• IIRC Pine64 was giving away these 5$ devboards to almost anybody who asked for it and had enough (don't know what's enough) open source contributions at the time of announcement.
    I think (this might sound bit negative, but) doing low-level stuff on Risc-V appeals to the hardware nerds. And to people who want a "blob free" wifi chip. To use it commercially I think you would need to certify both BLE and Wifi, so a company would need to dump lots of resources into software and certifications. But still certifying a fully open source driver could be hard, since how would you limit emission power, if everything is open and documented?

    As Gordon said, this chip's main selling point is it's price. A product with it probably could work, if the chip and software is good enough to do everything, BLE, Wifi, https with some certificate validation, usable ADC and regular peripherals, low enough power consumption. And a good enough software stack to do all these and run the main application at the same time?

    Oh, and let's not forget W600 (Manufacturer's site is at https://w600.chip.haus): A cortex-M3 wifi chip, ~1€ +shipping at Aliex in an ESP-01 like formfactor. Made some noise about a year ago, but I think it didn't really take off. The W600 Pico does have micropython, but it does't have enough flash to do https, so what's the point?

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