When dealing with Wifi networks, or networks in general, especaially if your WIFI has MAC Address filtering enabled, you will need the MAC Address of your Pico(s).
A MAC Address is a 6 part address that looks like so:
The first three numbers are to identify the manufacturer, the last 3 numbers are for the ID of the device. In a layer 3 network (most networks now) we generally use the IP Address of the device, but in purely Layer 2 networks then the MAC addresses are used.
As with most things Pico/Network we need a Python script. See an example below:
import network import ubinascii wlan = network.WLAN(network.STA_IF) wlan.active(True) print(ubinascii.hexlify(wlan.config('mac'), ':').decode())
Save the above code to your Pico as find-mac-address.py
When you run the code in Thonny, you will see something similar to below.
As can be seen, the code outputs the Pico MAC Address in to the shell window in Thonny.