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Pico Computer 3 & 2 v0.16 (test)

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@UKTailwind UKTailwind released this 25 Aug 10:00
· 9 commits to pico-computer-3 since this release
v0.16
863e00f

Firmware and manual for the Pico Computer 3 and the Pico Computer 2 (RP2350B).

New in v0.16

  • MicroPython 1.29.0 — the real thing. 1.29.0 was released upstream, so this build is made from the released tag rather than the preview it was tracking. The banner says so:

    MicroPython v1.29.0 on PICO COMPUTER 3 v0.16 with RP2350B

    142 upstream commits came with it. The ones that reach this machine: a native-emitter code-generation fix, garbage-collector bookkeeping for split heaps (which is exactly what this board has — SRAM plus 8 MB of PSRAM), two pow(a, b, m) corner-case fixes, a soft-timer fix, and str.encode("ascii") / bytes.decode("ascii").

  • PSRAM is now brought up by the SDK. The port's hand-written PSRAM driver has been replaced upstream by the pico-sdk's own hardware_psram library, and this board moves with it. Same 8 MB heap, same speed; the difference is that the chip is now detected and timed by the code the SDK maintains. The QMI timing is re-tuned on every clock change, and — because the SDK's PSRAM re-init also restores the bootrom's flash configuration — the flash timing is re-applied straight after it, so the 63 MHz XIP cap this board relies on survives a switch to 378 MHz. Verified on hardware by reading the QMI registers back at both clocks, in both directions.

  • requests gained chunked responses — bodies sent with Transfer-Encoding: chunked are decoded for you, and response header names are matched case-insensitively, so a lookup works whatever case the server used. umqtt and aioble picked up fixes at the same time.

  • TinyUSB stays at 0.20.0. Upstream moved to its own fork at 0.21.0 for a USB device CDC fix; this board runs USB in host mode only, and 0.20.0 is what the Pico Computer 3's MMBasic firmware and the Fuzix port use. One version across all three environments on the machine is worth more here than a device-side fix that cannot apply.

  • PC emulator — the refreshed pc3emu-linux-x64.tar.gz is at v0.16 and its banner now reads like the firmware's: MicroPython v1.29.0 on PICO COMPUTER 3 v0.16 emulator, with no git describe suffix. Runs on Linux, and on Windows via WSL2 — see INSTALL-WINDOWS.md inside the tarball. Needs glibc 2.43 / Ubuntu 26.04+ for the prebuilt binary; on older systems build from source (a few minutes, any distro).

  • Manual updated for the version and the requests improvements.

Nothing changes in how the machine behaves. No API moved, no setting is lost, and your files, keyboard layout, screen mode and Num Lock preferences all survive the update.

Flashing

USB HUB switch to DISABLE → connect the Prog port to a PC → hold BOOT, click RESET → drag firmware.uf2 onto the drive that appears → switch back to ENABLE. Your files and settings survive.

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