Big news for the day! A few weeks back, Ian Lesnet and the Dangerous Prototypes crew posted a blog regarding the Microchip ChipKit development kit. For the uninitiated, the ChipKit is essentially Microchip’s long-awaited response to the very popular Arduino development kit. Criticisms were rightfully raised about the open source content of some of Microchip’s software. Rather than ignore the issue entirely or issue some sort of rebuttal, Microchip chose to do the right thing and work with the open source community. Via Make:

We (Microchip) read your blog and comments, and we do agree with you. Though we are a corporation, with a lot of suits (not really, actually I think we have a policy against suits), we know the community has been and is a large part of why Microchip successful today. We put our best code forward, but we know it has usage limitations. Clearly this is an area where we can do better. The points made in the blog are important, so we set up a meeting with our management team yesterday, and both our CEO and COO joined us because they too thought it was important. Really, we weren’t just playing Frisbee golf as you might have thought. We understand why you guys are upset and this is an issue we need to address. Bottom line, we can’t release our existing stacks because we have contractual obligations to many of our customers that prevent us from making them open source.

So how about this: We offer a prize for anyone who writes these stacks for the community. To get started, the two that we want to target are the TCP/IP and USB stacks. Heck, who better to write these than the experts in the community…? The goal is that the entries would be compatible with the chipKit MAX32 (PIC32MX795F512L). Digilent Inc. will help us decide which stack first meets the requirements. For our part, we will pony up the prize and provide technical support for those who want to get involved.

Thanks for all your posts and I’ll follow up with additional details shortly.

You heard em, everybody! There are open source TCP/IP and USB stacks out there to be written, in exchange for awesome prizes! Get to your computers and get crackin’!

At the time of this writing, we use Microchip PIC microcontrollers in all of our microcontroller projects. It is our opinion that Microchip offers unparalleled support and resources for developers unmatched by other microcontroller manufacturers. From their hobbyist-friendly free sample policy, excellent and thorough documentation, reasonably-priced development tools, to their very promising cross-platform MPLABX IDE and now plans to release additional open source software, Microchip does a fantastic job going beyond the basics for their customers and is a great boon to the electronic hobbyist community. We can’t wait to see how the ChipKit develops as a result of contributions from the open hardware community, and will keep you posted with updates!