Raspberry Pi Pico W as USB Wi-Fi Adapter

(gitlab.com)

93 points | by byb 4 hours ago

12 comments

  • polpo 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 52 minutes 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.

  • GL26 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 27 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 37 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 53 minutes ago
      except now we don't need to spend that $5
  • hellweaver666 15 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!
  • byb 4 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 4 hours ago
      Hah! That's neat! So much fun stuff to be had with that particular bit of kit.
  • drop-volley 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 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 31 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 2 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 46 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 47 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 51 minutes ago
      ChatGPT is very good at code-reviewing Claude’s work and finds the howlers in it fairly reliably
  • JSR_FDED 3 hours ago
    Love the way the author labels each of his diagrams as “AI Slop”!
    • byb 1 hour 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 2 hours ago
    close enough, welcome back 56(0)k
  • ranger_danger 3 hours ago
    > I spent two days of a long holiday weekend and about one million Claude Code tokens building this firmware.
  • gavinsyancey 1 hour ago
    You can do this by installing OpenWRT on the Pi and controlling it from the web interface.
    • matthewmacleod 1 hour ago
      But this is a Pi Pico, which is a microcontroller and not a Linux system.
      • hparadiz 38 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