NRF24L01P shim for Pico

Apologies for asking my first question and then going M.I.A. for a week. Bad form on my part.

In any case, here's a bit of code for a "beacon" Pico, with the receiver Pico having essentially the same code. As it is here it runs fine, but if I switch over to the commented out software SPI portion, I get a "TX timeout". I've tried on multiple Pico/NRF24 combos so it shouldn't be a hardware issue.

Thanks for taking a look!

SPI1.setup( { sck: B3, miso: B4, mosi: B5 } );
var nrf = require( "NRF24L01P" ).connect( SPI1, B6, B7 );

//var spi = new SPI();
//spi.setup( { sck: A1, miso: A3, mosi: A2 } );
//var nrf = require( "NRF24L01P" ).connect( spi, A0, A10 );

var ledValue = 1;
var dataLine = "";

function onInit() {
   clearInterval();
   nrf.init( [0, 0, 0, 0, 1], [0, 0, 0, 0, 2] );
   sendData( 'PING' );
}

function sendData( value ) {
   digitalWrite( LED2, ledValue );
   ledValue = !ledValue;
   nrf.sendString( value );
   setTimeout( sendData, 2000, 'PING' );
}

function receive() {
   dataLine = "";
   while ( nrf.getDataPipe() !== undefined ) {
      var data = nrf.getData();
      for ( var i in data ) {
         var ch = data[i];
         if ( ch === 0 && dataLine !== "" ) {
            console.log( dataLine );
            if ( dataLine == 'PING' ) {
               digitalWrite( LED2, ledValue );
               ledValue = !ledValue;
            }
            dataLine = "";
         } else if ( ch !== 0 ) {
            dataLine += String.fromCharCode( ch );
         }
      }
   }
}

onInit();