Very happy with my purchase - a bare metal BASIC powerhouse
For Raspberry Pi Pico Card with VGA, Sound, Keyboard
I contacted Doug about an assembled board, which were not currently available, and he informed me he'd give me a heads up when they next came around - and he was good to his word.
Shipping was instant and hassle free, follow up support (which was not part of the sale price really) has been excellent.
I had been having some problem with the stability of the VGA output, but this was not a hardware issue and was rectified with using the following firmware "2022-05-23_171027_PicoMiteVGA.zip". I'm sure the VGA stability issues will be resolved in the next mainline version too - and I want to repeat - this is not an issue with the board itself - but a product of the rapid evolution of the firmware (which is a good thing really).
It feels really good to have an instant on boot-to-basic computer. You'll need your own PS2 keyboard, and you'll also need a monitor with a VGA input (which are sadly not being included on newer monitors) - but if you are buying this unit, you'll likely have a few older monitors lying around.
MMBasic is a tinkerers paradise, and the Pico is a quiet powerhouse. 640 x 480 is monochrome due to RAM limitations (on the Pico), but 320 x 240 has 8 colors - which is actually kind of fun. There is more than enough power for light graphical applications, and the raw horsepower puts this well above its 8-bit counterparts.
Nice to have the SD card available, and possibly in future, we could use wifi or bluetooth via a Pico W mounted (note that the Pico W at time of writing has not enabled the bluetooth stack, and at time of writing, MMBasic does not support Wifi or Bluetooth on Pico W).
I don't know if there will be many more pre-assembled units available, but if not, and you are adept with a soldering iron and a multimeter, it looks like it's not an over-the-top amount of work to put this together yourself - and there is a nice community available around the product too.
Once more, thank you to doug for making such a fun PCB, and for supplying it shipped at a very reasonable price, and for the after-sales service.
If you are a hardware/IoT/BASIC tinkerer, this will give you untold hours of joy.
