[Elecraft] Re: Make PIC code open source

[Wayne Burdick]

Hi Juerg (and others):

I appreciate your sentiments regarding open source code. It's possible that
portions of it could be published in the future. 

Needless to say, a huge amount of time went into the development of the
firmware. Like other companies, we consider it an important part of our
intellectual property. Many of the algorithms we developed are novel and very
efficient, and are directly responsible for the success of the product line.
(The K2's main microcontroller uses only 16 k of ROM, runs at 4 MHz, draws only
a few mA, and requires no shielding. Controllers in competing products generally
use many times the ROM, run at much higher clock speeds, draw a lot more
current, and must be extensively shielded. Our design choices in this area lead
to the K2's viability as an easy-to-build kit and as a portable transceiver.)

There's another reason, too: we don't have time to monitor and support
third-party product development efforts. In particular, the auxBus (used to
control the K2's internal options) is not designed to accommodate a large number
of additional external devices. We could end up in a situation where we have to
fix a problem we didn't create. We just don't have the engineering or
customer-support resources to handle this. 

In lieu of making the source code available, we're working on an accessory box
that will decode certain auxBus commands and provide a number of general-purpose
buffered outputs. There will be a discrete output for each band, a set of binary
encoded band-select outputs, three transverter band outputs, and three
user-defined lines controlled by the secondary menu's ACC entry.

73,
Wayne
N6KR

Juerg Tschirren wrote:
> 
> Making the PIC code open source would be a very good idea in my opinion. I
> hope the KPA100 / FCC  issue mentioned by Dan is not a real problem, and if
> it is then it may be possible to just keep the KPA100 - related parts
> closed-source, and open everything else.
> 
>   It would be great to hear an official Elecraft statement about the
> open-sourcing idea.