Other Boards - Unsupported? #4027
Replies: 1 comment
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Posted at 2014-04-09 by graf I'm not Gordon and I'm not related to Espruino, but I'm using one of these boards (HY-Mini) so let me share my experience too. For me it means that although they should work just fine, it's not guaranteed and you should not expect them to work i.e. demand a fix if something goes wrong. From what I can see on GitHub, Gordon is really busy working on Espruino (the software) and there is still so many things to be done that bugs related purely to unofficial boards are of low priority. And that is the situation we have at the moment with HY-Mini boards. They used to work fine, but then something got broken and current version of Espruino firmware doesn't work. He tried to fix it but it was taking too much time so he is not working on it any more, focusing on the official stuff in the first place (which totally makes sense). So my advice - if you don't like unpleasant surprises go and get the official board, then in case of any problems you can bet on him. Posted at 2014-04-09 by BogdanG Frankly speaking I started using espruino software before v1.30 (many months before advent of espruino board). Posted at 2014-04-09 by @gfwilliams It means:
Sadly the issue is money. I need to keep being able to work on Espruino, and to do that, I need to earn some kind of salary. The Espruino board includes a small markup so that hopefully if people keep buying it I'll be able to support myself while I keep working. The hope is that having the extra support for the Espruino Board will convince more people that were 'on the edge' to support Espruino and buy the Espruino board rather than buying a slightly cheaper board from elsewhere. However I'm working solid 11-12 hour days on Espruino most days, and I'm still losing money right now. Making sure new versions of Espruino work with each of the 8 different boards takes a huge amount of effort - nobody else helps out with this and generally it's a thankless task. I still spend quite a bit of time on it, but of course nobody notices when it works - only when it breaks. I just can't afford to spend even more time supporting other boards when at the end of the day they're not helping me keep working on Espruino - in fact in some cases people are buying them instead of Espruino boards, so it's actually making it more difficult for me to continue working on Espruino. If I spend all my time supporting these boards, and then have to give up work on Espruino because I can't support myself it really doesn't help anyone. BogdanG - thanks for the early support. Do you know how many people registered Espruino over that entire year of me working basically full-time on Espruino though, at £2.95 a time? 25. If more people had actually supported Espruino during that period things might be quite different - there might not even have been an Espruino board! Anyway, hopefully that clears it up. Posted at 2014-04-09 by BogdanG Understood! Posted at 2014-04-09 by DrAzzy Gordon - Since it sounds like selling Espruino boards is critical to the success of this venture, let me make two recommendations:
Posted at 2014-04-10 by BogdanG I think it's difficult to compete with Discovery F4. For about 15$ you get nice board: Of course some effort is required to use ARM tools but it's feasible and pretty flexible. Posted at 2014-04-10 by @gfwilliams Just to say - my last post sounded a big depressing. It's not like Espruino is going anywhere - the nice thing about the KickStarter is it's given me a year or two to find ways to create an income from Espruino, and I'm sure that will happen. @bogdang ... ST sell that board basically at-cost (if not at a loss). IIRC in the licence it says that you can't use it as a component in a product that you sell - because ST know that they wouldn't make any money if you did :) Obviously I can't compete with a massive multi-national selling a product at cost... In a way it's pretty dumb of me even to make the images available - so I've got to rely on the fact that people will want to support Espruino - and specifically that people will want something that just plugs in and goes, with documentation that shows all the correct pin names. I guess some people will always be more worried about saving £10 than about actually supporting Espruino - but I guess they never would have bought it anyway and I've just got to hope that they produce good publicity which causes others to buy the real board. As an interesting side-note, www.mbed.org support a wide range of boards but only if the board manufacturer pays them! Obviously that would be ideal for Espruino, but sadly I'm not big enough to be able to come to that kind of arrangement. @drazzy - thanks for the advice, it's really helpful. I've been meaning to update the website and add purchase links to the front page for a while - I'll try and do that today. I have been after US distributors for a while - and there was interest from a very big US one (but being a big one they're extremely slow moving). It's difficult - being more of an engineer than a salesperson there's always the thought that if I make it awesome enough and fix every bug, people will magically buy it. It's not the case at all, and I really need to focus more on marketing now. Posted at 2014-04-10 by BogdanG I know how the ST business model looks like - they want to popularise thei board to earn money later. Assuming that the espruino is targetted at hobbists market the ST, TI, freescale are great choice (cheap, feature-rich), etc. Maybe releasing espruino for as many boards as possible is a nice choice. Since Kickstart success the popularity of the espruino rised somewhat, I guess. I would look for opportunity how to popularize the espruino-javascipt among hobbits but I would not limit it to a single board (the mentioned "Unsupported board" headline might be discouraging). I am sorry for these words - you know I have been a fun of the espruino since the beginning. Posted at 2014-04-10 by graf Also speaking about doing the good deeds, supporting the project and so on, it is easy to forget that Espruino board is really a nice piece of hardware and, when compared with these fancy boards, it has pros too. Posted at 2014-04-10 by BogdanG People have different