Following various examples, I’ve created a MicroPython script that does the following:

• Create an access point on the Raspberry Pi Pico W.
• Create a web server.
• Serve a simple page on that web server.
• Toggle/flash the on-board LED when that page is loaded/refreshed.

TL;DR – see the code here

Download MicroPython and install it

First of all, you’ll need to download the latest MicroPython UF2. The one I’m using is v1.19.1-108-g474c47d59 (2022-07-08) .uf2 from this page. I found out via the Raspberry Pi forums that there was something broken on versions earlier than the 07-05 one – check out the thread here.

Next, you will need to put the Pico into bootloader mode and then drag the UF2 file to the external device that comes up.

Initial access point

Use Thonny to program the initial code:

import socket
import network

ssid = "PicoW"
password = "123456789"

ap = network.WLAN(network.AP_IF)
ap.config(essid=ssid, password=password) 
ap.active(True)

while ap.active == False:
  pass

print("Access point active")
print(ap.ifconfig())

Despite setting the SSID, to start with I got a generic wi-fi name starting with “PICO”. In order to get PicoW working, I had to power cycle the Pico (rather than just CTRL-D and run again). This is behaviour described here on the RP forums.

I tried connecting to it using my mobile and success – I could connect to the access point, but had no Internet (as expected, obviously).

Serving a web page

Now, I want to serve a web page of some kind from the Pico W, otherwise it’s pretty useless. What’s the point in having an access point that does nothing?

I found this MicroPython library called tinyweb which is like Flask, but for MicroPython instead of full-blown Python. This I can use to establish “routes” which will deliver specific content via the web browser.

tinyweb requires, as it says in the README, the logging library. I had to scratch around to find that, so here it is.

I uploaded the tinyweb folder and the logging.py file to the PicoW and added

import tinyweb

at the top of the code. This ran correctly, so I then looked at the tinyweb documentation for how to create a web server.

I added some more code (which you can see on my own GitHub repo – WordPress is doing VERY weird things if I paste it in here!)

I connected to the AP again using my phone, turned off mobile data to make sure it didn’t try and serve content from the Internet, and then accessed http://192.168.4.1/ (which had been printed to the REPL which I could see because I was using Thonny).

To my surprise, I got Hello world! on the browser. Yay! It works!

Flash the onboard LED

I added the definition of the onboard LED:

led = Pin("LED", Pin.OUT)

and set the / path of the tinyweb web server to toggle it on and off.

Now, when I refresh the Hello World page, the LED goes on and off. Wonderful!

See the code on GitHub.