It seems the biggest success of the foundation is to whitewash Broadcom's image and further normalise closed proprietary systems that have the appearance of being open.
I think that's a bit harsh. The bulk of the Raspberry Pi audience has no idea of the Broadcom connection. They're kids (like mine) who are looking for a cheap computer to do their hardware hacks with. And a Raspberry Pi Pico is very hard to beat for the money, they're ~5 bucks here single quantity, and far more powerful than Arduinos (and cheaper!).
Is there a good comparison site anywhere for boards nowadays?
I still usually gravitate to the Pi or Arduino, but mostly due to a combination of lack of familiarity with other brands, and being a repeat customer for stuff that just works
Doesn't include prices though, and it's really too comprehensive - it seems to include lots of boards you can't actually buy. So maybe not very useful for finding good boards.
>The bulk of the Raspberry Pi audience has no idea of the Broadcom connection
That doesn't make it less true. The GPU/VPU on the OG RPI was always undocumented and closed source that the community had to reverse engineer drivers for. Big L from my side for that.
It's why the OG RPI felt to me like a sneaky way Broadcom could move the stocks of unsold inventory of those set-top-box chips by marketing them as "Linux computers" that pretend to be open source but are actually not. Big brain move on their end to be fair.
> The GPU/VPU on the OG RPI was always undocumented and closed source that the community had to reverse engineer drivers for. Big L from my side for that.
So, like pretty much every other consumer level GPU?
That's fair. At the same time: the foundation and Broadcom really are two separate entities and I think even Broadcom is surprised by how successful the whole thing is. They may have thought to just humor their employee but it has become something much larger than that now. And I do agree they should open it up, just that that is not in Broadcom's commercial interest as far as I can determine.
looking for a cheap computer to do their hardware hacks with
A free standard PC, of which a depressingly large number are thrown out every day, easily beats the price and performance of an RPi, in addition to being far more open.
…while being hundreds of times bigger and also not offering the scope to implement hardware hacks (e.g. interfacing through GPIO/I2C/SPI/Serial without additions that cost more than the entire Pi).
Yes - obviously you can use an old PC for many different PoCs and prototypes. It doesn’t take much imagination to think of those you can’t.
Nearly every "old PC" does offer built-in easily accessible I2C - as "DDC channel" of a monitor plug - VGA, DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort - all have it. Linux exposes those as regular /dev/i2c-*, so any I2C software that works on a RPi or other Linux SBC, will run with those too:
Maybe they've improved, but banana pi/sinovoip used to ship images based on android kernels.
Rockchip have a reputation of fully working with the open source community, though I can't personally say how well. Most other SoC vendors only do enough to get android going.
Leaked SoC documentation is a very long distance from having a fully working open ecosystem. Like, dozens of man-years -maybe hundreds.
It would be a mistake to assume you can pick any of the sinovoip boards and get that. They use a number of SoC vendors with very different business models, and level of support for FOSS. Certainly there are some who make much less investment in maintaining an open ecosystem than RPI.
x86 PCs need insecure and ordinarily impossible to replace blobs in order to boot. It's true that PC firmware doesn't seem to hurt open source people's feelings quite so much as it once did, but there's not a ton of logic to that.
Unless things have changed significantly coreboot is an example of what I'm talking about - not a ton of x86 motherboard hardware is supported very well. "But for real openness, nothing beats an older x86 PC" just doesn't seem true at all.
(but I'll look into coreboot. I'd get a kick out of trying it.)
Are there any good truly open SoCs out there? Seems like it's impossible to find even a single chip that doesn't require some proprietary blob to work, let alone good chips.
The pinout of the CPU itself might be under NDA (just speculating). Or some interconnection details, or who know what other information you might get from the schematics.
yes, most likely this is the case. also for the ethernet phy. there's really no good reason for it; these pinouts are pretty bog standard. chalk it up to corporate paranoia.
It seems the biggest success of the foundation is to whitewash Broadcom's image and further normalise closed proprietary systems that have the appearance of being open.