Pine Offers Free PineCone EVB for Anyone Helping with Bouffalo Labs BL602 SDK Fork Effort

Make a valid pull request on the forked GitHub repository, and you'll get your very own PineCone evaluation board for your efforts.

Gareth Halfacree
3 years agoCommunication

Open hardware specialist Pine, fresh from the launch of the $30 PineCube Dev Kit IP camera platform, has announced the "Nutcracker Challenge:" A free Bouffalo Lab BL602-based evaluation board (EVB), codenamed PineCone, to anyone contributing code to an effort to produce binary blob-free Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity across the company's PINE64 family of devices.

"Although it’s the end of Hacktoberfest, it’s not too late for an open source nut cracking challenge. This is a challenge that will benefit not only our current and future devices but also the community moving forward," the company explains. "So, what is the challenge then? To achieve blob-free BL602 for the open source community so that we all can enjoy blob-free FOSS Bluetooth and Wi-Fi on PINE64 devices."

As a sweetener, the competition comes with the promise of a free evaluation board, the PineCone, based on Bouffalo Lab's low-cost RISC-V-based BL602 Bluetooth and Wi-Fi system-on-chip (SoC). These boards, it seems, will be used in future Pine64 devices in place of off-the-shelf radio modules, to push further towards the company's vision of a Linux system free from proprietary "binary blob" drivers.

"Anyone can participate in this Nutcracker campaign but we only have a limited amount (approx 1000 pcs) of EVBs available, so if many people choose to take part then we’ll have to prioritise the kits based on a common-sense first-come-first-served basis. Let’s do this!"

Those interested in participating are asked to make a pull request with a contribution to the bl_iot_sdk repository on GitHub, a fork of Bouffalo Labs' own Chinese-language software development kit (SDK) for the SoC. Accepted pull requests will result in an email asking for shipping details for the free EVB.

Full details on the challenge can be found on the Pine website.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
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