- Thu Nov 13, 2014 4:41 pm
#2575
OK, unfortunately, I was right
Let me guess the price: $9.99? Watch out, there is now the Spark Photon @ $19:
https://www.spark.io/
Already 3462 pre-ordered...
It comes with a state-of-the-art web IDE and a real STM32 CPU with Arduino-like programming full FCC/CE/IC certification, and... Open Source software and hardware! It looks like they are not afraid of someone else tinkering with their API
Again from experience, I doubt someone will be able to beat that level of price and functionality soon, so come on, don't waste your time and money in trying to sell something like this, let's have fun and share!
BTW, keeping source closed will not protect any API, someone else will come with another Lua port. In fact, If I had more than 24h/day, I just would port Lua to the ESP8266 myself. Maybe someone else will do? But what a waste of time and energy
OTOH, if you release the sources on a collaborative platform, you can keep control on the API by providing a good documentation for it (like the existing one, congrats!): it will turn your API into a reference, and all small hacks will either be integrated or become meaningless. Take Linux for example: the source code is available, its API (and even ABI) is public, but are there a lot of "incompatible" forks in the wild?
zeroday wrote:Squonk wrote:gerardwr wrote:But……. it's a cool development that zeroday has published! Especially for people that will/can not handle C development it's an excellent way of programming the ESP8266 without struggling with compilers, linkers, etc. And for the rest of us, it's an excellent tool for prototyping, converting to C can be done later.
I agree that having Lua on the ESP8266 can be very useful, but in my experience, the "not for now" and the dot com site "comming soon~~~" is a good indication that someone will try to sell me something soon, and that opening the sources will never happen.
I hope I am wrong.
well, you are right, the coming-soon website try to sell something, it will be a development kit with esp8266+usb-ttl.
but the product is designed for someone who have very less embedded C programming experiences and ZERO hardware experience.
not for someone who is familiar to esp8266 chip, gcc compiler, firmware hacking and sdk stuff.
It will be a "plug and play" development kit, especially for someone have javascript, nodejs, python or arduino experiences.
The picture here is, everyone can download and use this firmware for free, include people who have their own made module.
But everyone should write lua script use the "stable" api, if someone release their lua script, others can use it without any modification.
I hope after some time, there are many lua scripts for this firmware, and connect things to net will be as easy as "hello world".
Anyway, selling a firmware is not a good business for me, nobody will buy a firmware, especially in China.
So, "for now", my concern, open source will produce a lot firmware with diff api, makes lua scripts not compatible.
OK, unfortunately, I was right
Let me guess the price: $9.99? Watch out, there is now the Spark Photon @ $19:
https://www.spark.io/
Already 3462 pre-ordered...
It comes with a state-of-the-art web IDE and a real STM32 CPU with Arduino-like programming full FCC/CE/IC certification, and... Open Source software and hardware! It looks like they are not afraid of someone else tinkering with their API
Again from experience, I doubt someone will be able to beat that level of price and functionality soon, so come on, don't waste your time and money in trying to sell something like this, let's have fun and share!
BTW, keeping source closed will not protect any API, someone else will come with another Lua port. In fact, If I had more than 24h/day, I just would port Lua to the ESP8266 myself. Maybe someone else will do? But what a waste of time and energy
OTOH, if you release the sources on a collaborative platform, you can keep control on the API by providing a good documentation for it (like the existing one, congrats!): it will turn your API into a reference, and all small hacks will either be integrated or become meaningless. Take Linux for example: the source code is available, its API (and even ABI) is public, but are there a lot of "incompatible" forks in the wild?
