It’s a nice one.

I have a Pocket Chip somewhere standing abandoned. It was sad to see them go out.

Currently, my preferred kit originates from drone ground stations:

• a widely supported (e.g. Waveshare or SpotPear or even official Raspberry Pi) screen with a Pi4 on the back, video via flat cable or short HDMI jumper, touch can be arranged via USB or I2C
• if there needs to be a keyboard, I use an onscreen keyboard (benefit: as many languages as you can speak)
• for radio comms, a ridiculously good USB WiFi card (criteria of good: can enter monitor / inject mode, can raise output power beyond 100 mW)
• if that falls short, an RF amplifier (which means the output power can be raised to 10 watts and is blatantly illegal)
• if that falls short, a directional antenna (which means that radiated power is focused into a narrow beam)

The downsides:

• price: Pi4: 38 €, screen 65 €, WiFi 50 €, amplifier (if needed) 40 €, 5 amp USB battery bank 10 €, a separate battery bank for the amp, cells for the banks 2 € each, microSD card, antenna… the total aproaches 250 euros or even 300 if you have high standards

• weight and clumsiness: loose wires waiting to get pulled out, the kit weighs half a kilo, maybe more, you better buy an instrument case to house it

But you can beam video across a bay or between mountains, just don’t get caught doing it. :) But not across a forest on flat ground.

These projects are so incomprehensibly vast that no human mind can comprehend even one small isolated subset of the entire thing.

Which means - no human mind can trust them either, and no human programmer alone can conduct a security review.

Which means they should not be trusted, and should be considered insecure - unless they can be carefully isolated from the environment so that only a trusted surface is exposed.

My ideal project size: something that an average coder can read in a week or two, and come back to their (possibly anarchist) colleagues saying: “this code looks reliable and won’t be leaking buckets”.