https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=234228
is a nice summary of the (current) state of affairs with the pi.
It seems things have changed since it's first introduction. I seem to
recall they initially even had a bill of materials listed on their
site. so you could build your own pi boards. I didn't expect the boot
loader to be opensource, (few companies offer that), though to be fair,
Parallax does with their propeller boards, but those can't run dos,
though they have versions of CP/M that will run on them. I have seen
posts from the raspberry foundation talking about some of the projects
folks have built using the pi, and they even mention such projects in
their newsletters from time to time, so I doubt they're completely
against folks rolling their own hardware. When I got my first pi (the
pi1), I'm almost positive there was a BOM for download on the site, but
I've not looked for it since, having no interest in making my own.
On the other hand, building boards with pi inspired hardware has been
done many times.
The schematics and the board layout are readily available, so anyone can
build a pi themselves as long as they use the commercially available
parts, but honestly, if you're just looking to incorporate the pi into
an existing project, there's nothing preventing you from doing that as
far as I can tell.
Perhaps I was off the mark a bit in stating the entire system is
opensource, but it certainly does use opensource software, and finding
projects where folks used the pi as bare metal isn't difficult either,
so it depends on how much control you want over the final hardware
selection as to whether it will suit your purposes or not.
I apologize for the blanket statement of opensource about the pi,
apparently, that isn't true, but there's enough opensource components
that it's really not a problem in most cases to adapt it to your own
purposes.
I have seen projects where folks built their own boards including pi
components, but perhaps they didn't build a full blown pi, I didn't check.
There's thousands and thousands of projects out there, with some
judicial searching, you're likely to find something close to just about
anything you want to build using a pi.
Unfortunately though, dos won't run on it, so I guess it won't help in
this case.
On 2/10/2022 5:50 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
On Wed, 9 Feb 2022 at 14:17, Travis Siegel <tsie...@softcon.com> wrote:
For what it's worth, the raspberry pi is an opensource board. That means
you could easily build your own pi using components from the original, and
have a company produce the board for you.
I think it's important to point out that this is *only* true of the
very low-end Raspberry Pi Pico, with the RP2040 SOC.
It is *not* true of the RasPi 1, 2, 3, 4, any model of the Pi Zero or
any model of Pi Compute Module.
_Some_ of the Broadcom SOCs from some of the other Pi models have been
available, sometimes, but only in industrial quantities of from 50K to
200K units. You can't buy 1, or 10, or 100.
Secondly, the software is not FOSS either.
The main processor is not the ARM. They are a GPU with an additional
ARM bolted on. The GPU runs the proprietary, closed-source ThreadX
realtime OS, now owned by Microsoft, and not available on the open
market. This means that the RPi firmware is not FOSS and never will
be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThreadX
The GPU device drivers are not fully FOSS either.
There are efforts to built totally FOSS GPU drivers but they are not
complete yet:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/raspberry-pi-4-higher-quality-faster-graphics-edge-closer-with-vulkan-support-via-mesa/
E.g.
https://github.com/Yours3lf/rpi-vk-driver
For the current hardware only part of the functionality of some of the
drivers is FOSS:
https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=326882
Only the ARM part of the OS is FOSS, and you can't load it without
proprietary firmware. The GPU starts first, and it needs ThreadX; then
it loads the ARM OS from µSD (or USB or LAN) into RAM and starts the
ARM.
For the first 5+ years, Linux was also useless without proprietary
drivers: no Wifi™, no Bluetooth™, no graphics acceleration, etc.
There was an attempt to reverse-engineer and build open-source
firmware, but it didn't get far and halted some years ago:
https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware
The Pico is a very low-end device, aimed at replacing microcontrollers:
https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-pico/specifications/
133MHz CPU, 264 kB of RAM.
This is lower than a mid-1990s specification. It is not and never will
be a general-purpose computer.
TL;DR – Travis' statement is not true in any way for the
generally-available mass-market Pis.
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