Advent of Code 2023

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In December I took part in the annual ‘Advent of Code‘ event. I originally wrote my solutions using Free Pascal on a Raspberry Pi 4 and ended up with 42 gold stars out of 50 – my best performance yet. Christmas came and Santa brought me an RC2040 – a Pi Pico-based RC2014 emulator.

Photograph of am RC2040 computer below a credit-card sized loyalty card for scale. The RC2024 is slightly smaller than a credit card.
An RC2040 computer below a credit card sized RSPB loyalty card for scale.

Having built it one afternoon in early January (it’s very simple to solder, with the only tricky component being the micro SD card holder), I needed to find something to do with it. So I decided to convert a couple of my advent of code solution to run on it using Turbo Pascal 3.01A. Just a couple you understand …. ahem.

Some days later and I’ve ended up converting 20 of the solutions I wrote in December – so far. If you’re interested, you can find them all in this code repository. This exercise was also useful for smoking out a few more bugs in the Big(ish) integer library I wrote in Turbo Pascal last year.

But the real question that everyone needs answering is which is faster – a real RC2014 or the RC2040? There’s only one way to find out of course – fight!

An RC2014 and and RC2040 running my solution to day 4, part 2 of 2023’s Advent of Code. The RC2014 is on the right hand side of the desk and also on the right hand side of the screen displaying the output.