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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

#112
In the retro-computing world (Oric-1/Atmos) we are using the PicoW as a way to get our old machines on the Internet, not by implementing USB-CDC drivers on the old machines, but by having the PicoW imitate an old-school modem interface, albeit one that 'dials in' to a web site address instead of another modem ..

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!

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

#113
post #102

I would like to ask the author, what do they mean when they say 'I spent 2 days and 1M claude code tokens' Did you completely vibe code this? or did you create a spec and asked claude to implement that? How many times did you need to course correct claude when it deviated if it did? How much of your own experience as working in WiFi industry was useful while building this project? And what would be different if you h…

I've often thought that if I ever did get around to publishing any of the stuff I work on that I would probably also publish any AI usage verbatim. Like, the full logs of all of the chats, at least as a sign of "here was my thought process" and "here's how I convinced the text machine to give me the right text". That somehow feels more honest than "I made this thing, but actually I vibe coded this thing."

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

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No. The printer cannot connect to the wifi network that the macbook is connected to. I don't want to expose a USB printer to the network. I just want to allow the printer to connect to an AP created by the Macbook/PiZero/ESP32/insert_cheap_widget device and then allow the Macbook to connect to the printer's IP.

That's what I meant by the Macbook and the printer connecting to the same AP. The Pico is the AP, and both your printer and the Macbook connect to it. (You could also use a cheap off the shelf travel router)

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).

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

#115
post #109
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).

My experience with questions to LLM is that they mimic reddit a lot: ask them an apparently simple thing that is not possible, and they will bend backwards to tell you it's possible and give you tons of convoluted possible solutions. Ask them a thing that is possible but complicated, and they will be overly dismissive. The good thing however is that between those two banks there's a wide river of utility...more often…

shallow immediate confident authoritative answers; upon inspection falls apart immediately. sometimes can be beaten by repeat questioning into wisdom. by accident, beauty witnessing unfathomable NPC stupidity, but also invokes a hidden genius operating as though designed to troll first

ya, that is my experience as well

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

#116
post #113
post #102

I would like to ask the author, what do they mean when they say 'I spent 2 days and 1M claude code tokens' Did you completely vibe code this? or did you create a spec and asked claude to implement that? How many times did you need to course correct claude when it deviated if it did? How much of your own experience as working in WiFi industry was useful while building this project? And what would be different if you h…

I've often thought that if I ever did get around to publishing any of the stuff I work on that I would probably also publish any AI usage verbatim. Like, the full logs of all of the chats, at least as a sign of "here was my thought process" and "here's how I convinced the text machine to give me the right text". That somehow feels more honest than "I made this thing, but actually I vibe coded this thing."

Interesting point. The prompts are the source, in a way.

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

#117

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.

ChatGPT is very good at code-reviewing Claude’s work and finds the howlers in it fairly reliably

Playing off different LLMs against one another in that kind of manner is a good way to expose some first order errors.

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

#118
post #96

I’ve been looking for a good solution for doing the exact opposite, being able to connect stuff through USB in my bench, and see them pop up in my office desktop as if they were usb devices. The closest I’ve gotten is using a raspberry pi in the workbench, but for some weird devices that’s sometimes not good enough.

There USB over IP. I think Linux supports it. It could be possible to have Pico implementation, use WiFi like this, and connect to computer or another dongle.

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

#119
post #102

I would like to ask the author, what do they mean when they say 'I spent 2 days and 1M claude code tokens' Did you completely vibe code this? or did you create a spec and asked claude to implement that? How many times did you need to course correct claude when it deviated if it did? How much of your own experience as working in WiFi industry was useful while building this project? And what would be different if you h…

Author here: this is actually a "side quest" which I alluded to in the README.adoc and another comment. I've had a few Spotify Car Things (SuperBird) sitting on my desk that I have not touched in a year because I was waiting for the community to come out with a non-tethered approach to reclaiming them. All of the existing continue to either require a host PC, phone, or RPI Zero. I want to deploy these throughout my home and have them usable without my PC or phone nearby - likely with just a Home Assistant dashboard. I spent the first few hours cloning repositories of existing firmware, and examining other approaches, such as Bluetooth low energy with ESPHome Bluetooth proxies, but they ended up being dead ends. I took a compromise that a small wireless dongle would be acceptable. I then began examining the Linux source tree to see if it was possible to flip the USB from client to host and spent a considerable amount of time recompiling BishopDynamics' SuperBird NixOS distribution and building a test dashboard to show the IP networking information, because I knew that once I flipped the device's USB mode, I would lose access to the device. SuperBird took almost four hours to compile on my low end CPU - I let it compile while I hit my five hour Claude Code quota.

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.

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

#120

Buried the lede by calling this a "usb wifi adapter" and not "magic Ethernet adapter that you don't have to plug a cable into". This will come in handy for my systems that are normally air gapped or currently connected to something else, but sometimes I need to get another network connection on there for a few minutes. I don't always have a USB ethernet adapter on hand or enough cable, but I almost always have a Pico…

Author here: Thank you! It's a nice thought that something I made will become a trusted tool for IT professionals.

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.

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