Hacker News Reader

Comment by zippox | Hacker News Reader

I always see these low prices (<$5) on articles and comments but this doesn't seem the be the case for the boards people actually recommend. Are people buying on aliexpress or other cheap alternatives?

View on HN

You surely won't read this, but this is my best shot: as of today, there's an offer at AZ-delivery (they use to have offers like this every couple of months) that allows you to buy three 8266 for 7€ (2.40€ a piece), one for 3.79€. Sadly, the offer don't extend to the pack of five, that is 20€ (still, 4€ a piece!)

https://www.az-delivery.de/en/products/nodemcu-lua-lolin-v3-...

I know I sound like a salesman, but if you subscribe to their newsletter, you'll get that kind of offers all the time.

$1.10 US on eBay: https://www.ebay.com/itm/314750044526

Wemos D1 Mini is about 5 Euro from many local sellers here. It’s a great little board (if you have the official ones, don’t know about clones).

If you liked the D1 Mini, you can now get the excellent S2 Mini with an ESP32 S2 microcontroller for $2.50 on eBay. I just ordered a 10-pack for my HomeKit projects.

https://www.wemos.cc/en/latest/s2/s2_mini.html

To get less than 5€ you usually have to buy more than one, like here: https://www.az-delivery.de/products/nodemcu-lua-amica-v2-mod....

As an aside, I've bought a bunch of AZ-Delivery products and have been very happy with them.

Aliexpress is probably cheaper, but TBH I just order them on Amazon. If you buy a bundle of like 6 then the unit cost gets around... I would have said $6, but I might be misremembering. Of course, for the number I've used, ~$4 and ~$6 are equivalent so YMMV.

Right now I can see knock-off D1 mini clones on Amazon for about £2.40 each. Real Wemos boards are about £4 each in bulk.

I’ve got three from AliExpress that were all €2-3 (I pushed the boat out for a USB-C model most recently) and they’re all working perfectly so far.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com