Neotron Pico Rev 1.1 - Assembled

What is it?

A microATX mainboard for the Neotron Pico - a modern 'retro' home computer, powered by the Raspberry Pi Pico and designed to run Neotron OS, a CP/M alike OS written in Rust.

It features:

microATX form factor (240mm x 170mm)

VGA video output, via a 12-bit (3x 4-bit) RGB R2R DAC, 75 ohm video buffer and ESD protection IC

16-bit stereo audio, with headphone amplifier, microphone input and stereo line input

12V input, with 5V switch-mode PSU rated to 3A

Battery-back real-time clock with CMOS RAM

Four SPI-based expansion slots

An I/O controller providing 8 unique chip selects and 8 interrupts

A board-management controller providing:soft power control

TTL UART

two PS/2 ports and,

an 8 ohm PC-speaker style output

A fully open-source design 

What is included?

You get the PCB, loaded with all the SMT parts and through-hole components, EXCEPT the Raspberry Pi Pico which you must supply and fit yourself.

You must supply your own:

• Raspberry Pi Pico, with down-facing pin headers
• DC barrel-jack PSU, 12.0V @ 1A, centre positive
• VGA monitor and VGA cable
• PS/2 keyboard
• Full-size SD Card, FAT32 formatted
• Standoffs (or a whole microATX case, if desired)
• CR2032 coin-cell battery for the real-time clock / CMOS settings

The complete parts list is available at Github

What about software?

You can flash your Raspberry Pi Pico with CircuitPython and play with the hardware, or you can load it with the very incomplete and work-in-progress Neotron OS, which is open-source, written in Rust, and also available on my Github. So far it will display some text on screen, and load small programs from SD card, like the 4-channel ProTracker MOD player I wrote. This is a platform for hacking on embedded software, not (yet) a finished product!

The Raspberry Pi Pico-W will also work, but I have no software support for Wi-Fi in Neotron OS at this time.

Why did you make it?

So that people had access to a modern computer built from readily available part, but that was simple enough for one person to understand.

What makes it special?

It is perhaps the only open-source microATX form-factor computer powered by Raspberry Pi Pico