I am continually amazed by how often something mentioned on Hacker News comes within an unreasonable proximity to something that I have done recently.

I couldn't get something like that done one-shot with Claude. On the other hand, Claude did give me a lot of assistance at writing this

https://gist.github.com/Lerc/43540d8d581b2be8155a6a4e6e85c94...

Which is a Micropython setup of a ST7789 SPI display on a RP2350 using multiple DMA channels to provide a live updating paletted frame buffer. Once setup, you write to the SRAM, it appears on the display, without CPU involvement.

I started by feeding it the source of [Dmitry's](https://dmitry.gr/?r=06.%20Thoughts&proj=09.ComplexPioMachin...) C version of the paletted technique.

The chatbot, of course, emitted something completely broken, but it was enough for me to see where it was headed. By the time I got it working there were maybe no lines of it's original output left, but much of what replaced it was also LLM generated. Given I was pretty much new to MicroPython, SPI, the ST7789, and the Pico's PIO, it let me build something that I suspect If it were doing it alone, I would have given up before getting it working. (probably when I put my thumbnail through Display #1)

When I get a chance, I'll tidy it up properly, and put it on github.

At the moment I'm playing with Gemini to see if I can make a tile+sprites mode that generates the scanlines as they go to the display (without using CPU)