Video from a BBC micro:bit with IchigonQuest

Back in 2017 I played with projects to get composite video from an Arduino – huge fun and very satisfying in a retro way. After trying TinyBASIC on a BBC micro:bit, I fell down a bit of an internet search rabbit hole and discovered the world of IchigonJam (strawberry jam!), a Japanese computer the size of a Raspberry Pi that you program in BASIC. It uses a PS/2 keyboard and produces low-resolution composite video to be viewed on a TV with an AV input. A very cute and intriguing machine.

It had been bugging me for years that it must be possible to get composite video out of a BBC micro:bit the same way as on the Arduino and IchigonJam. And it is, and someone has already done it. Welcome, IchigonQuest! It’s a very quirky, very Japanese way of coding microcontrollers in something a bit like BASIC. There’s a whole ecosystem around it, and as they’re not shipping to the UK at the moment I put it out of my mind.

Then I found there’s a micro:bit port of it. And I got it working. I have no idea what I’m doing, but it works! The micro:bit becomes a self-contained computer with its own keyboard and screen that you can program on its own.

Here’s what I used:

- A V1 BBC micro:bit
- A micro:bit breakout board
- Various jumper wires
- A small breadboard
- A 100 ohm and a 470 ohm resistor
- An RCA / phono plug to get video into the TV
- A TV set. I used a cheap fairly modern Chinese one, bought in the UK but still apparently happy to display NTSC video
- A PS/2 keyboard. (Found on the street with the plug helpfully already chopped off – as used in my previous micro:bit PS/2 keyboard projects).
- Downloaded microDakeOS.20180925.zip from https://p.na-s.jp/, extracted ichigonquest.ubit.dj.en.hex and flashed it to the micro:bit

Here’s how I wired it up:

micro:bit pin connect to 15 100 ohm resistor to video out phono inner PIN 14 470 ohm resistor to video out (same as above) GND video GND (outer ring of RCA / phono plug) 16 PS/2 keyboard clock wire 8 PS/2 keyboard data wire 3v PS/2 keyboard 5v power in wire GND PS/2 keyboard ground wire

I very much was not expecting to see anything. I’d bodged together these wires from web pages in Japanese I barely understood even with Google Translate, and filled in some gaps from my own experience connecting PS/2 keyboards to micro:bits. I connected it all up, turned the TV on, switched it to the AV input… and a picture appeared!

I’m still puzzling out how it all works, but I managed to draw my own icons on the micro:bit display and even wrote my first proper program!

And here’s a bit of a longer walkthrough of how it works:

Sound update

I’ve now figured out that the piezo speaker goes on micro:bit pin 12! Alas it only beeps, you can’t seem to play tunes on it. But it’s a nice addition.

And yes, that’s forbidden pin 12, reserved for accessibility. So if you want to hook up a buzzer, you’ll need a breakout board that allows access to this pin. The Kitronik one I have does, but the Pimoroni pin:bit doesn’t. (Not a criticism of Pimoroni, you’re really not supposed to use pin 12 for anything!)

New video update

Here’s another video talking about how much coding IchigonQuest is like assembly language. And I demonstrate my inability to remember its name: