In this video, we're going to start simple and just connect our Pico to a local wireless network and then query or connect to some websites through the internet. This isn't going to let us browse the internet like we do through a normal computer, the Pico is nowhere near powerful enough for this and just three frames of this video is nearly enough to completely fill the Pico's RAM and crash it. So we can't browse the web but we're going to be able to send or receive text-based data from specific websites.

All right let's get into it, we aren't going to need any additional hardware obviously just a Pico W and a cable to connect it to the computer and we're going to go ahead and code this up from scratch and kind of just explain what everything does along the way and as always we'll have the full completed code on our course page, link below for our YouTube audience.

First of all let's import the libraries that we need, we're going to need network and we're going to need micro requests which are both part of the standard MicroPython library and we're also going to import time. So starting off I've gone ahead and created some variables with our Wi-Fi details in them and this is just the details to your Wi-Fi network, it might be your home router or you might be using a wireless hotspot, both work as long as you have an internet access through them.

Next we're going to create a function which is going to connect us to the internet. Now wireless code is going to get very messy very quickly so it is always a good idea to use functions wherever you can. So we start with these three lines which are doing the heavy lifting of connecting the Pico to our wireless local network. So we start by setting up an instance of it similar to how we might set up a pin as a PWM or an ADC input, then we turn on our hardware with active.true and if you wanted to turn it off for maybe power saving reasons you could use active.false and then we tell the Pico to connect to our Wi-Fi using our credentials that we put up here.

Now another very important thing when using wireless on the Pico is using print statements to debug or to see what's going on because there's a few steps that it can fail at and by putting print statements in our code we can see where it fails. So here we're saying while it's still trying to connect it's going to print connecting please wait and then go to sleep and then once it has connected it'll break this while loop and print connected and this is easy to develop through a shell but it might be a smart idea to pop an OLED screen on so you can see what your wireless project is doing and this line here is going to be especially important in the upcoming videos because it's the IP address of our Pico on the wireless network. Ifconfig is a list that holds all of our connection data and the zeroth element of that is the IP of the Pico.

Now let's test that function by just calling it like so and if we hit run we can see that we're going to be printing connect connecting connecting please wait and with that print line we know that our Pico has successfully connected to our Wi-Fi network.

Another really handy thing for when dealing with wireless on the Pico is something called error handling and we're going to do this through the try and accept functions. So what this try and accept is going to do is it's going to try the code that we put in the try and if there is an error with it or something happens and the Pico crashes it's going to run whatever we put in the accept so if we try to connect and that fails or gives us an error it's going to print that there was an error so we can see what's going on and this is not only a handy tool in wireless related things but any code you write can really benefit from this try accept functions.

So now we've got a Pico connected to our local network let's get it to then send out a request to a website on the internet itself. So let's start by creating a variable with the site that we want to query. I'm going to copy and paste that and we're going to talk about what sites you can use later in the video. So here we tell the Pico to make the request to the site and all the information that we get from that is going to be stored in this variable R here and then all we do is we just print out R. Now when that data comes from our site it's going to be in a JSON format and this dot JSON here just turns it into nice Python readable strings. It's very similar to how we use dot decode in our UART video and then we end our request with dot close and we also put it in our accept to just close any loose ends in case it throws us an error and something else I just want to add in here I just want to add some more print statements so we can see what's going on and I'm just going to say we are querying the site and just print it out like so and if we hit run we should be able to see that it connects and that it's querying and that we get that information back.

How cool is that we got our $10 microcontroller connecting to a server over on the other side of the world pulling information back and storing it as a data that we can use that is mind-boggling and this site that we're querying just returns the exact date and time to our Pico and we could use some string manipulation to extract the data that we actually want from it and this can get a bit technical it can be really easy or hard depending on what information you're getting back and with that we have just completed our first stepping stone in our wireless chapter now that might seem a little bit contrived or a little bit obscure just querying the time from a site but there is a wealth of websites out there that you can query to get really useful information for your project but we can't just connect to any random site it needs to be a very specific one that returns some sort of JSON string so for example if we try to connect to even just Google for example let's run that the Pico is probably going to crash because it's not going yeah as you can see it doesn't like doing that but you'll find tons of sites that can return this information like how about a random dad joke that as I get older I think of all the people I lost along the way maybe a career as a to guide wasn't such a good idea or a random cat fact maybe you can get a random zen quote and connect a display to the Pico to have random quotes just floating around your house outside of random jokes and facts there are also sites that have useful technical information like how about the position of the ISS in real time or global exchange rates to a specific currency or how about all the earthquakes detected by the USGS in the last hour we will have a link to all of these and some more on the course page but if you find any or know of any cool or helpful sites to get information with a Pico let us know so that other people can find them.

Three key takeaways one we can use the network library to connect the Pico to a local wireless network two when programming to use the wireless capabilities on the Pico it's always a smart idea to use error handling with try accept and use print statements to help debug your issues and maybe also using functions is a smart move and three as long as your wireless network has internet access the Pico can query websites to receive useful information.