Writing a basic Linux device driver when you know nothing about Linux drivers

> I also thought I’d message the vendor and ask them if they could share any specifications or docs regarding their protocol. To my surprise, Nanoleaf tech support responded to me within 4 hours, with a full description of the protocol that’s used both by the Desk Dock as well as their RGB strips.

How cool is that? Too many vendors still think that they have valuable intellectual property in such relative trivialities. And that handing out the specs freely helps their competitors more than themselves.

I had the same reaction. Nano leaf is extremely cool for that.

This has to put them in the top 0.01% of companies that make consumer electronics.

I can think of only a few companies that bother to publish any details... And most of them are focused on industrial customers where it isn't unreasonable to need certain protocol details for integration or even just compliance with certain regulatory systems.

Maybe things are changing?

I have noticed that some of the LED light controllers you see on AliExpress are leaning in to open firmware standards. 5 years ago, you bought the controller and had to flash your own firmware. Now, there's an option at checkout to select an open source firmware. Some even have a USB port built in for flashing!

I almost had that experience with one of the popular PC liquid cooling hardware vendors around 10 years ago.

I emailed them saying I'd be interested in developing drivers for their hardware for Linux as I was a happy customer and was immediately put in touch with one of the managers and their engineering team.

Made quite a bit of progress before the whole thing was shut down because one of their component vendors threatened them saying it'd be a breach of their contract with them.

Apparently that vendor sold a "datacenter" (non consumer) version of that hardware for which they charged a hefty license fee for the management software (which was Linux compatible).

Jokes on them, someone reverse engineered the whole thing with a USB analyzer years later and published it XD. (not me)

Yeah that part of the article put a big smile on my face.

I did the same thing back in college, when I was in a lab. We wanted to do some research on Wi-Fi signals, and I happened to own a bunch of Wi-Fi adaptors produced by SomeSmallTech Co. Ltd., which featured relatively new Atheros chips and didn't have Linux drivers at the time.

So I sent an email to the company's public email address, asking for some datasheets, "for science". To my disappointment, presumably a PR person replied that they "don't have a company policy to collaborate with academic research". (But they did send a quick reply, kudos to that.)

Funnily enough, years later I ended up working for said company. Naturally, when I first logged into the company network, I searched for the datasheets I asked for. There were "classified" watermarks all over the PDFs :)

I have a solar inveter from a company, aparticular German brand. I wanted to use home assistant with it so I needed rs232 data.. tried the support and they asked me to sign an NDA.

Okay, cool. I did with a fake name, address and everything and they sent a file..

Turns out the file is available online.

Facepalm pro Max.

So my question is, what kind of "IP" is in a data sheet that needs protection ? And this isnt even some secret product but a generic solar product sold by millions.

Rs-232 protocol ? Really ?

It's not the IP, it's sadly how people react. Some folks will be appreciative of help, credit to them. Others will immediately get back how they tried it, it didn't work and now they need you to rewrite everything, or do their project for them, or redesign your product to match what they want it to be. And if you politely refuse, it quickly escalates to threats of trashing your business through every channel, and other things.

So, the safest thing to do is not give details at all, or "leak" them like another reply in this thread mentions.

> don't have a company policy to collaborate with academic research"

Strangely they all have a tacit policy to build their products at least partly on the results of academic research.

They have asked to the legal team who basically don't know shit about what us do and who will always take the most conservative approach possible. So you'll get either: no answer, a "NO" answer or an "NDA" answer.

Was it Alpha-ESS? they make it so stupidly hard to get your information outside of their smartphone app.

I wish more vendors would put "Linux support" on the package. Or maybe "Unofficially supported in Linux" or "Linux community support" if they don't want to get their fingers burned.

Maybe this kind of thing should be enforced in the GPL (as many devices use Linux under the hood).

Yup. The default from lawyers will be "No" because why help? The correct way to use lawyers, either in-house counsel or a paid lawyer if you have a specific project is to tell them what you want to happen and then they figure out what the best legal course of action is to closest achieve that. Mundanely this might mean e.g "Fill out form X1234 and then send letters to this politician suggesting they support your X1234 application" but at the extreme it could mean closer to the situation in the UK where a ferry company illegally fired crews with zero notice, and their legal advice had clearly been "Worst case they put one of your executives in prison, probably not even that, but either way you replace union workers with people on slave wages and that means $$$".

It really makes me wonder why it's not more common. They literally don't have to write any firmware, just use one of the thousands already available provided that the license allows for it

Germans germaning!