The Raspberry Pi Pico is a handy little microcontroller that has become a widespread addition to many hackers’ workbench. The Pico W has a CYW4342W module (just like the Pi Zero W) to add WiFi capabilities and [Jeremy Bentham] ported his bare-metal WiFi driver to the Pico W.
The CYW43438 is an SDIO interface, so most of the code ported over from his Zerowi project, but there were a few notable tweaks along the way. Given that the Pi Pico SDK has the complete source code to drive the CYW43439 with an open source TCP/IP stack (lwIP) and the datasheets from Infineon are pretty detailed, why create your own driver?
The short answer is…because why not. But a second answer is to tweak it just how you like it. With his own implementation, [Jeremy] can focus on maximizing throughput and making WiFi a little easier to debug. He deeply delves into the hardware, scope traces, and code samples. It’s a tremendous five-part read over lunch. Some highlights include writing some code for the PIO (Programmable I/O) to interface with the SPI interface, bank switching in the WiFi RAM, handling the 140 different events, connecting to a network, and sending pings.
The PicoWi code is available on GitHub. Perhaps it can be integrated with this PCMIA interface to offer outstanding performance to an older laptop.
Roll Your Own WiFi Driver For the Pico W
Source: Manila Flash Report
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