Competition: MT7681

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Re: Competition: MT7681

By RichardS
- Sun Sep 07, 2014 12:59 pm #321 [quote="obvy"]Thanks for posting this - I wanted to do it, but couldn't find time. And indeed, community can't afford to have dedicated sites for each chip.

David Gouveia just registered MT7681.com so its coming :-(

Richard.
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Re: Competition: MT7681

By Sprite_tm
- Thu Sep 11, 2014 5:06 am #443 Seems the SDK has leaked now: http://www.amobbs.com/thread-5588899-1-1.html

Older SDK: http://pan.baidu.com/share/link?shareid ... 3223826005 password imep
Newer SDK: http://pan.baidu.com/share/link?shareid ... 3223826005 password jwnv

Looking through the first now. Seems pretty reasonable: it uses uIP, seems to use gcc out of the box and even has documentation. And some of that even is in English!
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Re: Competition: MT7681

By Squonk
- Thu Sep 11, 2014 6:50 am #444 Yes, it looks like a serious competitor to ESP8266, but all modules I find are priced higher ~7 USD vs. ~4.50 USD for single QTY.

And by looking at the PCB, this SoC requires many additional components, both active and passive:
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... Not so many components, but an external (outside the chip but onboard) RF front end is required, so RF calibration too... Beware of cheap modules :mrgreen:
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Re: Competition: MT7681

By jonsmirl
- Thu Sep 11, 2014 7:42 am #447 Problem with the MT7681 is that the SDK requires NDA. That makes it very hard for a community to grow around it. Those SDKs on Baidu have been uploaded by people violating their NDAs. Many people have asked Ralink for years to get rid of their NDAs and they won't budge. RT5350/MT7620 has a dedicated group of independent developers who will create non-NDA (ie OpenWRT) support for the chips. But it took almost three years after the MT7620 first shipped until there was OpenWRT support for it.

ESP8266 seems to be different. The players involved want to open their SDK but don't have the procedures in place for doing it. Hopefully that will get resolved in the near future.

Also, free compilers from Andes is not enough. You still need the wifi libraries from Ralink which as covered by NDA. There is good chance that the OpenWRT people will open us the MT7681 but that will be a few years from now.

My personal take is that these NDAs are complete nonsense. The code in OpenWRT is more advanced than the code you get from Ralink. Probably some misplaced belief by management that hiding the code hinders competitors which is never the case.
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