Funny you should mention that!
I built some last week - but I cheated and ordered five PCB's from JLCPCB, as the Gerber files are already provided. Even though I ordered them through work - any boards I want count as R&D
- I only paid for slow shipping, as I was in no rush. So the five boards cost a grand total of £10.61 inc VAT and carriage - they even arrived quite promptly, not the usual 5-7 days paying for DHL, but less than 14 days.
As I'd bought a pack of 5 Pico's, the standard 5 boards from JLCPCB worked out nicely.
Loading the interpreter to the Pico is dead simple, just hold the button on the Pico and plug the USB lead in, then just drag and drop the UF2.
However, I'm having some problems connecting to it via a terminal program, but if I use MMEdit5/MMCC then it works perfectly - perhaps I should read the instructions
I've had it connected to a VGA monitor (well a TV with VGA), and the VGA output works fine - I haven't tried the keyboard yet, as I've not been able to find one - but I
KNOW I've got at least one PS2 keyboard here 'somewhere'
As far as the bare Pico goes, it's fine using MicroPython and Thonny, but I'm REALLY struggling getting a decent setup using C, it's
VERY complicated, particularly from Windows. Using a Virtual machine and Ubantu I've been able to do command line compiling, but haven't managed to get Visual Studio to work yet - so it's
VERY clumsy to use.
It's a fun project though