Turning a Raspberry Pi Pico into a GPU!

Everything can become a GPU if you're weird enough, right!? Clem surely has the weirdness required here, as he attempts to take a Raspberry Pi Pico and turn it into a DVI graphics card for use with single board computers, microcontrollers, and especially his Sudosom module that runs Linux on an ESP32S3.

His project is an iteration on the amazing work of the Pico-DVI project by Luke Wren (link below), and Clem aims for compatibility with the popular Adafruit graphics library commands.

#0:00 Welcome to element14 presents
#0:19 Overview
#2:17 Pico DVI
#5:09 But Is It a GPU?
#10:06 Code and Test
#12:24 Last Minute PCB!
#14:46 What's Next?
#15:33 Give Your Feedback

#raspberrypi #raspberrypiprojects #raspberrypipico #raspberrypiprojectcenters #gpu #linux

[Rich-llce]

I made a project using a Pico as HDMI generator, my Samsung TV needed the 5v before it would allow me select the HDMI input. (My monitors work fine without the 5v)

[JeffGeerling]

This video's been in my queue for so long... I finally got to watch it today, and I love everything about this project, lol. I need to try one of these in my Ampere Altra Max computer!

[raspberrypi]

Clem, you are... resolute. Blogging this tomorrow!

[SianaGearz]

The term GPU was introduced by Nvidia as a marketing term for GeForce 256 because it was a vector processor. Before that we had "3D accelerators" (with no geometry math) and "video cards" (usually with GDI and overlay acceleration).

But there was another unit before officially called the GPU, it was the video subsystem of the original PlayStation.

So I think until it does at least 3D, it's just a PPU or VDP or whatever.

[Stabby]

It's funny you used the ZX81 as an example, as that machine actually used the Z80 processor to generate the display without a dedicated display chip. It had a shift register and some logic chips, but when it was time to generate the frame, the Z80 would be fed NOP instructions, so it would just increment the value on its address bus and that, plus the 74 series logic would clock out the pixels. It's actually a very cool hack!

[jeremiahbullfrog]

I can't wait to run Stable Diffusion on my pi pico!

[BalugaWhale]

I recommend you put a pair of psrams and a mux on the PCIe board. That way you can port the Pimoroni PicoVision to this PCI system and have a frame buffer. In their system, the GPU Pico has no flash and is programmed via JTAG from the CPU Pico.

[andywest]

Love it! Can't wait to see the board working!

[christer]

This looks like an interesting project. Hope you get the board soon so we can see the result.

[AjinkyaMahajan]

It can be Integrated with my FPGA board for VIdeo handling. I am amazed how can dual core micro with 256k ram is doing such a wonderful stuff.

[elektronkim]

I love my Pico's. It became MMBasic for everything and I learn a lot.

[domi-no]

me, who just so happened to need a custom GPU:

[RohitKumar-owzt]

Amazing Video Clen.. loved it.. very informative 😃😃
You have passion for your projects and you explain complex topics in an amusing manner.. Loved it.
Eagerly waiting for the video part-2 👍👍

[yooyod]

Try to port Mesa OpenGL. If Pico have enough RAM for double buffer then it can generate 3D graphics using soft renderer in Mesa.
All you have to do is to encode OpenGL commands and send from host to "gpu" over I²C.

[garystinten]

This would be awesome to start a new hardware stream specifically for pi and soc pi based computers..

[cirkulx]

the funniest part is just yesterday, i hijacked the DDC of my pc's VGA port (while using displayport for video) and then connected a minature display using linux to extend my monitor (although in black and white dither, at 128x64...)

[四点能]

I have an other idea of achieving the goal of drawing picture to the HDMI LCD: there is RGB on ESP32S3, we can make it with a RGB-to-HDMI chip.

[pieterboots]

There seems to be a market for this. Like an board with a spi chip with hdmi output and a 1 mb framebuffer for less than 5 euro.

[DerMarkus]

To be clear: I gave you an instant thumb-up on this video for your Arrow-on-a-Stick! 😁

[The_Prizessin_der_Verurteilung]

This is knowledge I will never need, on a video that was randomly recommended to me that still managed to grab my attention.
10/10