I don't understand why they didn't use something like an esp for the wireless. That seems to be more open. Is it a cost thing. Or is the esp equally closed but has a front end that isn't?
The wireless chip they used is a cypress chip but the design was by Broadcom, who sold it to Cypress (now owned by Infinion). A lot of the Pi team are ex-Broadcom and probably have a good working relationship with the team that make that chip. That will give them good confidence that any issues can be sorted out because they can get the attention of the right people. It's related to the chips which they use on the original Pi line
RF in general is pretty closed. Last I heard the ESP low level drivers for wifi and BT were closed source (but that was a few years back). There is a lot of resistance to opening RF, partly to please incumbents but partly because of concerns that completely open RF would cause a radio spectrum "tragedy of the commons" - BT and wifi protocols need each tranceiver to behave in order to share the spectrum, if people could easily tweak it, people could easily take the spectrum at the expense of their neighbours. (for example, see https://fsfe.org/activities/radiodirective/radiodirective.en...)
That tragedy of commons thing is why any consumer product where you could modify the radio transmitter firmware would loose its FCC certification, making it illegal to sell in the US.
That almost ended the sale of openwrt (or other open firmware) compatible wifi routers in the US. The compromise that was reached was that radio firmware would be signed blobs that would not be user modifiable, but that everything else could be modifiable while retaining the FCC certification.
I sure wish we could teach no tricks to the very capable RF hardware in many things.
But things like the FCC and NDA's from IP vendors make that hard.
> That tragedy of commons thing is why any consumer product where you could modify the radio transmitter firmware would loose its FCC certification, making it illegal to sell in the US.
This is not true. FCC equipment approvals have both a frequency range and power level. What the FCC tried to clarify is that devices should not be able to be "easily modified" to operate outside of these approved parameters, which has always been true since way before radios had anything that could be considered software or firmware. For example, it would be against the rules to sell a radio certified for 1W power output that had a 5W power amplifier inside that could be enabled by removing a screw or something.
Firmware modification, in general, is not against FCC rules. For example, new firmware that lowered maximum power would be permissible (or firmware changes that did not affect the emissions of the device at all).
Having worked with creating drivers for Qualcomm (but not worked at Qcom) I can't stress enough how important is to have connections with people who are familiar with the hardware or have access to documentation.
Surely the pi foundation is big enough now to be able to get through the front door of any chip maker.
I'd like to see them using that clout to get (more) open hardware.
Protecting against tragedy of the commons through obscurity? Seems misguided. You could make the same claims about software, or SDR. And it isn't As if the Pico is high powered...
If you have ESP (most of them anyways) you don't really need the RP2040 anymore - you can run all your code on the ESP. Also there are all that geopolitical concerns about Chinese networking gear coming with more than you asked for.
