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263 points chaosprint | 1 comments | 29 Oct 25 23:21 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

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ChuckMcM ◴[29 Oct 25 23:43 UTC] No.45754594[source]▶

Fun stuff. You kids don't know how lucky you are to have really capable MCU's for just a few bucks. :-)

It is kind of the ultimate "not a TOE[1]" example yet.

[1] TOE or TCP Offload Engine was a dedicated peripheral card that implements both the layer 1 (MAC), layer 2 (Ethernet), and layer 3 (IP) functions as a co-processing element to relieve the 'main' CPU the burden of doing all that.

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hunta2097 ◴[30 Oct 25 10:26 UTC] No.45758335[source]▶

>>45754594 #

I can't get my head around it sometimes. I know most end up doing duties that a PIC-chip could do but the fact you can get a WiFi enabled microcontroller few a few bucks blows my mind.

The IO co-processing on the Pico is so powerful, I hope they expand on this.

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1. nerdsniper ◴[30 Oct 25 14:43 UTC] No.45760571[source]▶

>>45758335 #

It's also not really clear that using some of the more powerful chips for simple things is really a "waste" in any reasonable sense of the word. The packaging of a PIC/CH32 is probably the majority of its cost and environmental "footprint".

An RP2040 is not much more physical material.

An ESP8266/ESP32 is rather bit more material, but still not egregious.

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Raspberry Pi Pico Bit-Bangs 100 Mbit/S Ethernet