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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

#121

Post by overfeed »

dsign wrote: post #109
polpo wrote: 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…

I cannot fathom how people fall into the trap of thinking that LLMs have a consistent world view on any of the users bugbears (what would be an opinion in a human). CoT is a work-around and doesn't persist across sessions. "You are absolutely correct" and "I should not have deleted your production DB" prove the anthropomorphic facade only a facade.

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

#122

Post by byb »

wpm wrote: post #113
asc91 wrote: 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."

Author here: I will consider writing a blog about ir, but it will require a lot of work on my part, because as I mentioned, this was a digression/side quest from the main task of hacking my Spotify Car Thing. It might work better as a YouTube video.

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

#123

Post by dromio »

MomsAVoxell wrote: post #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 eco…

I've been using an ESP8266 as a wifi/modem adapter with my original Commodore 64. Works really well! You may be able to get away with something cheaper if you push.

http://tech.guitarsite.de/c64_wifimodem.html

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

#124

Post by byb »

vardump wrote: post #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.

Author here: You're welcome!

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

#125

Post by byb »

farfatched wrote: post #28
GL26 wrote: 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).

Author here: Thank you, this is one of the nicest things anyone has ever said about my work.

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 ;)

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

#126

Post by byb »

15155 wrote: post #100
teaearlgraycold wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Pico is USB 1.1, so the upper bound is 12 Mb/s.

Totally pedantic deep dive: the Pico has a USB FS PHY (the numbered versions don't directly correlate to line rate, and FS was defined in 1.0) - the signaling rate is 12Mb/s, but it's impossible to achieve sustained transfers at this data rate under any circumstance: - 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…

Author here: thank you for this deep dive. I saw peaks of 5.9 Mbps, it might be possible to increase throughput by allocating more memory. The link between the rp2040 and Infineon Wi-Fi device is 31.5 Mb/s. It might be possible to push that out over PIO to an external USB 2.0 PHY. Apparently the Wi-Fi device is capable of higher speeds. Who knows what will be the limiting factor. I'll leave it to someone else to experiment, my focus was the stock hardware without any modifications.

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

#127

Post by byb »

MomsAVoxell wrote: post #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 eco…

Author here: good point - I do hope the retro computing community enjoys this tool. It does remind me of the Espressif line if ESP8266 and ESP32 devices which have Wi-Fi devices which are available on UART and respond to AT modem commands. Pico-usb-wifi is a nice tool which some clever YouTubers will hopefully be able to use to get old internet appliances, or systems that didn't have Wi-Fi, online.

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.

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

#128

Post by MomsAVoxell »

dromio wrote: post #123
MomsAVoxell wrote: post #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 eco…

I've been using an ESP8266 as a wifi/modem adapter with my original Commodore 64. Works really well! You may be able to get away with something cheaper if you push. http://tech.guitarsite.de/c64_wifimodem.html

Nice to hear of your success with the C64 .. I'll do that with mine too, one of these days.

Since the Pico W is around 7 bucks in my neighborhood... its already pretty cheap.

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

#129

Post by byb »

ianburrell wrote: post #118
xondono wrote: 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.

Author here: I have wanted to make a wireless USB mouse and keyboard switch out of RPI Pico Ws for a long time. I would go a layer deeper than USB/IP, because I want to cache the USB handshake to keep the connection enumerated on multiple systems without dropping.

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

#130

Post by 15155 »

byb wrote: post #126
15155 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally pedantic deep dive: the Pico has a USB FS PHY (the numbered versions don't directly correlate to line rate, and FS was defined in 1.0) - the signaling rate is 12Mb/s, but it's impossible to achieve sustained transfers at this data rate under any circumstance: - 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…

Author here: thank you for this deep dive. I saw peaks of 5.9 Mbps, it might be possible to increase throughput by allocating more memory. The link between the rp2040 and Infineon Wi-Fi device is 31.5 Mb/s. It might be possible to push that out over PIO to an external USB 2.0 PHY. Apparently the Wi-Fi device is capable of higher speeds. Who knows what will be the limiting factor. I'll leave it to someone else to expe…

> It might be possible to push that out over PIO to an external USB 2.0 PHY.

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.

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