Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mkj 1572 days ago
The ESP32C3 seem to have the same friction - closed wifi blobs? They might get supplanted by something with a more malleable software stack.
1 comments

someone told me the wifi blobs exist because of regulations prohibiting wifi chipsets from being easily modified to use illegal frequencies, but they still want to do much of the functionality in firmware so they can have more flexible asic designs that can keep up with standard changes. If that is all true, wifi blobs are unlikely to change.
Regulatory issues are one reason. The second is that the wifi side of things might be some 3rd party IP they bought and the licencing terms prevent open sourcing it. Wifi stacks are complex and filled with edgecases. And every release just makes that moat bigger.
... . -. -.. / -- . / .- -. / . -- .- .. .-.. break .. / .... .- ...- . / .-.. --- --- -.- . -.. / ..-. --- .-. / -.-- --- ..- break 6c6f6d65696e30313031676d61696c636f6d