A few weeks ago we posted an editorial about the lack of complete open source support for Microchip’s chipKIT Arduino-compatible hardware. Marc from Microchip writes:
We’ve been reading the blogs and comments, and do agree with you. Though we are a corporation, with a lot of suits (not really, actually I think we have a policy against suits), we know the community has been and still is a large part of why Microchip is successful today. We put our best code forward, but we know it has usage limitations. Clearly this is an area where we can do better. The many points made in the blogs were taken to heart. So, we set up a meeting with our management team yesterday, and both our CEO and COO joined us because they too think this is important. Really, we weren’t just playing Frisbee golf as you might have thought. We understand why you guys are upset and this is an issue we need to address. Bottom line, we can’t release our existing stacks because we have contractual obligations to many of our customers that prevent us from making them open source.
So how about this: We offer a prize for anyone who writes these stacks for the community. To get started, the two that we want to target are the TCP/IP and USB stacks. Heck, who better to write these than the experts in the community? The goal is that the entries would be compatible with the chipKit MAX32 (PIC32MX795F512L). Digilent Inc. will help us decide which stack first meets the requirements. For our part, we will pony up the prize and provide technical support for those who want to get involved.
Thanks to everyone who posted and I’ll follow up with additional details shortly.
This is a great development. Your comments made it to the top of Microchip, and they’re making an effort to engage the community. Until now open drivers weren’t even on the radar. While they aren’t going to open source their own drivers, neither have competitors like Atmel – there are simply more community-produced USB and TCP drivers for the AVR.
Dangerous Prototypes will join in with a $100 cash bounty to the developers of the USB and TCP/IP stack used. We’ll bring you further details about the Microchip prize when we hear them.
A big thanks to Adafruit, Make, NBIT wonder, and everyone else who covered this.
Via the comments.
For quite a while I’ve been sad about not getting open source tools from Microchip. And I’ve also been sad to see Microchip bashed up online about it. You see, PIC were my first microcontrollers and I’ve been using them ever since; call me stupid, but whatever they do, I still have a soft spot for them. I’ve used Atmels and Arduinos and the MSP430s, but I still keep coming back to the PICs. And announcements like this make me want to keep coming back to Microchip! :-D
could hoken and JTR’s USB stack be entered into this, would be cool for their efforts to be repayed like this.
I hope so :)
nice job being the “squeaky wheel”, ian!
The first issue is:
– Need to have an open source register file for all Microchip PIC32MX. My understanding is you cannot use anything from Microchip. I have open source PIC32 boot up etc, but the hardest part was the stupid pic32xxx.h file with all the registers.
– A common link script, on of the issues with PIC32 is the flash area is used to store configuration of the processor. I’ve done this using a simple asm file and link script
Maybe I might be missing something with the PIC32, but I think the first task is to agree on a common .ld (linker script) and register files.
Would be nice to agree on the processor startup etc.
A very positive response from Microchip. Competitions are a great way of spurring innovation. They worked well in the early days of aviation and again more recently with the X-Prizes. Good thinking on their part.
When normally reasonable people/corporations act irrationally, you’ll often find it’s the lawyers that are behind it. A common example is an obvious missing feature in a product. You complain about it, and you get no meaningful response. You think they are morons. But what’s happening is there is a patent in the way. They can’t say that publicly, because by doing so they acknowledge that 1) aware of the patent, 2) and believe they might be infringing. If there is ever a law suit taken against them in the future it would be evidence of willful infringement which carries severe penalties. I’m sure the same applies to many contracts that have secrecy clauses.
So, how do we contribute to the pot for the prize? I can’t give a bunch, but I’ll throw $25 or so in. Don’t/can’t do it myself, but I consider this the best way to go about these things.
Anyone?
I think this is an excellent response from Microchip. I work for a corporation and I know we have various rules and agreements we have to abide by, some make sense and some don’t. If Microchip can abide by their agreements and still support a full open tool set that is great.
I’ll be curious to see how much support Microchip is actually able to give but even if it’s just encouraging words and a bounty that is huge. Thumbs up to Microchip for making lemonade out of lemons.
It is great that at least Microchip is willing to talk about it and do something but from offering an unknown prize (with some pre-conditions from the start) with not clearly written rules and what kind of support and openness one can expect does not sound very exciting.
YES, I believe that many of us would love to have an open source USB, TCP/IP and MiWi like open stacks, but to achieve that there is not involvement from Microchip required and you can port it and run it in whatever platform you please without pre-conditions.
Developing a stack requires time, and time is money, some people don’t do it for the money but they still need to pay the bills every month, so if Microchip is willing to *fund* (not just funky marketing deductible prizes) an open source development effort which also requires resources and leadership, now we are talking about a different story.
BTW, IMHO the top execs at MCHP don’t give a squat, meanwhile the 8-bit MCU money printing and dividend generating machine keeps working without an open source stack.
And don’t get me wrong, as others said in the related article, I like Microchip, they have great products and I think is a good and well managed company.
Just ask your legal dept to put the T’s and C’s and make it clear what are you offering as support for an open source development effort and under what kind of “license” it would be acceptable to port and distribute freely in open source code for everybody.
My .02
Jorge
BTW, forgot to add, I feel that 55 bucks for the network shield is a robbery …
-J
Is it me or did Microchip just say “No. You do it yourself.”
It feel like being scolded.