[milesvp]

Mics have a pretty standard look, and are hard to miss on the board. It would be more insideous if there were cheap film caps leading into a very expensive ADC. I work with with analogue audio, and it’s very important to design around the noise of cheap caps. They are for all intents and purposes microphones and if you were clever about different caps for different frequencies and good digital processing I have no doubt you could build something with comparable fidelity to some of the cheapers MICs in the vocal range.

[nixpulvis]

Why is there a component on the board that isn't used in the product for any official purpose then? Even if you believe it was an accident and an oversight (which it could have been), you should be upset because it's something that could be pretty serious if you used in your home.

Just because you might claim it's not malicious, doesn't make it not negligence.

[slanterns]

Cuz it's simply built upon the existing LicheeRV Nano SBC, then it has the same component just as the board.

[milesvp]

So usually you would DNP the parts and they wouldn’t populate at the factory. But sometimes you have a bunch of boards already made that for some reason you can’t use for another SKU, and so you put them in another housing, and change the board for the next rev.

Mind you, I’m not saying a mic in a KVM isn’t sus, just that it’s a little obvious, and certainly not stuxnet level espionage.