ah, understandable. i'm a EE by day and all of the coding i contribute to Mbin is purely for fun with no bearing on real-life, so my github profile is expendable/only for Mbin. ;-)
if you can, please create an issue for this specific problem at https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin/issues if one doesn't already exist or thumbs-up/add a comment to an existing one so it gets visibility. broad fediverse compatibility is one of our main project goals, but not all platforms conform to the AP spec (or it's not addressed by the spec) and instead do their own thing, so it sounds like we'll need to work out a common ground.
no, we maintainers (~6 active out of 13 total) have full merge power and admin rights over the repo, all it takes is 1 other maintainer to approve a PR for it to be eligible to get merged into our main branch... C4 ftw https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin/blob/main/C4.md.
holy shit, the first one was at Morey's!? TIL growing up I was riding the OG gravitron... nice!
TSMC
edit: downvote all you want, the fundamental circuit level design is not in question here... it's how you make the damn thing and TSMC can do it better. intel talks a big game yet continues to fail on delivering any of it. i'll believe half of what they say when i see it... and it helps that good ol' uncle sam is helping them out, they're gonna need it.
hard to say for sure, but U109 and U208 could be UART into those Cisco baseband or radio chips. one placement for the 2.4 GHz (G) and 5 GHz (A), respectively. would be interesting to probe around there and see if you get a serial interface to it... obviously for extra credit ;-)
you flux the fluxing flux out of it
not if you want to make it back to your car at the end of the day ;-)
i know this is for the lols, but you'd be surprised how often stuff like this happens... bodge wires and dead bugging it are much cheaper than re-spinning a board/IC. anything to get the boss off your back, just make sure to give your technicians a case of beer/beverage of choice for the extra effort fixing your fuck up.
didn't Verizon overbuild most, if not all, of the area with FiOS? not sure how they're getting away with it in the rural regions unless there are still CLECs operating. All this to say... fiber still has the issue of power outages and nonfunctioning customer backup batteries in the ONTs and I vaguely remember some drama over Verizon not offering replacement batteries or providing backups at all.
undergrad C/C++ background, PHP is a cakewalk by comparison :-)