Is there a community specific to FOSS or just general privacy oriented IoT? With plenty of hardware discussion along with software. Routers, piholes, Meshtastic, anything IoT but open source. If it touches a network but you want it to do something it doesn’t. Flashing a doorbell camera with FOSS firmware. Hosting media servers on your phones Hotspot. Loading gcode to a printer from anywhere. There are so many things and possibilities.
If there isn’t someone should start one, OpenIoT or something catchy and relevant.
A Chinese WiFi chip with binary blobs is about the farthest you can get from privacy, though. Or free software.
That’s fair, since it’s possible these chips have some backdoored bootloader or something, I’ve never personally analyzed them with an electron microscope, but the architecture and wire traces are published, so you could start a chip fabrication plant and roll your own silicon.
The actual running code on them is usually GitHub hosted though, or you can write it yourself and just import the libraries you need, again usually from GitHub or the platform specific repositories.
If you’re worried about Chinese chips in your open source though, I have some real bad news for you.
If you’re using FOSS specifically as a control against Chinese spying, and not analyzing the commit logs of every package you download, I have more bad news for you.