Raspberry Pi Pico W as USB Wi-Fi Adapter
gitlab.com
gitlab.com
Great work on PicoGUS.
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
LLM "awareness" is similarly irrelevant. They process information usefully, in a way grounded in reality, and that's that.
> Bad take. Some things are feasible and some things are not, "anything is possible" is a useless framework.
It would help if you quoted the entire comment rather than removing the context and further giving a very bad example afterwards:
> Example: go convert two smartphones to communicate p2p over their 4g radios - it's all software!
Nice try. That is a hardware limitation in the 4G radio which is designed to connect to an operator mast. Even if you wanted to do it in software, the hardware does not support that P2P use-case which is what I already said.
> LLM "awareness" is similarly irrelevant.
Exactly. There is no such thing as awareness in LLMs.
The parent comment I replied to believed that an element of awareness had to be present to give an answer because this was done "several times over" in open source projects. Which that is inaccurate in the context of LLM research.
>> "It should be aware that using a Pico W as a transparent ethernet bridge has been done several times over in open source projects..."
> They process information usefully, in a way grounded in reality, and that's that.
Useful to those who know when it is either mostly correct or outright wrong.
Clearly in this example, Gemini doesn't even know if its own answers are grounded in reality and consequently people using them are unable to determine if the results they bring are true or not and there are countless examples of that.
So you know what you just said is not true.
Sounds like a intentional firmware (aka: software) limitation to me?
Infeasible? Oh my yes. Impossible? No. That's the point - there is a distinction.
You can ask follow up questions or point to potential feasibility and it will change its answer.
You know, like the same for horoscopes and psychics.
If you do have cross-session memory enabled, I agree this is not glowing performance. If you don't, then I think it's working exactly as intended.
I just got major Dotcom vibes
> Can you use a raspberry pi pico W as a USB WiFi adapter
> Yes, it is possible to use a Raspberry Pi Pico W as a USB Wi-Fi adapter, but it is a project that requires custom firmware and a clear understanding of your goals.
Then goes off and lists the things you’ll need which at a cursory glance seems like good starting points.
ya, that is my experience as well
It's pretty cool, I have to say - especially for us old Oric folks, who never did quite get a full BBS ecosystem for these machines, unlike others. Its on like donkey kong now though, thanks to wonderful PicoW projects like this!
Since the Pico W is around 7 bucks in my neighborhood... its already pretty cheap.
Personally, I rescued a dozen PogoPlugs from the trash a decade ago and used one to practice self hosting a word press instance. Having a dongle like this would have allowed me to stick it in a corner and run something like librespot or snapcast. Instead, I eventually sent them to the recycler when I moved.
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.
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
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.
I'm actually tired that people put stupid questions in ChatGPT and then present in with a straight face as a source of truth. Sometimes it hallucinates completely, sometimes the conditions or regulation have changed and it gives false answers and no-one cares. Simple collaborations that was possible before now turn into unnecessary arguing. Some ChatGPT users aren't even aware that LLMs hallucinate, I just pointed it out recently and was accused of mansplaining and being a tinfoil hat.
> Nothing they do mirrors ...
"Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?"
Also I posted this comment using one. Speedtest says about 4 Mbps. Surprisingly usable for web browsing though. Very nice tool! I'll be keeping the .uf2 file around for sure.
Now I need to make a nice 3D-printed case.
I admit, I almost couldn't believe it when I turned off my regular blazing fast 802.11ax NIC in the KDE network manager and switched to the pico-usb-wifi and I watched the YouTube "stats for nerds" buffer fully fill up and playback was totally smooth.
https://gitlab.com/baiyibai/superbird-host-mode
I also did not look forward to trying to build in wireless functionality in to NixOS, because it also took 30 minutes to flash the device - I had to lower the transfer block size and add more retries in the flash utility because it kept crashing.
ultimately both the SuperBird work and the RPI pico firmware was about 300 prompts of investigation, research, creating potential approaches, architecting, designing, debugging, testing/validating, and documenting.
