Broadcom's documentation sucked and will continue to suck because of their customer strategy. As a company their goal has always been to focus on high volume customers. I don't have a problem with that, except that they were also trying to cross-sell to the lower volume market but didn't have the mindset to support that market. Mind you this isn't just the Hobby market like RaspberryPi but smaller customers who were willing to pay. By smaller I mean companies who would buy 100,000 a year but not 1 Million+ a year. So it's not small change. Yet Broadcom just didn't have the support infrastructure or interest in supporting such customers while they develop products.<p>Just to see an scant datasheet for their old BLE chip one needed to the following.<p>1. Contact a Broadcom Sales rep. Ask if they are willing to sell to you.
2. Sales Rep then comes to your office with a PPT and makes a presentation clearly aimed at Management. Sales rep tries to understand your business and volume. If you pass a magic test, then you are now qualified to buy their product.
3. Sales Rep then asks who in your team will work on BLE. Takes their email addresses, phone numbers.
4. Sales Rep enables doc access. The team member gets an email and then can access datasheet for exactly that one single part. Plus that datasheet is watermarked that it's to be read by only that specific team member.<p>And no, this isn't 1995. Plus, if you want to change parts or explore a different part, you can't. Before Cypress bought BRCM's IoT business, if you had a problem with anything, the standard answer was - use WICED. BRCM's docs sucked so bad that they even hid information about UART and I2C. Think about it for a moment. Imagine buying a chip and you don't get programming information about UART and I2C. Instead you have to believe that WICED magically solves every problem.<p>Cypress buying and opening up BRCM's documentation is the best thing that's happened to documenting those parts and supporting customers who are small, medium volume.