wifinina

README

WifiNINA Driver

This package provides a driver to use a separate connected WiFi processor ESP32 for TCP/UDP communication.

The way this driver works is by using the SPI interface of your microcontroller to communicate with the WiFi chip using the Arduino SPI command set.

Using the WiFiNINA Driver

For information on how to use this driver, please take a look at the examples located in the examples/net directory.

Firmware

PLEASE NOTE: New Adafruit Boards with WiFi and Arduino Nano33 IoT and Nano RP2040 Connect boards most likely already have a recent version of the nina-fw firmware pre-installed. You should not need to install the firmware yourself.

In order to use this driver, you must have the nina-fw firmware installed on the ESP32 chip. If it is already installed, you can just use it. You do not need to flash the firmware again unless it has known bugs or lacks functionality you plan to use.

The following instructions are only for those who want or need to update the firmware on your board.

Update Arduino Boards with Arduino IDE

Probably, the easiest way to update nina-fw on Arduino boards is to use their IDE. Please see tutorial page for detailed instructions.

Sometimes you may want to flash a version of nina-fw Arduino IDE does not know about yet.
There is no way to "refresh" firmware versions list, but you can "fool" Arduino IDE by substituting, say, 1.4.5 binary with 1.4.8 binary.
For that you need to locate the binary Arduino IDE going to flash and replace it with a new file.
Location differs from OS to OS, on macOS it's in "/Applications/Arduino.app/Contents/Java/tools/WiFi101/tool/firmwares/NINA/".
Replace respective binary ".bin" file with new file and follow tutorial steps above flashing "1.4.5" version while in fact it is going to flash "1.4.8".

Latest firmware binary file for your board can be downloaded from their releases page.

Verify correct version flashed with "Examples/WiFiNINA/Tools/CheckFirmwareVersion" sketch in Arduino IDE.

Update Arduino Boards without Arduino IDE

Download nina-fw firmware binary

# wget
wget https://github.com/arduino/nina-fw/releases/download/1.4.8/NINA_W102-v1.4.8.bin
# curl
curl -LO https://github.com/arduino/nina-fw/releases/download/1.4.8/NINA_W102-v1.4.8.bin

Install esptool to flash nina-fw firmware

In order to flash the firmware, you need to use Python to install the esptool package.

pip install esptool

On macOS you can also use brew

brew install esptool

Once you have installed esptool you can follow the procedure below for flashing your board.

Note: We use esptool executable in the rest of the document, you may find yourself using esptool.py instead, depends on OS and way you install it. Note: Port /dev/ttyACM0 is valid for Linux; on macOS it shall be something like /dev/tty.usbmodem14101; on Windows expect to see COM1 or alike.

Update nina-fw on the Arduino Nano33 IoT

In the updater directory we have a precompiled binary of the "passthrough" code you will need to flash first, in order to update the ESP32 co-processor on your board.

This is what needs to be done. There is also a bash script that performs the same steps also located in the updater directory.

# reset board into bootloader mode using 1200 baud
stty -F /dev/ttyACM0 ispeed 1200 ospeed 1200

# flash the passthru binary to the SAMD21 using bossac
# code from https://github.com/arduino-libraries/WiFiNINA/blob/master/examples/Tools/SerialNINAPassthrough/SerialNINAPassthrough.ino
bossac -d -i -e -w -v -R --port=/dev/ttyACM0 --offset=0x2000 ./SerialNINAPassthrough.ino.nano_33_iot.bin

# flash the nina-fw binary to the ESP32 using esptool
esptool --port /dev/ttyACM0 --before default_reset --baud 115200 write_flash 0 ./NINA_W102-v1.4.8.bin

You only need to do this one time, and then the correct nina-fw firmware will be on the NINA ESP32 chip, and you can just flash the Arduino Nano33 IoT board using TinyGo.

Update nina-fw on the Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect

In the updater directory we have a precompiled binary of the "passthrough" code you will need to flash first, in order to update the ESP32 co-processor on your board.

Put Nano RP2040 Connect into Mass Storage Device mode by shorting REC and GND pins while plugging it in. Alternatively you can short the pins and press button on top side of the board while keeping the board connected to your computer. Release the pins and "RPI-RP2" storage device shall appear mounted.

Copy SerialNINAPassthrough.ino.nano_rp2040_connect.uf2 file over to storage device and it must eject rebooting.

Now you can use esptool to flash nina-fw to ESP32 chip on the board.

esptool --port /dev/ttyACM0 --before no_reset --baud 115200 write_flash 0 ./NINA_W102-v1.4.8.bin

Verify correct version of nina-fw installed by flasing CheckFirmwareVersion.ino.uf2 on the board the same way you flashed SerialNINAPassthrough.ino.nano_rp2040_connect.uf2 before. You must connect to the board with a serial monitor, for example Arduino IDE, alternatively screen or picocom cli commands.

Update Adafruit ESP32 WiFi Boards

Adafruit provides very good instructions for updating their boards that provide a ESP32 WiFi-BLE co-processor. For more information, please see:

https://learn.adafruit.com/upgrading-esp32-firmware

Updating the driver

If you modify the WiFiNINA status or command codes, you will also need to regenerate the display strings.

go generate ./wifinina/status.go ./wifinina/commands.go

Debugging

You can output debug information to the serial console by using the wifidebug tag.

tinygo flash -target pyportal -ldflags="-X main.ssid=something -X main.pass=somethingelse" -tags=wifidebug -monitor ./examples/wifinina/webclient/

Documentation

Index

• Constants
• Variables
• func New(cfg *Config) *wifinina
• type Config
• type Pin
  • func (p Pin) Configure(config PinConfig) error
  • func (p Pin) High() error
  • func (p Pin) Low() error
  • func (p Pin) Set(high bool) error
• type PinConfig
• type PinMode
• type Socket

Constants

const (
	PinLow uint8 = iota
	PinHigh
)

Variables

var (
	ErrPinNoDevice = errors.New("wifinina pin: device not set")
)

Functions

func New

func New(cfg *Config) *wifinina

Types

type Config

type Config struct {
	// SPI config
	Spi  drivers.SPI
	Freq uint32
	Sdo  machine.Pin
	Sdi  machine.Pin
	Sck  machine.Pin

	// Device config
	Cs     machine.Pin
	Ack    machine.Pin
	Gpio0  machine.Pin
	Resetn machine.Pin
	// ResetIsHigh controls if the RESET signal to the processor should be
	// High or Low (the default). Set this to true for boards such as the
	// Arduino MKR 1010, where the reset signal needs to go high instead of
	// low.
	ResetIsHigh bool
}

type Pin

type Pin uint8

func (Pin) Configure

func (p Pin) Configure(config PinConfig) error

func (Pin) High

func (p Pin) High() error

func (Pin) Low

func (p Pin) Low() error

func (Pin) Set

func (p Pin) Set(high bool) error

type PinConfig

type PinConfig struct {
	Mode PinMode
}

type PinMode

type PinMode uint8

const (
	PinInput PinMode = iota
	PinOutput
	PinInputPullup
)

type Socket

type Socket struct {
	// contains filtered or unexported fields
}