entry for young to learn programming.

I find a lot of your videos quite nostalgic, but this one has sent me back to high school. I learned to program then and this brings me back to the 70s. I always enjoy watching what you do. Thanks for sharing!

Videos like this that link computers, SBCs, or microcontrollers with electronics are my favorite EC videos. Throw in some basic programming, like the BASIC language I first learned on my Commodore in 1980 and it’s absolute Nirvana. Can’t wait for the display interface video(s) to come. Geoff’s Projects looks very interesting. Looking forward to reading the 170 page manual, and exploring the projects on the website. Thanks CB and EC for keeping us in the loop on this great tech!

Gee-Wiz, You went back to the 1980+ year of computer "BASIC" Simply and reliable with using PLC controller. You're going to have to pull out the kindergarten book. And teach these "now programmer" ancient coding of BASIC, C, PLC, early JAVA (which now make gaming so darn life like), and 5 1/4" drive and 3" Floppy drives. I read the list of us "oldies" pulling out old books, magazines of memories! Great Jobs!

In 1978 at the tender age of 24 I bought a 6502 based UK101 build- it- yourself kit which boasted a 'Massive 8K Basic' ... here at nearly 70 that EC video and the work of the guys who ported the basic transported me back to a time when computing wasn't owned by Google, Amazon and Microsoft ... it belonged to the guys in their back bedrooms. Great work all round - thank you :) I will enjoy reading the manual.

Amazing, original and intuitive work as always. Well done and presented! Thank you for introducing all of us to to these wonderful ideas! It is a fresh breath of air without commercial bias.

Way back in 1980 I saw the first Apple ads, but the price caused me to hesitate till '82.. Saw the ZX81 at a friend who told me to buy a Speccy instead, as they were JUST released. So I waited for mine while getting acquainted on his ZX81 and ZX80..I only bought my first pc when 286's were well on their way. An ICL OPD filled in the gap after the Speccy to pc. Damn, the nostalgia..Great one Chris, now you got me into thinking what mischief I can cause with that Basic stuff in Windows 😏😈

I enjoyed getting the introduction to BASIC on the Pico as much as you enjoyed revisiting it.

MM BASIC is a very powerful language with the benefit of being well documented and simple to use. You can create custom commands as well. Very cool and underrated!

I love this channel you run with consistency and reliable information and a dose of humor (especially the outro "veeeeery soooon" which I love). Thank you very much for what and how you do. I bow low.

You just hit me, it was 40 years ago for me too - on my good ole trash80 though I haven't done as much as you have. Really great that Geoff has made his MM Basic available for other platforms.

Amazing Project - Having spent part of the last year translating ideas written in Basic into MicroPython and C++ to run on the RP2040 Pico (All good for the learning curve) - PicoMite allows an alternative approach to exploring such ideas directly. Thank you for another clear and informative video.

Brightest idea I've seen in years, CONGRATULATIONS!! to the developers, and a big thank to you , for spreading the word.

Brilliant seeing basic back again. That language still has so much to offer us in this modern world

39 years since I started using Basic on a Sirius micro. Thanks Christopher, takes me back to the good old days in computing.

It would be interesting to see the Pico turned into a little basic stand alone computer with a keyboard. Looking forward to your next video!

Wow! this is the coolest thing Ive done with a pico so far! How neat! thank you so much for the tutorial. I've never used basic before, and it was a great introduction.

Sir Chris, this one of your best videos ever. You've touched on tons of content. No wonder I see pleasure and pride in your eyes tonight. WELL DONE!

Great video. My first dealings with computing was with BASIC on a TI99/4a back in, I believe, 1982, when my father purchased it. Spent many hours copying programs form magazines and also making up some of my own. Storage was on an audio cassette.

I was havng flashbacks to programming in basic on my Commodore 64 back in the 80's. Another great video,I will certainly be checking the website and PicoMite out.

The first computer I got to use was an ICL 2903 (remote over acoustic coupler modem and teletype terminal, painfully slow and often take near on an hour to get a connection over the PSTN line) running George OS using CECIL programming language, also the Research Machines 380Z running BASIC at school. But my own first computer was a ZX81 preorder as well. Fun times indeed. Today, there is so much tech in your basic systems that it is overloaded and curtails the creative stuff, which things like microcontrollers give back as you can get creative at the core way more. Just like those early microcomputers.

That's really neat, can't believe the documentation, that's a huge amount of time! Looking forward to the VGA output version. Wishing I still had a pile of old Byte magazines, I spent hours typing basic code into a Sinclair and saving out to cassette tape. There were some neat games for the Sinclair and things like Color Computer in this old magazines!

