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That's the spirit.
The silent majority, and you have nearly 1700 of them out there, will be, well, silent.
It's early days, the 'look what I made!' will come. Just now to try out Espruino you have to get a board and figure out how to install it. That is not trivial for the intended audience of JavaScript on an MCU.
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Ever since the beginning of JS I had never even considered learning it. My world was "real" languages like C and C++ on embedded systems. Why on earth would I be concerned about some stupid, slow, scripting language in a browser?
Until a year or so ago then...
My boss wanted animated visualizations of a real-time data streams from our embedded systems as a Web App. "Oh crap", I know nothing of FLASH or HTML5 or JavaScript, I have not even worked on server side web technologies for ten years.
My saviours were: HTML5 with WebGL and the Three.js and IvanK libraries. Data streamed to the browser via Web Sockets. But how to feed those web sockets? Easy write a little HTTP server in Node.js. BINGO JS everywhere up and running in a few weeks learning everything from scratch.
Of course I initially thought this was all going to be a disaster, I mean, "JS is not a real language right". After being annoyed at the JS quirks I soon discovered Douglas Crockford and "JavaScript the Good Parts" and jslint and 'use strict';. I was very surprised to find out how sophisticated JS actually is what with inner functions, first class functions, closures etc. Damn thing is actually a big step up from Java in many respects!
The other big surprise is that we now have server side components rewritten in JS and running under node.js that perform almost as well as their previous C++ incarnations but are a thousand times easier to develop and maintain.
JS on those embedded systems? Yep, I already have communication centric work being done in Node.js out in the field on small ARM boards. All be it a lot less small and cheap than the Espruino.
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Gordon,
You have to look at that frustration positively. It's not "drat someone is digging up more work to do" it's "great there is another user out there checking out Espruino." Consider it a sign of the huge success you have had with the Espruino and the Kick Starter campaign. Think how miserable you would be now if nobody had turned up.
Clearly many don't have the skill or the time to fix bugs they have found, even if they intend to be serious Espruino users. It's still better to have people trying things and reporting bugs than not.
I do appreciate that you must be somewhat overwhelmed just now. Such is the burden of success:)
The Puck has a magnetometer (compass), it can detect a magnet nearby. So a magnet on a wheel could be used to count the rotations. No reed switch or other hardware required.