Raspberry Pi Pico W as USB Wi-Fi Adapter

 (gitlab.com)

65 points | by byb 3 hours ago

9 comments

  • polpo 1 hour 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).
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    • byb 8 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 one an LLM trained on pre-1900 documents and ask it if powered flight is possible.

      Great work on PicoGUS.

  • GL26 36 minutes 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...
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    • lithiumii 9 minutes ago
      except now we don't need to spend that $5
  • gavinsyancey 51 minutes ago
    You can do this by installing OpenWRT on the Pi and controlling it from the web interface.
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    • matthewmacleod 48 minutes ago
      But this is a Pi Pico, which is a microcontroller and not a Linux system.
  • drop-volley 2 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.
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    • bdcravens 1 hour 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.

  • andrewstuart 1 hour 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.

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    • mechazawa 2 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 3 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 7 minutes ago
      ChatGPT is very good at code-reviewing Claude’s work and finds the howlers in it fairly reliably
  • byb 3 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.
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    • fragmede 3 hours ago
      Hah! That's neat! So much fun stuff to be had with that particular bit of kit.
  • JSR_FDED 2 hours ago
    Love the way the author labels each of his diagrams as “AI Slop”!
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    • 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 1 hour ago
    close enough, welcome back 56(0)k
  • ranger_danger 2 hours ago
    > I spent two days of a long holiday weekend and about one million Claude Code tokens building this firmware.