Regarding your last two questions... I started out 25 years ago by studying for a CCNA in high school and joined the industry just as first generation 802.11ac devices began hitting the market. From my position, I've worked on every layer from the SoC, PCB, to software. I want to be very careful and say software estimation is very difficult. The main bug (issue #1) I encountered would have been very difficult to diagnose and resolve ten years ago using traditional development workflows.
The closest I’ve gotten is using a raspberry pi in the workbench, but for some weird devices that’s sometimes not good enough.
https://www.orei.com/products/usb-over-ethernet-extender-upt...
They're much cheaper than the competing devices from Digi and they've been bulletproof for me. I've got some out there running >10 years.
I've even done stupid stuff like hung a USB Ethernet adapter off of one and made it a NIC on my local PC to talk to another of the same unit hanging off that USB NIC (just to be cheeky-- not for actual use). Stacking things on top of other things is fun.
My only complaint is I wish they did PoE. I use a cheap PoE splitter for that but it would be nice not to have to do that.
If you'd rather just expose a USB printer to the network, a Pi Zero is a better fit.
What the Macbook can't do is have multiple wifi connections at the same time, so you'd have to disconnect from its primary network (which also rules out the Macbook serving as an AP that the printer connects to).
In a similar but opposite vein, I am going on a vacation and I wanted to share the stupidly expensive internet in my room at night with the family so I am likely bringing a raspberry pi to have as a travel router attached to my Mac. In this case, I can use the RaspAP project: https://raspap.com/
This is slightly different in that I do want a NAT.
You can use it as a repeater, so the whole family can just use the same network/password we use at home. And it is so small, you can run it from a power bank for hours.
Unfortunately, they are not sold anymore.
Peruse README and source code
x=pico-usb-wifi
tnftp -4o"|unzip -p /dev/stdin $x-main/README.adoc $x-main/src/*.c" \
https://gitlab.com/baiyibai/$x/-/archive/main/$x-main.zip \
|tr -cd '[ -~\n]' \
|lessDo you want to share an USB device across the WiFi?
If so, why not use the USB-IP protocol? It is already part of the Linux kernel, has implementation for Windows and doesn't require additional hardware.
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?
- USB FS has a 1ms frame limit (HS is 125µs)
- UBS FS Bulk is thusly limited to ~19 transactions x 64 bytes maximum (HS is 512)
- USB FS Isochronous can do 1023 byte transfers, but you can only fit one of those in a 1ms frame (resulting in a giant quantization hole in the packet)
- Focusing on bulk only: the token packet, ACK handshake, inter-packet bus turnaround time minimums, framing bits, CRC bits, and periodic FS SOF packets mean that the actual theoretical maximum data rate is ~81% of the signaling rate
- Bit stuffing optimality issues (required for clock recovery) eat an additional several percent on most data, up to ~17% on pathological data
Therefore: ~9.5Mb/s is the best theoretical data rate that can be obtained with optimal host and device IP and an ideal application layer.
Realistically, ~8Mb/s is the most one can expect on real hardware with an ideal application (and this is optimistically high in my experience.)
I doubt you will be able to achieve USB HS via a ULPI PHY without an FPGA tunneling the USB SIE for you and handling the tight turnaround requirement (in which case, you might as well give it the entire MAC workload or just use an MCU with an integrated HS PHY.)
The ULPI clock is a 60MHz free-running PHY-sourced signal (typically - some PHYs allow MAC-sourced clocks and this would likely be a little easier), the PHY is entirely in control of when the MAC can transmit (DIR pin), and the protocol is unforgiving from a timing standpoint.
But that's exactly the point of such experience. It's a challenge, and the guy/gal nailed it.
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.
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.
Where I do think it ads value is "AI slop 2". This is somehow even better comprehensible than an average photo.
Also details like the light blue boxes being swapped.
Pico is an amazing thing tho, so many weird firmwares that are useful in a pinch.
It's about quality of discourse among us, and Microsoft has nothing to do with that.
I think it stopped being edgy and transitioned to a symbol of user frustration the moment their CEO tried to address the slop without acknowledging their customer pain.
It is not much different from the micro$oft used here often.
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).
I achieved two goals today: a front page post on hackernews and for being recognized for my work; or more accurately, for being very good at using AI ;)
The author learned nothing though...
I wonder why not use the Pico's RISC-V cores.