Raspberry Pi Pico W as USB Wi-Fi Adapter

bbyb about 5 hours ago 24 commentsRead Article on gitlab.com

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Discussion (24 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

polpo•about 2 hours ago

Interesting that Gemini said it was infeasible. It should be aware that using a Pico W as a transparent ethernet bridge has been done several times over in open source projects, for example on BlueSCSI (emulating a Daynaport SCSI-Ethernet adapter) and PicoMEM and my own PicoGUS project (emulating an NE2000 Ethernet adapter).

byb•about 1 hour ago

Exactly, bit banging an 8-bit bus isn't that different from pushing the data out of the USB port. It would be great to try an LLM trained on pre-1900 documents and ask it if powered flight is possible.

Great work on PicoGUS.

dofm•18 minutes ago

You can probably try this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46590280

hellweaver666•9 minutes ago

Oooooh, now I'm thinking... you could design a simple circuitboard that holds multiple picos (surface mounted) and uses the USB data pads on the back to pull all the USB ports out to an onboard USB hub basically allowing you to add a multitude of wifi adapters to a project in one USB cable. Would be great for War Driving!

GL26•about 1 hour ago

one million Claude Tokens (assuming you are on opus) = 5 USD = the very dongle you tried to replace. Add the cost of the rasberry pico, you'll have an easier time buying the wifi dongle. The project is cool thought to learn about networks, NAT, Proxys, ect...

byb•21 minutes ago

No, it's not really easier to buy a Wi-Fi dongle. My target device is the Spotify Car Thing and SuperBird doesn't have Wi-Fi components. My Claude Code Pro subscription was idle, so it cost me nothing. Also, according to an article from Tom's Hardware from two years ago, four million Picos have already shipped, so I've unlocked this ability for let's say 500,000 devices. Finally, my day job is in the Wi-Fi industry... this wasn't a learning exercise.

bdavbdav•31 minutes ago

It’s nice that it doesn’t need the WiFi stack or host side configuration though. This would be great for headless machines.

lithiumii•about 1 hour ago

except now we don't need to spend that $5

byb•about 5 hours ago

pico-usb-wifi is firmware for the Raspberry Pi Pico W that turns it into a driverless USB Wi-Fi adapter, enumerating as a USB CDC-NCM device.

fragmede•about 4 hours ago

Hah! That's neat! So much fun stuff to be had with that particular bit of kit.

drop-volley•about 3 hours ago

Can you have the Pico operate as an access point? Would love to be able to use this to connect over wifi to a printer (printer in client mode), with the printer and macos talking directly over IP without needing to configure any other routing/forwarding on macos.

bdcravens•about 2 hours ago

Wifi printer, where both your machine and the printer are connected to the same AP? yes

If you'd rather just expose a USB printer to the network, a Pi Zero is a better fit.

vardump•25 minutes ago

Thanks! Now I potentially have ~20 USB WiFi adapters I didn’t have yesterday.

Even better, no need to hassle with the WiFi settings on the target system.

In wrong hands, Pico W is actually a bit terrifying device, because it combines USB and wireless.

andrewstuart•about 3 hours ago

Google Gemini is that naysayer senior developer who confidently tells you it can’t be done.

Claude is that easy to get along with smart hard working guy who just gets on with it and builds it double quick.

ChatGPT is the eager senior developer who says it can be done but can’t actually work it out and fluffs it.

mechazawa•40 minutes ago

Gemini writes pretty shitty code in my experience. We tried it out for a grand total of half a day at work before deciding it wasn't worth our time and switched back to Opus.

ChatGPT writes like it's life depends on it and refuses to correct its own mistakes. It'll figure out a way to write 4k lines for something that could've been done in 500

puppymaster•41 minutes ago

DeepSeek will just wing it and tell you it's done only for you to find 1 major + 3 edge case bugs.

petesergeant•about 1 hour ago

ChatGPT is very good at code-reviewing Claude’s work and finds the howlers in it fairly reliably

JSR_FDED•about 3 hours ago

Love the way the author labels each of his diagrams as “AI Slop”!

byb•about 2 hours ago

It's one of the neat features of the AsciiDoc language. The user is able to change captions mid document, in this case :figure-caption:. AsciiDoc and Antora are things I've invested a lot of my time into

https://baiyibai-antora.gitlab.io

nicman23•about 2 hours ago

close enough, welcome back 56(0)k

ranger_danger•about 3 hours ago

> I spent two days of a long holiday weekend and about one million Claude Code tokens building this firmware.

gavinsyancey•about 1 hour ago

You can do this by installing OpenWRT on the Pi and controlling it from the web interface.

matthewmacleod•about 1 hour ago

But this is a Pi Pico, which is a microcontroller and not a Linux system.

hparadiz•32 minutes ago

Two arm cores at 133 MHz. That's already more powerful than my first computer. For $4. It qualifies as a computer on it's own. It runs Linux just a hacked version with an emulated MMU

https://github.com/tvlad1234/pico-rv32ima