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.
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 than not they'll at least mention things I haven't considered before.
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...
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!
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.
I don't have any idea of what is the purpose of this.
Do 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.
I had the same idea for a Plan 9 USB WiFi using an ESP32. You serve the wifi device as a ether(3) device which negates the need for janky side band config as the config is done over the same 9P interface. Never got around to it.
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.
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 had worked on this project without that experience?
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 52.5 ms ] threadClaude 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.
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.
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?
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.
Do 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.
The closest I’ve gotten is using a raspberry pi in the workbench, but for some weird devices that’s sometimes not good enough.