Jonathan Pallant's Neotron Pico Personal Computer Hits Beta with a 25-Board Production Run

Jonathan Pallant's ambitious Neotron Pico, a fully-functional personal computer driven by a Raspberry Pi Pico W and running an operating system written in Rust, is heading for beta testing — and he's building boards to deliver to those eager to iron out the bugs.

Pallant unveiled the Neotron Pico in June last year, as a successor to the Neotron-32 — a retro-inspired computer built using a Texas Instruments Tiva-C Launchpad microcontroller development board. The Neotron Pico, as its name implies, swapped this out for a more affordable Raspberry Pi Pico while also expanding the board's size to micro-ATX — allowing it to fit inside modern PC cases, complete with expansion slots for additional hardware.

The project aims to make as much use of the resources on the Raspberry Pi Pico as possible, including its programmable input/output (PIO) state machines — used in the Neotron Pico to generate a 12-bit Super VGA (SVGA) video output and 16-bit 48kHz digital audio signals.

Elsewhere, the board offers I2C and SPI expansion slots designed to mimic the PCI Express slots of a modern motherboard, while on the software front the machine runs Neotron OS — a modern operating system written in Rust but designed to mimic the functionality of CP/M or MS-DOS. "But," Pallant promised at the time, "being open hardware, you can program your Neotron Pico to do pretty much anything."

Pallant has been working on the project ever since, and has now reached a milestone: the production of beta boards. "[I'm] about to build 25 kits," Pallant announced on Twitter today, "and give them away to Beta Testers."

Those not selected to be amongst the official beta testers, meanwhile, can find the design files for the board on the project's GitHub repository, under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license, and more information on Pallant's Hackaday.io project page.