Thank you renky and thank you TRS-80 for the very good advice.
This is Xianjun Jiao which is the primary author of the openwifi project. I am being encouraged and inspired by people like you guys. And I do agree that no matter how big the difficulty/risk is we should try it out!
Now I am pushing the USB based WiFi dongle/chip design (in this way, people use openwifi just like any other COTS WiFi dongle!) in my spare time, and already got some progress. I am drawing the schematic and discussing with some hardware experts on the design, and good news is that seems like there is a hope that we can make an openwifi FPGA SDR dongle with price < 100 dollar, which will be much much cheaper than the COTS FPGA development boards currently we support. I believe the cost and "easy-to-use" are two key factors for an open source hardware/chip project to setup a large community (like Raspberry Pi, etc) -- this was also the main feedback I got in the last FOSDEM2020 where I announced the openwifi project for the first time.
Why I see the 100 dollar FPGA dongle as the first step? Because I want the openwifi chip project to be sustainable by itself, not taking external funding as a main supportive source. Yes we do need funding for some phases, like the board manufacturing and testing phase. But after that, I hope it can go to crowdfunding and sale to hackers/hobbyists/community, and finally make the project survive by itself. With this FPGA dongle, I believe we can already boost the community a lot (much much cheaper than current COTS FPGA boards), and make the chip design more mature, which will be very good preparation for real chip tape out.
You might notice that I mentioned "in my spare time". This actually reveals the difficulty currently I have. As you might know I work for IDLab which is a joint lab between Gent university (UGent) and imec, Belgium. Although I proposed and started the openwifi project internally at the beginning, the reason why openwifi project can survive for years in imec/UGent is that it is useful for some internal projects. Then I successfully convinced my boss and BD (business developer) to opensource the design from the dissemination point of view, that is why you can see it now. So we should realize that openwifi developers (me and my colleagues) have to work for other internal projects. We can't say we work for openwifi project internally, because there isn't such an openwifi project officially in imec/UGent. Only because openwifi is useful for other internal projects, our job positions are kept and we get salary to raise our families. I tried several times to make the openwifi an official internal project, but so far I am not successful. The imec/UGent business development is quite traditional/old-fashion. They mainly care about using the openwifi for other internal projects and then sell the non-open source license/IP/patent of those internal projects, which is understandable because this mode works successfully for the big company/organization. So actually they don't care much about the hardware price, the low cost chip/dongle design, and setup a big open source community. That is why I have to try to push the chip/dongle project in my spare time (and also with my private computer, not the company computer!)
I still need to find some time to discuss with my boss to get permission that I am allowed to push the real open source chip direction in my spare time.
In this phase, I believe I can handle most of the technical challenges. But from a project management/advancing point of view, maybe I need very skillful management/operation people's help! Any further advice or spreading/discussion will be appreciated!
Above are some progressions and thoughts. A bit long text and mess situation. Hope I can make it more and more clear in the near future. Keep an eye on the upcoming libreplanet2021, rC3 and fosdem2021, I might have presentations there.
Thanks again for your caring about the openwifi project!
