andrewcchen

I'd say they are bad because they aren't very power efficient. There are boards with nrf52 chips that already have qmk support iirc.

Yes, custom cores in the sense of what apple does.

The cores don't serve the same purpose as the M1 cores. M1 is optimized for single thread at the cost of die size (and a bit of power). I don't have exact numbers, but say the apple M1 core takes 1.5x the die area of N2, the you'd get better performance by putting in 1.5x the number of N2 cores.

Fairing recovery is not abandoned, they decided to fish them out of the water after a soft landing instead of catching them with a net.

Digikey pricing is not indicative of actual volume pricing, especially for FPGAs where they are often many times overpriced when buying from distributors. I doubt the board is sold at an loss, probably sold at a small profit, not that's it's really significant for a low volume dev board.

The trick to doing smd soldering is reflow. On all budget all you need is a hot air gun, if you put solder and flux on the pads manually before placing the components. With a stencil and solder paste you can save the time tinning the pads, and placing a component every few seconds is quite possible. So if you work really hard and quite possibly break your back you can assemble this board in a day :)

It takes a combination of software and hardware to get good power consumption. In this case, assuming the author has implemented sleep modes on the microcontroller, it's probably the 3g module being not very power efficient.

This is only a cpu core. It lacks the memory controller and peripherals that make a SoC work. It will probably never make its way into a chip tapeout.

It's in a QFN not QFP package

mitigations=off is all you need on a recent kernel