Hacker News Reader

Comment by protomok | Hacker News Reader

I bought an ESP8266 dev board (<$10 CAD shipped!) for side projects, and I think it's great for hobbyists.

But I'm curious if Espressif actually have any design wins? I mean I don't mind using the community Arduino port (which is awesome), and buying from...unknown suppliers :) but is thing commercially viable or just a hobbyist gadget?

View on HN

It's originally intended as a commercial product to make smart home type stuff and the hobby interest is a bit of a lucky accident. It's still pretty new by industry standards so it's just starting to appear in products, mostly very cheap wifi-enabled plugs and stuff. Itead makes a pretty sweet wifi-enabled switch for about $6.00 shipped that is hackable to put your own tailor made firmware on. Pete Scargill has a great writeup on them and I have one myself that I put in the wall to control my overhead lights. They're remarkably well made for how cheap they are.

> http://tech.scargill.net/itead-slampher-and-sonoff/

I got 10 for 38$ CAD shipped from Aliexpress. You could probably get them for even cheaper right now (though the USD > CAD is worst than it was at the time).

That's awesome, and that is dev boards or just the chip itself ?

I got the "NodeMcu Lua WIFI Internet Things development board based ESP8266 CP2102 Arduino" a while ago on eBay for $6.85 USD, price has now dropped to $4.76 USD, plus CAD is better-ish.

I am a ESP8266 fan but not sure that I'd be confident enough to do a product with the ESP8266.

Depends on what you want to do. I generally recommend the WeMos D1 mini, because there's only one of it, while there are like ten NodeMCU boards and only some are good. If you need something more bare, I recommend buying ESP8266 12E or 12F boards and using my small breakout:

https://github.com/skorokithakis/tiny-ESP8266-breakout

Reply on news.ycombinator.com