I've enjoyed reading this discussion and hearing everyone's thoughts. So far the Open Panzer project has not died yet, and you can read through the
release notes to see some of the features/additions that have been made to the TCB in the last year since release. In addition the Scout ESC was re-designed and development continues on the sound card. So work is still ongoing, mostly in the background and in the case of the Scout and sound card, not much of it can yet benefit the end user since those products are not being manufactured and may never. But development is all I can do, and so long as all the code and schematics are freely available then who knows someday what that might lead to.
People asked about sound options, for now the options remain the Benedini Min and Micro including the Micro clone (the Micros are limited to engine sounds, cannon and machine gun only), and the Tagien units. One user also interfaced the TCB with an MSM1 unit from ELV Elektroniks, which can play three sounds so not much and is mostly just a novelty (
see here for his thread).
The new Clark board sounds interesting and I am looking forward to more details being released. It is not immediately apparent to me what benefit internet access on a model tank will provide, but that is what we shall see. For those who want to add video streaming to their models, note that you don't need a Raspberry Pi to do that and in fact you can do it for very little money on any model, even a stock Heng Long. Small cameras and miniature video transmitters are cheap and abundant on eBay, Banggood, AliExpress and probably even Hobby King and a million other places, thanks to the massive popularity of FPV flying. They come in 5.8GHz and WiFi versions, the former require a receiver and small screen and the latter can be viewed on your phone. You can buy cheap drones with these capabilities for less than $50 so it shouldn't cost more than that to put one on your tank. I seem to recall Imex Erik doing this on one of his Taigen's not long ago.
The Open Panzer TCB is sort of a niche product that will not appeal to everyone. Tinkering, programming and open source are all very popular in other segments of the RC hobby, but I think not so much the current RC tank demographic. However I would like to think our work has had an indirect impact on the tank hobby already. After the TCB was released Clark released a version of the TK60 with SBus support and ElMod can now be updated via Bluetooth using something remarkably similar to what is described in the Open Panzer Wiki. Maybe they were going to do these things anyway but it's a strange coincidence!