WiFi (Raspberry Pi Pico W) Support
WiFi is supported on the Raspberry Pi Pico W by selecting the “Raspberry Pi Pico W” board in the Boards Manager. It is generally compatible with the Arduino WiFi library and the ESP8266 Arduino WiFi library.
Enable WiFi support by selecting the Raspberry Pi Pico W board in the IDE and adding #include <WiFi.h> in your sketch.
Supported Features
WiFi connection (Open, WPA/WPA2)
Static IP or dynamic DHCP supported
Station Mode (STA, connects to an existing network)
Access Point Mode (AP, creates its own wireless network) with 4 clients
WiFi Scanning and Reporting
See the
ScanNetworks.inoexample to better understand the process.
Important Information
Please note that WiFi on the Pico W is a work-in-progress and there are some important caveats:
Adding WiFi increases flash usage by over 220KB
There is a 220KB binary firmware blob for the WiFi chip (CYW43-series) which the Pico W uses, even to control the onboard LED.
Adding WiFi increases RAM usage by ~40KB.
LWIP, the TCP/IP driver, requires preallocated buffers to allow it to run in non-polling mode (i.e. packets can be sent and received in the background without the application needing to explicitly do anything).
The WiFi driver is a little limited as of now, but fully functional for sending and receiving data
Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) is not supported
Combined STA/AP mode is not supported
Multicore is supported, but only core 0 may run
WiFirelated code.FreeRTOS is supported only on core 0 and from within
setupand ``loop`, not tasks, due to the requirement for a very different LWIP implementation. PRs always appreciated!
The WiFi library borrows much work from the ESP8266 Arduino Core , especially the WiFiClient and WiFiServer classes.
Special Thanks
Special thanks to:
@todbot for donating one of his Pico W boards to the effort
@d-a-v for much patient explanation about LWIP internals
The whole ESP8266 Arduino team for their network classes
Adafruit Industries for their kind donation