Turn a Raspberry Pi Pico W into a driverless USB WiFi adapter
Article excerpt
pico-usb-wifi by 白一百 is firmware for the Raspberry Pi Pico W that turns it into a driverless USB WiFi adapter, enumerating as a USB CDC-NCM device. The firmware works as a transparent layer-2 bridge that forwards frames between the Pico W’s wireless interface and its USB interface. The host’s USB interface adopts the Pico W […]
pico-usb-wifi by 白一百 is firmware for the Raspberry Pi Pico W that turns it into a driverless USB WiFi adapter, enumerating as a USB CDC-NCM device.
The firmware works as a transparent layer-2 bridge that forwards frames between the Pico W’s wireless interface and its USB interface. The host’s USB interface adopts the Pico W WiFi station’s MAC address, which provides a single MAC and IP identity end to end.
I needed a USB Wi-Fi adapter to use in an upcoming embedded Linux project. I did not have a cheap USB Wi-Fi dongle, so instead of going and buying one from a brick-and-mortar store for five USD, I spent two days of a long holiday weekend and about one million Claude Code tokens building this firmware.
No host-side driver, kernel module, or wireless stack is required; see No Host-Side Wi-Fi Stack. The host only needs the in-box cdc_ncm and cdc_acm drivers that ship with every modern Linux, macOS, Windows, and mobile OS.
See this MIT licensed project on GitLab.