Powerful board developed in cooperation with the fabless semiconductor manufacturer SiFive [1].
This board never happened - maybe there are real people who actually have seen this thing in reality and even in a powered state with the magic smoke still inside - but this very press photography is a hoax:
The only single part soldered seems to be the DC barrel connector (lower left), maybe the stacking pin headers, but all other parts just lay there and show an offset and a hard skew like on the worst Chinese el-cheapo PCBAs. No reflow soldering happened to that board, this becomes obvious more easier e.g. on parts like the two tactile push buttons (upper left) or the SOT23 transistors close to them or the flash IC (lower center): there is no solder paste anywhere. It is OK to show a partly populated PCBA, but this is simply a bad press photo of something they needed to throw together quickly back those days because of … potential investors ?
Strangest thing is the supposed RF frontend (upper right): it reads like it should be a SX1257 by Semtech, but that part would be in a QFN32 package (see image of a soldered real part below), but they present it in a QFN48 package… wtf ?!?
That’s rather the place where the ESP32 should sit (comparing pinout details bears that plus the SO8 flash IC layout aside; also, SX1257 is 5 by 5mm, ESP32 in QFN48 is 6x6 mm, that’s why the pads look huge), - but why did they cover it with another, somewhat related chip? It was the same year that Arduino started playing with the SX1257 for their own LoRa gateway, so they might have had some ICs laying around to place something there for the photo?
So we can safely call it vapourware.
real SX1257 soldered:
real ESP32 soldered:
i wonder…if they got a secret source of these stm32 chips or where they get them from currently.
yep… but you couldn’t and can’t buy this PCBA, not only because of the F103. It was 2017, back then they did not know that Tesla/SpaceX/Starlink would buy out all STM32 … scnr. This time, if this PCBA was ever produced, they likely would to use a cheaper and, more important, available USB serial converter. - The times where a CP210x was more expensive than a Cortex-M3 are gone for good, or for at least the next 12 months.
