Uni students new to this field are turned away from using Particle products, because it’s cumbersome running mobile hotspots that drain their battery while 15-20 hotspots are actively competing for signal in a lab over the existing institutional WiFi that their Photons cannot get access to. Uni IT policies typically only allow enterprise wifi security.
As a result, running through code examples and lessons are slow and interrupt the learning process. I had to deploy my own WiFi network via 4G for my students one semester. It was not viable as the 4G connection in the lab was spotty at best.
As anyone who’s experienced it, the platforms we were exposed to as students form lasting impressions – positive and otherwise.
I don’t think a case needs to be made. Particle wants this to happen as well, but their hands are bound by licensing and NDA from Broadcom/Cypress. As mentioned before, they’ve been repeatedly trying to get a hold of a permissive license for quite a while, so it’s definitely not Particle hindering this.
Probably not. @particle2: Would it be possible to implement enterprise Wi-Fi support in software, rather than relying on chipset support? This is how the ESP8266 firmware people accomplished it, and that is a far less powerful chip.
Taking an existing repo, understanding it's structure, finding the relevant code, and porting it to a new architecture, testing and documenting is far from simple although we of course welcome input and help here.
I believe it’s just wpa_supplicant ported for use on a microcontroller, rather than a full OS.
Your skills far outweigh my own, so I’ll leave it to you or someone of comparable skill to determine feasibility. It isn’t feasible for me to attempt, I promise you that.
although we of course welcome input and help here.