Comment by tkanarsky

That's freaking awesome. For those unaware, the RP2040 microcontroller has several Programmable IO (PIO) cores, which are essentially standalone state machines that read/write directly from memory to the GPIO pins. Unlike bitbanging the pins with the CPU, you can implement much more timing-sensitive protocols while reducing CPU usage at the same time. There's demos of people implementing VGA out, digital audio, all sorts of interesting protocols.