Thanks to you and the MMBASIC creators for this video.

Marvelous! Hoping to see more episodes about Programming using other languages (like C, Java, Swift, and others) for Computer Science students like me... 😄👏

GOTO .......... millions of modern programmers' brains just exploded all over the walls :P Darn this brought back memories of the 1980's when I was learning to program on BASIC, on a massively basic PC. Extreme nostalgia

This is such a beautiful video, I am so eager to try this on my own now. Thank you for showing the beauty of computing yet again!

Oh, that's cool! I didn't know MMBasic ran on the pico! I wanted to build/buy the maximite2 a long time ago and having the pico as the target will make that possible! Thanks for letting me know about this! Also, Geoff's work is amazing! Thanks for posting this!

Slice that breadboard in half right down the middle and you can then make it "wider" so that the pico plugs into the end of each row. That would open up four connection slots per pin.

WOW, where was this when i was 11 or 12? It would have given me so much enjoyment at that age. It still is fun today, but when i was a kid i was using regular electric switches and what i could "borrow" from an old car etc. I still remember adapting a 6v / 12v meter circuit that used LEDs output to show the level, reducing the resistors to convert to a VU meter for my radio because i wanted falshing lights. See your LED on the breadboard and then the neat MMBasic was just great. Thank you for bringing this to us and than Geoff for his hard work.

This takes me back a ways. I programmed Apple IIs using Apple BASIC (which isn't much different than what you were showing) and loved writing code back then (late 80s). This little board seems like a great thing to go back and try to see if I even remember BASIC. For $4 I'm all in on this. No doubt I will study Geoff's site. Good stuff Chris, good stuff.

BASIC is part of me and every time I read/hear this magic word I feel so happy, Thanks Chris

I am very impressed by your mental arithmetic capabilities as you are able to instantly calculate 674/87 in your head and declare the 7.747126437 that is output to be the correct answer. It isn't given to many of us to be able to calculate to 10 significant figures in our heads.

Now that was extremely exciting! I can't wait to see what you do with a keyboard and VGA output. I'll follow along with my own setup. I learned BASIC on the ZX-80, then switched over to the C64 (quite the leap!) where I continued with their thankfully crappy BASIC, forcing me to learn machine code. Really fun times.

Fascinating! A wonderful mix of nostalgia and the present day.

What's interesting that while watching this video, I suddenly got very nostalgic and it also brought me back 40 years ago when I learned to program on Coleco Adam's SmartBasic. So it was very interesting when you ended the video with you also getting nostalgic about when you learned to program in Basic as well. I still remember coding back then using the line numbers, GOTOs and a simple line editor. Of course, fast forward to today and I'm looking to retirement from being a career IT professional as a software engineer. Thanks for the video and bringing back old memories!

I've really enjoyed this video Chris a real trip down memory lane, I used a BBC micro (Acorn) for my 'O' level exam back in 1986. We had fun programming in basic and saving onto cassette tapes, plenty of line numbers as well. Part of the exam was writing a program which I used for RC aircraft design saved onto a 5.25" floppy disk. I'm looking forward to the next episode in this series. :)

Way to go *_Geoff Graham!_* Being able to make simple microcontroller programs (or complex) that can be edited with any terminal program (without installing any programming environment, compiler, etc.) is awesome. And for a lot of projects it's likely more than fast enough. Awesome!

Oh my gosh a blast from the past. I got my start on the Timex Sinclair as well, and basic programming. This video is certainly informative, as are all of yours. I will truly be giving this a try.

Always look forward to a Sunday afternoon EC video. Thanks Chris.

Thanks for the video. Very much looking forward to having a go at this. My journey into computing also started with a zx81 with a 16K add on pack! Thanks again for all your content.

Have not use basic for a long time. Good to see it on the pico. Thanks for showing this. I don't have a pico. But i can run in windows. How good this is.

This is being put in my "one of my favorites EC!". It's along the lines of why I started watching EC. It's funny how you ended the video with your reminiscing of the Sinclair. I was doing the same thing while watching and thinking about my introduction to BASIC on a Commodore PET with cassette tape at roughly the same time! The wonder and joy of computing and electronics never seems to fade, does it?

Very good presenting skill highly enjoyable, been tinkering for a while now I’ve found your videos I’ve found new inspiration! Many thanks!

