Raspberry Pi Pico Bit-Bangs 100 Mbit/S Ethernet

Raspberry Pi’s tiny Pico just pulled a headline stunt: developer Steve Markgraf made it “fake” 100 megabit Ethernet in software, streaming about 11 MB/s without a dedicated network chip. It’s transmit‑only and needs safe isolation (no Power‑over‑Ethernet!), but the demo video and repo prove the point — bit‑banging (pretending hardware with code) can fly. And the comments? Absolute fireworks. One old‑school engineer swaggered in with “you kids don’t know how lucky you are,” then dropped a history lesson on TOE (a TCP offload engine — fancy network hardware) while saluting the clever hack. A pragmatist asked the obvious: would this magic even be possible without PIO (programmable pins) doing the heavy lifting? Cue the hottest take: a frustrated dev torched Raspberry Pi’s support, saying competitors ship real audio and network blocks while RP users have to roll their own from “crappy” examples. Meanwhile a philosopher of silicon called it the “wheel of life”: we move work from the CPU to a card, then to a card with its own CPU, then back inside the CPU as special logic — and around we go. The mood swings from awe to eye‑rolls, with side quests comparing PIO to Cypress PSoC. Verdict: dazzling party trick, divisive practicality.