Got ya, and I even dabbled in that direction myself a while back - viewtopic.php?t=239247Sorry, I wasn't clear ... I was thinking about a closer to the metal version.
I'll admit I didn't indulge beyond that, and my adventures with bare metal were limited, but I have of late been speculating upon using a Pi Zero 2W, and now CM0, as some kind of Super-Pico, where the Pico SDK or similar generates a bare metal executable instead of a 'uf2'. There's no reason that shouldn't work for every Pi from Zero upwards.
Though I have never really looked at Circle I was also thinking that could provide the boot-up and low-level access needed.
If you can get a program running bare metal on a Pi which is just a dumb-typewriter putting key presses on a display, just a 'read key' and 'print character' API, you are well on the way to running anything, including MicroPython, Snek, even CPython cut to the bones, no imports, lua and other scripting languages; including interpreted C.
Creating a MicroPython port which needs nothing more than Start-Up, Read Key and Display Character linking in, is probably a good start. It's then a case of linking it for Linux command line or bare metal. There's the 'bare-arm', 'embed', 'minimal', 'pic16bit' and other ports which may be the way to approach that.
I am hoping to do something productive in this direction in the new year so probably worth keeping your fingers crossed. In the meantime I guess I ought to learn more about Circle.
Statistics: Posted by hippy — Thu Oct 09, 2025 9:40 pm