I did a little coding while in College in my computer science classes. I've mucked about with MMBasic and after having my Raspberry Pi I've started coding with Python it all interests me to write a small program and watch it work. Thanks for the introduction to the Raspberry Pi Pico. I'll check out the website you mentioned and take a "Closer Look". Thanks Chris 😀👍✌

Stinking cold so tucked up with a nice warm wrap of "proper computing" nostalgia today! The only thing I find strangely disturbing is the lack of "World" after "Hello"! 😳

In the early 2000s I learned to make my first microcontroller-driven robots using a Basic Stamp 2. This is such a delightful nostalgic throwback! I made some cool stuff, including a mini sumo robot that had infrared distance sensors that it would use to find and follow an opponent. It was so cool for a 12 year old to be able to relatively easily get into that with a BASIC powered MCU

I wrote my first program in Fortran in freshman - intro to engineering at Uni. Sept 1972 and I am still working at the "same" company for 47 years!

This is good stuff Chris, and inspiring. Going to get busy playing with my Pico this week. Thanks for another great video.

This looks like a great introduction to programming for newbies! Making basic circuits and programs run on this would be a good starting point before embarking on using less intuitive (imo) languages. But more importantly it looks fun!

Around 1979 I wrote a BASIC interpreter for the 6502 that ran on an APPLE ][ with at least 25K RAM and Apple DOS. I didn't like AppleSoft BASIC because its I/O was slot dependent and you could not have multiple files open on the floppy at the same time and you had to switch slots to write to or read from different peripherals or files. The syntax of my version was based on BASIC+Plus that I learned on the PDP-11 running RSTS/E at the college I was at. It was written entirely in assembly, was slow and completely non-portable, and took up 20k of RAM all by itself. It's hard to believe that something as small and "simple" as a Pico is many times more powerful than the Apple ][, or even the PDP-11, so having a good BASIC interpreter with a built-in editor (other than the command line), file handling, etc., is practical and even leaves more RAM and storage available for the user.

Loved it! This pico has probably more power than the 50kg TRS-80 computer which I first learned BASIC with!

I just got a rpi pico for£4.70. I didn't get it to work with putty as win 10 doesn't show it as a com but just pico but installing tera term vt got the terminal working and it works and I'm very impressed by the interpreted basic. Thank you for drawing my attention to mmbasic and rpi pico.

And here we meet again Greetings!

So nostalgic! In the 90s I had so much fun in basic!

Very well executed vid, better than previous SBC vids because of the thorough and rational walk through of process right from beginning. Very important for newbies. We are big Python/C folks here but looking forward to LCD video in basic. How fast would this perform vs PY interpreters... Thanks again for your pro work on this channel. 5 stars!

My feelings always kicks in when I see BASIC ❤️❤️❤️❤️

To echo many of the same sentiments that others have listed below, this neat little video brought back memories of my first encounter with computers & programming. I almost missed the whole PC movement & didn't care too much as there were hardly any around in high school in the 70s. If not for a fateful day in the mid-80s while in graduate school (music performance) and I wandered by a smallish room and heard a synthesizer & also a handful of Sanyo MBC-550s 'grunting' away w data disk & compiler drive talking! (a kind of music, CP/M was it?) As I learned FSU had a connection to the U. of IL at Champaign-Urbana & the music departments were involved in technology research in sound synthesis termed C-Music (?) or some such. The staff built the synth I heard from the ground up - out of wood. Big sucker, and FM synthesis was breaking out big-time , especially in Pop music! The next year saw a large lab set up with - wait for this - Atari 1040 STs of which I have the regular & a Mega-STE in my basement to this day! FSU started a Center for Music Research & they could get 3 Ataris with 1MB on the MOBO, stereo sound jack, MIDI IN/OUT, cartridge port, etc. and GUI for the cost of just 1 Macintosh! Actually, a British professor on staff taught the first programming class I ever took: Pascal. That language was abandoned the next semester in favor of C. After I started teaching high school a few years later (1/2 day music 1/2 day computer literacy/programming...ahhh...so nice!) the kids & I had fun with programming challenges in QBASIC, Batch files (anybody remember?) and MS-DOS. Oh, and fantasizing about the day I would buy a PC with a couple MBs RAM and a huge 40MB hard drive! Woo-Hoo!) Well then, I feel sorry for anybody who has read this tome down to this point. But at least know I feel good in the way one does after visiting a very close friend not seen in many years! Have a good one, and I think I shall poke around in the MicroPython project mentioned above. Cheers!

I think I could make quite a lot of use of this for various projects, where programming in BASIC directly on the Pico would probably be quicker and easier than the usual options. I've used BASIC on a ZX81, Spectrum, BBC B and IBM PC, but none of those had the ability to do what a Pico can!

I feel the nostalgia just watching this ....

