pinephone can it get a free software wifi card?
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A downside of the pinephone is its 8723cs wifi card. It requires
non free firmware software.
I asked some questions about getting a free software wifi card for the
pinephone. The wifi card is a separated chip on
the pinephone's mainboard. Pinephone tried to find a free
software supported wifi card. Unsuccessfully. They tried to reverse
engineer the wifi card's firmware. Unsuccessfully. Most likely the
firmware is not signed. Saying reverse engineering is
not ruled out. The 8723cs' connection is sdio. Maybe because
the Quad core ARM Cortex-A53 @ 1.2GHz only has two usb connections
and they are used otherwise. Therefore making an attaschble
back cover having an ar9271 usb wifi card is probably not an
option.
About other wifi chip options these chips were
mentioned ESP8089, ESP8266 and ESP32. Because it should be
possible to write firmware and driver software for
the chips.
There are some old Atheros wifi cards that came in SDIO forms with Linux kernel support. The AR6103 and the AR6003 were talked about on some of the hobbyist SoC board forums about 6-10 years ago. And the Marvell 88W8385 and 88W8686 devices worked with the libertas driver. Getting one of these old chips to work with a modern phone is probably quite complicated. Form factor might not even be compatible. Not to mention working through some very rough documentation to figure out how to get them to talk to each other. And if you did get it to work, you still might end up with really crappy, slow wifi.
There are some mobile phones that use PCIe based WLAN card, and some of them are made by Qualcomm, but I haven't seen any ath9k.
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