Comment by jsheard
17 days ago
Yeah, any PC can have GPIOs if you plug a cheap USB microcontroller into it. That's more or less how the Pi5 works internally anyway, as they've moved the main SOC to more modern silicon processes its internal GPIOs have become less able to tolerate hobbyist abuse, so now they proxy the GPIOs through their custom southbridge chip instead, which is an amalgamation of a microcontroller and various other peripherals.
Indeed, a USB MCU is my preferred GPIO these days. It makes my peripherals platform independent, and I can do my code development at my comfy desktop workstation with its big displays.
I find it easier to write real-time code on the MCU.
In fact, I've disciplined myself to make all of my projects -- hardware and software -- capable of running on any modern platform. It turns out that's not hard to do.