Raspberry Pi Pico W as USB Wi-Fi Adapter

258 points · 128 comments on HN · read original →

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Firmware turning a Raspberry Pi Pico W into a driverless USB Wi-Fi adapter via CDC-NCM.

The firmware bridges Ethernet frames between the Pico W's wireless and USB interfaces at layer 2, adopting the Wi-Fi station's MAC address for a single identity end to end. It requires no host-side Wi-Fi stack, kernel module, or vendor driver, using only in-box cdc_ncm/cdc_acm drivers on Linux, macOS, Windows, Android, and iOS. WPA2-PSK authentication and an out-of-band management console are included. Sustained throughput reaches about 4.75 Mbit/s.

What commenters are saying

Commenters found the project neat and appreciated the author's use of LLMs and AsciiDoc diagrams. Some noted the Pico W has been used as a transparent bridge before, e.g., in BlueSCSI and PicoGUS projects. A split emerged on LLM utility: some praised Claude for building it while Gemini dismissed feasibility, while others argued these models lack reasoning and merely mimic language, warning against personifying them.