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Comment by hlandau | Hacker News Reader

I'm a bit confused why pine64 has decided the BL602 should be the target of deblobbing efforts. Surely the ESP32 would be a better, more popular and more available target?

(Some background: Most western designs of wireless MCU have a user-programmable core and another core handling Wi-Fi running a proprietary blob. Often the flash on the Wi-Fi side of these is inaccessible to the user core and thus deblobbing them would be hard. The ESP8266 and ESP32 are unusual in that the Wi-Fi "blob" is just a proprietary static library (.a file) linked in with your application, so it would be entirely feasible to deblob it. The BL602 seems to be trying to compete with ESP parts, follows a similar design, and thus can also be deblobbed, but is presumably much less available and much less documented.)

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> The BL602 seems to be trying to compete with ESP parts, follows a similar design, and thus can also be deblobbed, but is presumably much less available and much less documented.

Wasn't the BL602 just released last week? Bouffalo Lab is also a rather new company so trying to gain market share & attention with a more open strategy sounds like a good idea.

? Its their own core, if Bouffalo Lab wants to gain market share & attention they could start by releasing all the sources to begin with.

I primarily use Bluetooth connection to ESP32.

BL602 support Bluetooth 5.0 with longer range, mesh network, lower power consumption ++

For me this makes BL602 a winner, if the SW can catch up.

> ...why pine64 has decided the BL602 should be the target of deblobbing efforts.

The 4-day old HN thread BL602/BL604 RISC-V WiFi and Bluetooth 5.0 SoC will sell at ESP8266 price point [1] links to a cnx-software article with the following:

> TL Lim, the founder of Pine64, also participated in the discussion and would consider launching a Pine64 BL602 board if an open-source toolchain is available.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24877335

> I'm a bit confused why pine64 has decided the BL602 should be the target of deblobbing efforts. Surely the ESP32 would be a better, more popular and more available target?

Because RISC-V

I too am confused why BL602 and not ESP32?

Basically they want to reverse engineer this 10MB binary file:

components/bl602/bl602_wifi/lib/libbl602_wifi.a

Which references an internal closed-source sdk:

  phy_bl602.c
  phy_hal.c
  phy_tcal.c
  rfc_bl602.c
  bl602_rf_private.c
  etc..

So this is not actually kinda advertisement to raise aware-ness on the chip? I mean if the manufacturer is sponsoring this giveaway, why didn't they release the sources in the first place?

I would be very funny to discover they lose their source code :)

A more serious reason I could think of : maybe pine64 is trying to convince them to do just that, and this contest is to show them there is public interest (pure speculation from me, of course).

Pine64 and Bouffalo are two different entities. The former tries to ship open-source compatible hardware, the latter manufactures the chip.

So Pine64 is itself giving away 1000 pcs of the board? Assuming 5$ for each board, this challenge costs them 5k...

Yep

When I was working with an ESP8266 board I was really frustrated that the wifi stack was blocking. It meant I couldn't make a good user experience in the event that wifi was lost or at boot.

If that blob was open sourced, it would have been great to make changes to the wifi stack and make it truly async.

You can run more than one thread.

Your comment intrigued me as I hadn't found anything at the time to support this, however this unofficial library exists to try to solve my problem: https://github.com/bmellstrom/esp8266-arduino-threads

Many of the solutions I had found talked about cooperative multi-threading, which doesn't work if I can't make the wifi stack cooperate with me.

Maybe I can make my device run that much smoother during wifi drops now!

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