Patrick O'Brian (author of the Aubrey/Maturin series) was a huge Austen fan and intentionally modeled his writing style after hers. Post Captain (book 2) is the most explicit homage, with a number of character names borrowed from Austen's work.
Nothing about NXP? They are a pretty big player in this space, and mostly do a great job contributing upstream to the kernel, but I guess they don't have a hobby-level entry point readily available.
I've used NXP-based embedded Linux hardware from Toradex, Gateworks and EmbeddedTS in previous projects, lots of vendors out there.
iRobot got crushed by Chinese competitors. Rethink failed early, they had a poor quality product and Universal made a much better cobot. And this new venture is pointless, there are 10 other companies in the Boston area alone doing warehouse automation...
Suggested edit: in your "handy rule of thumb", delete
outside of official APIs or services
since (1) official APIs and services are constantly getting redefined and (2) what's stopping them from deciding they just don't like how you're using the official APIs/services?