drivers/wifinina

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/wifinina directory.

WiFiNINA Firmware Installation

PLEASE NOTE: New Arduino Nano33 IoT boards already have the WiFiNINA firmware pre-installed, so you should not need to install the firmware yourself.

In order to use this driver, you must have the WiFiNINA firmware installed on the ESP32 chip. If it is already installed, you can just use it. You do not need to build and flash the firmware again.

Building the WifiNINA firmware

We have provided a Dockerfile that can build the needed firmware.

docker build -t wifinina ./wifinina/
docker run -v "$(pwd)/build:/src/build" wifinina

This will put the firmware files into the build directory. Now you can flash them to the ESP32 chip.

Installing esptool to flash WifiNINA firmware

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

pip install esptool

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

Installing on Arduino Nano33 IoT

The Arduino Nano33 IoT board has the WiFiNINA firmware flashed onto the onboard NINA-W102 chip out of the box.

Flashing the firmware is only necessary on the Arduino Nano33 IoT in order to upgrade or if other firmware was installed previously.

If you do want to install the firmware on the Arduino Nano33 IoT board's built-in NINA-W102 chip, you will need to first build the firmware as described above.

To flash this firmware on the Arduino Nano33 IoT you will need to follow the following procedure using the Arduino IDE software:

• Install Arduino SAMD Boards from the Boards Manager.
• Install WiFiNINA from the Library Manager.
• Using the normal Arduino software, load the SerialNINAPassthrough sketch on to the board (in File -> Examples -> WiFiNINA-> Tools).

Now you can flash the WifiNINA firmware using the esptool script:

python esptool.py --chip esp32 --port /dev/ttyACM0 --baud 115200 --before no_reset --after hard_reset write_flash -z --flash_mode dio --flash_freq 40m --flash_size detect 0x1000 build/bootloader.bin 0xf000 build/phy_init_data.bin 0x30000 build/nina-fw.bin 0x8000 build/partitions.bin

You only need to do this one time, and then the correct WiFiNINA firmware will be on the NINA chip, and you can just flash the Arduino Nano33 IoT board using TinyGo. We should be able to remove some of these steps in a future release of this software.