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SW kickstarter paying for 6 months -> you could try to ask for more money :) But yes, I see the point, ESP8266 has been around for years now...
A couple of days ago Espressif sent 50 beta boards of their new micro. At least one landed at a microptyhon dev.
Just asking: try to push some community "pressure" on Espressif? Or without explicit support from Espressif, that wouldn't help much?
AkosLukacs
Sorry for the delay replying to this...
It's true, but STM32s come in all flavours, so it's always been a bit hit and miss trying to just buy one and get Espruino firmware for it. By comparison you can just google 'ESP8266', buy the cheapest one you can find and run a pre-built Espruino firmware on it straight away.
I totally agree with you that providing 'official' Espruino builds for ESP8266/32 would make Espruino more popular. The issue for me is I'm not VC-funded or anything so I'm not specifically after as many users as possible - what I'm after is finding a way to make Espruino sustainable, and having loads of non-paying users has pretty much the opposite effect :(
The software KickStarter idea always seemed like a good one. The issue for me really was how to handle support - because a software Kickstarter might pay for 6 months of work if I'm really lucky, but after that there will still be loads of emails, forum posts and GitHub issues that then I'm expected to do for free.
I quite liked the idea of a KickStarter based around the idea of a web service (so you could program all the boards direct from espruino.com) but I don't think that's what anyone asking for a proper Espruino port actually wants?
Honestly if Espressif had cared even a tiny bit about Espruino on their devices then I'd be more inclined to take a risk and do something, but there's been nothing from them despite me trying repeatedly to have some kind of conversation with them. By contrast I've had people at ST and Nordic actually reach out to me to ensure that engineers could answer any queries I had.
Maybe some have more money, but I think a lot of 'makers' would rather save money by doing something themselves than by buying it - it's part of the reason we do it so it's not surprising that things like ESP8266 are so popular.
That post you linked is quite interesting @AkosLukacs - I've been lucky with Espruino that the board sales prop everything up, but even so I wouldn't be able to make it sustainable if I hired someone else, wasn't working from home, or was actually on an industry-standard wage.