Wasn't the BL602 just released last week? Bouffalo Lab is also a rather new company so trying to gain market share & attention with a more open strategy sounds like a good idea.
BL602 support Bluetooth 5.0 with longer range, mesh network, lower power consumption ++
For me this makes BL602 a winner, if the SW can catch up.
The 4-day old HN thread BL602/BL604 RISC-V WiFi and Bluetooth 5.0 SoC will sell at ESP8266 price point [1] links to a cnx-software article with the following:
> TL Lim, the founder of Pine64, also participated in the discussion and would consider launching a Pine64 BL602 board if an open-source toolchain is available.
Because RISC-V
Basically they want to reverse engineer this 10MB binary file:
components/bl602/bl602_wifi/lib/libbl602_wifi.a
Which references an internal closed-source sdk:
phy_bl602.c
phy_hal.c
phy_tcal.c
rfc_bl602.c
bl602_rf_private.c
etc..A more serious reason I could think of : maybe pine64 is trying to convince them to do just that, and this contest is to show them there is public interest (pure speculation from me, of course).
If that blob was open sourced, it would have been great to make changes to the wifi stack and make it truly async.
Many of the solutions I had found talked about cooperative multi-threading, which doesn't work if I can't make the wifi stack cooperate with me.
Maybe I can make my device run that much smoother during wifi drops now!
(Some background: Most western designs of wireless MCU have a user-programmable core and another core handling Wi-Fi running a proprietary blob. Often the flash on the Wi-Fi side of these is inaccessible to the user core and thus deblobbing them would be hard. The ESP8266 and ESP32 are unusual in that the Wi-Fi "blob" is just a proprietary static library (.a file) linked in with your application, so it would be entirely feasible to deblob it. The BL602 seems to be trying to compete with ESP parts, follows a similar design, and thus can also be deblobbed, but is presumably much less available and much less documented.)