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by magicalhippo 1404 days ago
Using the PIO you can get some serious speed out of it. Someone made an arbitrary waveform generator[1] reaching 125Msps stock, for example. But you can overclock[2] the Pico up to 420MHz apparently so maybe you can get even more, though not sure if the GPIO drivers can handle that though.

[1]: https://www.instructables.com/Arbitrary-Wave-Generator-With-...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2BuoFNLoDM

1 comments

If you want to communicate with standard Ethernet gear, that would be either 10Mbit/s exactly (10BASE-T standard) and 100Mbit/s exactly (100BASE-TX standard).

OP implemented 10BASE-T here. Next step up is 100BASE-TX, which nobody did in software/bit-bang as of yet, as far as I'm aware - part of the reason it's fairly large jump in complexity. Namely, you'd need 3 analog voltage levels, as well as pretty hairy digital scrambling/encoding, to output 100BASE-TX. RPi-pico might just be able to eek that out with few external resistors and enough elbow grease.

Other reason nobody bothered with bit-bang 100BASE-TX - virtually all switches will happily down-negotiage to 10BASE-T, which gives you ~1.2MB/s, and that's plenty fast enough for a microcontroller with mere kilobytes of RAM.