Raspberry Pi Pico W as USB Wi-Fi Adapter

(gitlab.com)

140 points | by byb 6 hours ago

17 comments

  • KJs6ZxELzQM37O 3 minutes ago
    I recently bought Pico 2 W for DualSense (https://github.com/awalol/DS5Dongle).
  • arcza 25 minutes ago
    Meta comment: nice to see someone NOT putting their FOSS project on Microslop (GitHub) and using another platform for hosting their code. I respect that, thank you for standing up to GitHub's dominance. I wish more projects didn't give GitHub such monopoly power by defaulting to using it.
  • polpo 4 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).
    • tehlike 33 minutes ago
      It's often good to approach what llm said as a guidance, and not as ground truth.

      You can ask follow up questions or point to potential feasibility and it will change its answer.

    • byb 3 hours 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.

    • alexjurkiewicz 49 minutes ago
      It was Gemini Flash, probably an even faster variant optimised for immediate response on search pages.
    • rvz 36 minutes ago
      > Interesting that Gemini said it was infeasible.

      Unless there is a hardware limitation or the hardware does not support it, anything in software is possible.

      Gemini and all these other LLMs are designed to convince you that they have "awareness" which they do not have any of the sort. They are neither sentient nor do they have consciousness

  • byb 6 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 6 hours ago
      Hah! That's neat! So much fun stuff to be had with that particular bit of kit.
  • palata 52 minutes ago
    > Average 4.75 Mbits/sec throughput

    Isn't that slow for WiFi?

    I mean it's an interesting learning experience, but isn't that strictly worse than pretty much any WiFi dongle?

    • tehlike 32 minutes ago
      Yes, the guy clearly spent more of his time than it's worth - you can buy a wifi dongle for a few bucks on aliexpress.

      But that's exactly the point of such experience. It's a challenge, and the guy/gal nailed it.

    • teaearlgraycold 41 minutes ago
      The Pico is USB 1.1, so the upper bound is 12 Mb/s.
  • drop-volley 5 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 4 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.

    • teaearlgraycold 39 minutes ago
      The Pico W can host an AP.
  • GL26 3 hours 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 2 hours 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.
    • farfatched 1 hour ago
      The author's tone when they discuss the cost of the project is self-deprecating. They know it would have been simpler to just buy one.

      But also, the author has given the community a great gift, both directly (the blog post and the project!) and indirectly (the idea: what else can be implemented in similar ways).

    • bdavbdav 2 hours ago
      It’s nice that it doesn’t need the WiFi stack or host side configuration though. This would be great for headless machines.
    • throwwwll 1 hour ago
      > The project is cool thought to learn about networks, NAT, Proxys, ect...

      The author learned nothing though...

      • teaearlgraycold 38 minutes ago
        Eh maybe a few tidbits. But the world gained a new WiFi adapter!
    • lithiumii 3 hours ago
      except now we don't need to spend that $5
  • hellweaver666 2 hours 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!
  • amelius 2 hours ago
    How many Mbps?
    • smilespray 1 hour ago
      6
      • tonyhart7 1 hour ago
        not very a lot are they
        • tehlike 32 minutes ago
          Yes, but why does it matter. People do all sorts of things for fun.
        • InsideOutSanta 53 minutes ago
          6 is all you need in all cases, depending on the unit.
  • vardump 2 hours 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 4 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.

    • lionkor 1 hour ago
      Actually, all of them are fallible, very incompetent machines that are good at writing text. They're not people, they don't have any qualities of people except the really bad ones, and they are absolutely miserable at reasoning.

      The only people I know who use Gemini are unemployed.

      The only people I know who use Claude vibe-code everything, often including their communication -- they probably let Claude kiss their kids goodnight.

      Everyone else uses ChatGPT, and the world is worse off for it.

      They are machines. "it" is the only acceptable pronoun, and personifying these machines adds emotion into the discussion and the use of the tool. They are not people. They do not behave like people. If you feel like they do, and you're e.g. autistic, that's entirely fair, so please take my word that they do not behave sufficiently like people in any way.

      Nothing they do mirrors the behavior of engineers. They instead mimic the language of engineers. I understand that this is all it takes in a lot of circles to gain respect, which is quite a sad state for those circles, but that doesn't mean its a universal experience.

    • mechazawa 2 hours 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 2 hours ago
      DeepSeek will just wing it and tell you it's done only for you to find 1 major + 3 edge case bugs.
    • petesergeant 3 hours ago
      ChatGPT is very good at code-reviewing Claude’s work and finds the howlers in it fairly reliably
  • JSR_FDED 5 hours ago
    Love the way the author labels each of his diagrams as “AI Slop”!
    • byb 4 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

    • MgB2 59 minutes ago
      I'm kind of fascinated by the first diagram on the page. It sits so firmly in the uncanny valley for me and I can't put my finger on why. By itself every part looks ok and normal, but as a whole it just screams AI to me. I don't know if its the color choices or the composition or something else. It all just feels that little bit off.

      I mean, I know its AI, the page says so itself, no one is trying to hide it. But it also just gives me AI vibes on such a subliminal level that I can't figure out why.

  • nicman23 4 hours ago
    close enough, welcome back 56(0)k
  • throwwwll 1 hour ago
    AI Slop.
  • ranger_danger 5 hours ago
    > I spent two days of a long holiday weekend and about one million Claude Code tokens building this firmware.
  • gavinsyancey 3 hours ago
    You can do this by installing OpenWRT on the Pi and controlling it from the web interface.
    • matthewmacleod 3 hours ago
      But this is a Pi Pico, which is a microcontroller and not a Linux system.
      • hparadiz 2 hours 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

        • RossBencina 8 minutes ago
          > This project uses CNLohr's mini-rv32ima RISC-V emulator core

          I wonder why not use the Pico's RISC-V cores.