Excellent video Chris! I felt like you, like a step back in time to the old computers. Mine was a Texas TI 58, later 59 and a wonderful HP41. This little Pico with Basic reminds me of them, and the Zinclair computers to. A time where no such computer would be sold without a proper manual explaining "it all". :) I think i have to try this little Pico out.

Fascinating stuff! Like you, Chris, I cut my teeth on BASIC, first Dartmouth BASIC, while connected to a DEC 10 minicomputer (using a paper tape-driven teletype!) at the University of Essex from my high school in Southend, then later at Uni where I spent my second year's grant money on a BBC Micro. Still later, in around 1986, I implemented a version of BBC BASIC in C on the Mac for David Johnson-Davies (the ex-head of Acornsoft), and finally I wrote Red BASIC for Chris Curry's Red Boxes system, in 6502 assembler. It's nice to see versions of the language are still popping up in the tiniest of computers!

Three of my favorites in one video; ExplainingComputers, BASIC and Raspberry PI!

Good to see *_goto_* again! Some people absolutely hate it but not me. ;-)

Thank you for Geoff's website! Awesome stuff!

Thanks Chris, very informative. Takes me back to my college days in thd 80's coding in BBC Basic

a very nostalgic video. this time it was really a basic lecture.

Brings back memories of running BBC Basic on my BBC B. Really interesting video.

Timeley this, I'm playing with Geoff's colour maximite 2 this week that I bought last year to demonstrate programming to my grandson. Basic programming comes back to you in a few minutes, should do I've written 100's of thousands of lines of visual basic 5!

Chris, that's very impressive. The Basic seems to have a fair number of convenience features. Wow, it's even capable of using VGA. Imagine all that; an 80's style computer on a tiny little chip costing 4 quid. I also learned about the breadboards for the Pico. They look neat. That battery pack thing looks worthy of investigation, too.

That was very interesting. I too had (still have in the depths of the garage) ZX81's to which I connected all manner of sensors via the expansion slot and learned such a lot programming in BASIC. To really get the nostalgic feeling though you should have saved your programmes on cassette! For anyone using the PICO I thought that breadboard was an excellent idea.

OMG, shades of Edlin! Now I understand how a whole raft of display doohickeys work, like programmable signs and such. Now anyone can have a dynamic billboard!

Indeed. I believe I took a BASIC course at the local community college at night in 1981 (I don't remember why, I recall no interest in computers then), and I have ever since had a soft spot in my heart for this simple, accessible language, especially after Borland introduced an inexpensive structured BASIC, Turbo Basic. I still have a copy of the excellent Turbo BASIC manual.

This is great! I think I'll look out my old Commodore 64 magazines and try to get Scramble running on my Pico. Excellent video!

A most interesting video. I would like to see some more videos about using the PicoMite, I have been looking for a microcontroller and software to use in some simple projects. The PicoMite might be just what I have been looking for. Thanks again for most interesting video. Cheers....😀😀😀

That's really neat. Seeing the BASIC programming reminds me of when I took BASIC in college during the 80s.

This takes me back to my Basic Stamp fun times. You can't beat the price and features.

Nice to see things going back to BASIC, my first introduction to computers

I only started playing with microcontrollers about 7 yrs ago and by then I think basic was to most people a distant memory . It seems like a very simple and easy to understand language- I suppose that is why it is called basic 🤣. It might see a resurgence now it can run on a modern microcontroller like the pico which is dirt cheap to buy - looks like it would be great for young children to try before tackling C++ Or Micropython.

This brings back memories, great job, thanks a lot!

Geoff really did an excellent job creating MMBasic, it's the perfect platform for beginners who want to experience BASIC running on real hardware. I've built a Colour Maximite (in addition to using Picomite) which I find is ideal for prototyping. It's worth noting that this is a locally-developed Australian product (maximite.....vegemite....it all makes sense now!), which I find to be unusual given that we missed out on a lot of the 80's computing craze. Retro machines like the C64 are rare around here and you can't easily get one, let alone the peripherals and cartridges, if you want to experience retro computing. The Colour Maximite isn't a direct C64 replacement but it has that same spirit of "friendly computing".

Thanks for the intro - just getting started with my Pico Mite basic board (it has VGA onboard and can go direct to video monitor).

MMBasic looks fantastic! My first BASIC program was written on a teletype in my electronics shop class, connected via a 300 baud acoustic modem to an IBM 360 at NASA/Ames Research Center in Mountain View, CA. I even got to save it on paper tape, which I thought was pretty cool at the time :)

Thanks to this video I'm also PicoMite user now (and a Bascom user for years)

I always thought the mission of the Timex Sinclair was to make people learn to hate computers. Congratulations on sticking it out.