You are reading a single comment by @Gordon and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
Espruino is a JavaScript interpreter for low-power Microcontrollers. This site is both a support community for Espruino and a place to share what you are working on.
@Gordon
I think it's telling that the original NodeMCU team all dropped the project, because despite it being basically the go-to way to do stuff on ESP8266, nobody bought their boards and Espressif wasn't any help.
I do try and do the odd poke for "maybe you should let them know you're using Espruino" but I'm not really sure how to get more people to prod them.
I got to the point of talking to some people inside Espressif, they asked for a bunch of detailed information about it and the amount of people using it, and then they didn't even bother to respond when I gave them that despite repeated pokes.
I think if I were willing to say 'there's no support for this board' then yes, I could sell pre-flashed ESP8266/ESP32. I just feel a bit weird about doing that and I bet I'd get people asking for support saying "I bought this".
Of course the real win would be being able to make $1/board off ESP8266/32 that were purchased in 100s for schools or products, but the only way to do that would be to have some part of the firmware that's closed source like Neonious one do (maybe serving the IDE up over HTTP?).
Would you personally buy a pre-flashed ESP8266 though? I think it's mainly the hacker mentality that most people would rather save the £3 and do the work themselves :)