Clockwork Pi PicoCalc – a good platform for uLisp?

#1

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See the following tweet on X: Drawing with uLisp

More about the Clockwork Pi PicoCalc: PicoCalc kit

#2

Seems like really good value. Looking for am excuse to get one

#3

Potentially, that’s even an excellent platform, I think. Sadly, complaints in their shop indicate they have incredibly long delivery delays of many months and more, so really obtaining the thing which has just been announced may take very long. Looking at the hardware, I think they potentially did a lot of things right.

#4

It seems to be available ex-stock on AliExpress:

PicoCalc Kit

#5

True, but for three times the nominal price (or maybe about twice the price if you consider shipping and taxes). I’m not trying to bash these guys, just stumbled across the comments at the bottom of this page when I was trying to find out who “Clockwork Pi” actually is. I knew before they have developed some very interesting products, so I’m actually quite surprised to read that there might be issues.

#6

It’s perfect for uLisp if it could be thinner, the 18650 battery should be blamed. I have an uConsole in hand, the build quality is good.

I just order this PicoCalc seconds ago, lets see when can I receive it.

#7

I have uLisp 4.7b running on it as of an hour ago, using a Pico 2W instead of the Pico that ships with it. I rather like the keyboard and screen so far, I was playing with the uLisp image that ships in the Clockwork repo.

#8

Excellent, so that took just 7 days to arrive?

Any negatives?

#9

It took about a week, yes. I copied over some of the supplied ClockworkPi patches, just debugging some issues with the LispLibrary functionality. Otherwise, seems to work well. The keyboard is much better than some other handhelds I’ve used, and even has backlighting. The display is bright and crisp. Some more hacking and it might just be the perfect Lisp handheld for me.

#10

That’s interesting, as I’ve now got a PicoCalc and I’m planning to add official support for PicoCalc to uLisp.

The PicoCalc installation seems to be based on ARM uLisp 4.5a. How did you go about installing uLisp 4.7b? Did you add the PicoCalc patches by hand?

#11

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I hand applied the patches and made some minor changes to them (for example, renaming a variable in Mandarin to make more sense to me, or defining a single flag for any of the Pi Pico platforms). The bigger challenge is maybe the libraries needed; I applied their patch on 4.5a to extract the patch directory, then git reset back to 4.7b. Spent maybe an hour or three going through it.

#12

I will say the biggest issue (I thought it was with the LispLibrary, but it was deeper) is that sometimes an error will appear to hang the system; it’s usually responsive on the serial console. The only way to get back to the screen & keyboard functionality is to power cycle. I’m working my way through the code base to debug it.

#13

Following up with some benchmarks:

I’ve run a few benchmarks:

ARM @ 150MHz ARM @ 200MHz RISC-V @ 150MHz RISC-V @ 200MHz
tak 4.6s 3.4s 6.6s 4.8s
fib 3.2s 2.4s 4.9s 3.6s
q 6.2s 4.6s 9.5s 6.7s
q2 11.3s 8.4s 16.7s 12.0s
factor 1.6s 1.2s 2.2s 1.6s
sieve 18.1s 13.6s 23.6 17.1s

I wrote up more on a blog post. I also have the UF2s available on that site as well.