[mrpippy]

Given Broadcom's connections to the project, it's almost a surprise they didn't have some kind of Broadcom option for WiFi/BT earlier. Must have stung at Broadcom to be powering the most popular hobbyist ARM Linux board, but almost every one using WiFi powered by Realtek,Ralink,etc.

[peteforde]

Broadcom's "connection" to the project often seems circumstantial, like the Pi project is a blip on nobody's radar. Several of their engineers used to work at Broadcom and they've been under NDA lock and key, bending over backwards to help people progress on things that they can't officially talk about by leaving the least subtle clues ever so that they can move the process forward.

The GPU/camera integration in particularly is really painful - people have gone to insane ends to reverse engineer how it's working so that they can access features that aren't documented.

As a heavy Pi+camera user (I use 70 at a time every time we ship a unit) I appreciate the efforts of all these folks so much.

[Ezhik]

>bending over backwards to help people progress on things that they can't officially talk about by leaving the least subtle clues ever so that they can move the process forward

That sounds pretty interesting, where can I read more about it?

[peteforde]

If you hang out in the camera board and read a certain kind of post - generally people trying to get the camera to do stuff it's not easily able to do - you see guys like 6by9 and jamesh doing their best to help without getting in trouble.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=4779...

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=108&t=133...

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=1091...

[yuhong]

I think even the founder Eben Upton works at Broadcom too.

[tdicola]

There is an official Raspberry Pi foundation wifi dongle that uses a Broadcom wifi chip with full support in the kernel. For a time it was the only dongle that worked with Windows 10 IoT on the Pi. Can see it here: https://www.adafruit.com/products/2638

[mrpippy]

Ah interesting, thanks!

[skykooler]

It'll be interesting, given the state of Broadcom wifi drivers on linux.

[vdfs]

Looks like it's using a broadcom WiFi & Bluetooth chip: http://i.imgur.com/exuZy58.jpg