We are all in search of the fastest in a wireless router, to give ourselves the best connectivity to the world. But what about the slowest? Gigabit Ethernet may not be for everyone, as Matt Deeds demonstrates with bit-banged 10baseT Ethernet on a Raspberry Pi Pico 2W.
The project is written in Rust, and is in part a port of an earlier project. It makes use of Ethernet magnetics, but the rest of the works is all done in software. He says it’s full-speed on transmit and reduced speed on receive, but we’re guessing if you’re using 10baseT in 2026 then speed isn’t your number one concern anyway. It provides a WiFi router as well as a wired connection, making it possibly the cheapest Ethernet to wireless solution possible.
We like projects that extract the last ounce of power from a part to make it do something its designers never intended. In this case we’ve seen a few other bit-banged Ethernet projects before, even another on the Pi Pico.
There’s no such thing as a Pi Pici 2W. It could be a Pi Zero 2W. If you’re talking about a Pi Pico, that’s a basic microcontroller, not a SBC. While it is powerful, and has some powerful architecture, esp compared to many other uC, it cannot do the job you described.
C’mon!
According to The Pi Hut, it does exist.
https://thepihut.com/products/raspberry-pi-pico-2-w
The manufacturer disagrees: https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-pico-2/
Burn!
“The job you described” means bitbanging 10BASE-T?
People have done way crazier things with the Picos, using the PIOs and stuff
I remember when 10-Base-T (or 10-Base-2) was fast. Compared to serial… I might have a use for this.
Receive is only around 100 kB/s with this implementation. Transmit can go up to 1 MB/s, so if your application is mostly sending data, it could certainly be useful.
Reminds me of the “high speed” internet I had in 2005.
now that’s a hack!