The rePalm project is created with an aim to port Palm’s classic Palm OS, which was used in their classic PDA to modern hardware. The rePalm project is created and maintained by the embedded engineer Dmitry Grinberg who is now Sr. Staff Software Engineer at Cruise. Previously he has ported the Palm OD to other ARM devices such as STM32H7 series and STM32F469 MCU from ST Microelectronics. Now he has tweeted a video which demonstrates the Palm OS running on a Raspberry Pi Pico.
With some modification Grinberg was able to pare down the RAM requirements to 231kB for the underlying operating system and storage, leaving 33kB for the framebuffer which is then used to drive a 320x240 pixel resolution display with a 4bit grayscale colour depth or a 160x160 display with 8bit grayscale colour depth. As per Grinberg still there is lot to do , such as implementing Bluetooth, WiFi, USB, debug, NVFS and more. He also mentioned that he will be releasing preview images for others to try with either an STM32F429 discovery board or a Raspberry Pi Pico with a proper screen. More details about the rePalm project can be found at Grinberg’s website.
