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Raspberry Pi Pico W as USB Wi-Fi Adapter

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Re: Raspberry Pi Pico W as USB Wi-Fi Adapter

#21
post #14

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...

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

Re: Raspberry Pi Pico W as USB Wi-Fi Adapter

#22
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.

Re: Raspberry Pi Pico W as USB Wi-Fi Adapter

#23
post #14

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...

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.

Re: Raspberry Pi Pico W as USB Wi-Fi Adapter

#24
post #16
post #10

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).

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.

You can probably try this:

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

Re: Raspberry Pi Pico W as USB Wi-Fi Adapter

#26
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!

Re: Raspberry Pi Pico W as USB Wi-Fi Adapter

#28
post #14

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...

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).

Re: Raspberry Pi Pico W as USB Wi-Fi Adapter

#29

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.

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.

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