For networking and communications week, I didn't have any experience or knowledge in this area, so I first watched different youtube videos to better understand this week's topic. At this point, I've learned that debugging generally takes me hours, so I wanted the first objective to be simple. I decided to work with the Raspberry Pie Pico W as a microcontroller with which I had some familiarity. To get started, I wanted to first connect the RPP to my wifi network and try to blink the built-in LED.
In Thonny, I used code to connect the RPP to wifi. I used ChatGPT to help me with this code (included in the file below). Right away, I ran into issues. I couldn't connect through Harvard's wifi network due to all of the security barriers (.e.g having a Harvard key to sign in). It was clear to me fairly quickly that this network wouldn't work.
I turned to using my hotspot which, after troubleshooting for several hours, did not ultimately work. Connecting both my computer and the RPP to the same hotspot connection seemed to be having issues. Eventually, the pico was able to read my hotspot as a wifi option among the others, but I couldn't get my computer to connect to the same network simultaneously. I tried many work-arounds including connecting my phone to my computer to transfer the wifi over a USB.
Ultimately, I decided the best path forward was to find another wifi network with an accessible SSID and password. Once connected, it printed "connected to wifi" and the IP address in the shell. The RPP was now networked with my computer over the wifi.
I now needed to control the built-in LED on the RPP over the network. I used code in Thonny to set up the RPP as a web server and blink the LED. The code is included below.