needs. For some people the espruino is great choice. The others might want for example a bunch of sensors embedded on the board and ST boards might be very tempting. Posted at 2014-04-10 by @gfwilliams A common dev platform is a great idea - that was my initial plan for Espruino... The problem is that people won't pay for it. I did try it - for a year - and it failed miserably. Even you, who have 20 boards and are trying to convince me to do this, only registered Espruino on a single board during that time. However people will pay for a board that comes pre-installed with Espruino, so that's what I'm doing... If the common dev platform had worked out, I'd be doing that :) Posted at 2014-04-10 by BogdanG I had ONLY one STM32VL where I use the licenced espruino - tt is licenced per SN, isn't it?. BTW. Two other STM32 boards are programmed using the arduino (libmaple). I did many projects where I was not able to use espruino for many reasons (performance, memory constrains, complexity of javascript event oriented model when using challange/response communications required complex FSMs, etc). At the beginning the espruino was promissing and I spent many hours trying to use it in every project Espruino has its place in the hobbyst market. And as usual it is not a 'silver bullet'. Posted at 2014-04-10 by @gfwilliams @bogdang - I'm not saying you broke any licence at all! I'm just saying that selling the software on other boards isn't really viable... You're trying to convince me that supporting more boards is worthwhile, but what you've just said kind of implies that it isn't? Believe me, I've spent a very long time trying to find ways to make selling just the software work - and I couldn't. I sold more copies of Espruino (with the board) in the first 30 minutes of the KickStarter than I'd sold all of the previous year - and it's been much less trouble supporting my users than if they'd all had different boards. I think it shows that it's the right direction - even if it's frustrating for people who'd like to use different boards. Posted at 2014-04-10 by BogdanG For some application using javascript is not suitable, but for simple ones it might be useful. It's nothing new in the software industry - you do not use object oriented programming when you want to do simple automation tasks... You choose the programming language to get the results quickly - at least in business settings we do use this approach. They are some application where espruino is the best - for example prototyping. I'm closing the topic. Thanks you for sharing your thoughts. Posted at 2014-07-21 by d0773d @gfwilliams have you considered accepting donations? Posted at 2014-07-21 by @gfwilliams Originally I did - I think I had a donations button up for around 6 months and I don't think I ever got anything, so I took it off :) Having said that, the amount of traffic to the site has increased massively now so it might well be worth re-adding... Especially if it was next to the Download link :) Posted at 2014-07-21 by d0773d @gfwilliams how much traffic does this website consume every month? Posted at 2014-07-22 by @gfwilliams It's around 400 users, 2000 pageviews a day - so not massive... Posted at 2014-08-14 by bluecamel Hey, Gordon. I was a Kickstarter backer and I've enjoyed playing with my boards. Just thought I'd share some of my experiences. I see your Espruino boards as prototyping boards, for two reasons:
However, it's not really the ideal prototyping board:
All that said, cost is really the biggy. I appreciate your concerns and don't expect you to give things away for free, but when I can easily include even something like an Arduino Micro for half the cost (and not have to deal with SMT), I'm almost always going to go that route. But really, I'm usually just creating a standalone Arduino on perfboard. Still, I think there are some gaps you could fill here that would help a lot and make me more likely to use Espruino:
Just my opinions ;) Posted at 2014-08-15 by DrAzzy I think Gordon is planning a smaller, cheaper espruino, to wick I am greatly liking forward to. There are some posts about it. Personally, I love the smd area, and just wish there was a second smd area (connected to same holes for headers) instead of the spot for Bluetooth, with the pads on the finer pitch for tssop / msop. With that cheap "no clean gel flux", I can solder on smds in half the time as an equivalent through hole part. I may not be typical - but I would think there would be people who know electronics but are scared of the programming, whom JavaScript and smd both great for. Plus, you can't get a lot of the best parts in through hole... Like, show me a mosfet that has performance specced at and decent at 3 volt gate drive through hole for example... I haven't been able to, while there are rice grain sized sot-23 parts handle multiple amps continuously, at 2.5v on gate (they fit real good the smd area) Re lack headers do you mean you'd the pin strip be included? I agree on that, but I'm glad it wasn't pre installed because I've been using several styles of pin strip. I do kinda feel like there's room for two versions of the espruino - the expensive one with more pins and smd area, and the cheaper, smaller one that Gordon has talked about. Just my two cents - I'm not normal, so I'm not trying speak for the world. Posted at 2014-08-15 by bluecamel Thanks for the perspective. I think I'm just as atypical, but on the other side of the fence. While Javascript is appealing, I'm a software engineer, so different languages aren't scary to me, whereas I'm still learning the hardware side (I hardly know what you're talking about with the mosfet) and I'm horrible at soldering. I get by fine with through hole, but my attempts at SMT were disastrous. I guess I just need to learn with some cheaper components instead of my pricey Espruino boards that I don't want to bork. Posted at 2014-08-15 by @gfwilliams I've heard from a few people who wanted pins preinstalled. I think I'm going to have to have two specific products - one with and one without. I am working on a new board - I got the first prototype mostly working just last night! It sounds a lot like what you want, and it should be a bit cheaper too. About price... You say half the price for a micro, but I just looked online and they are £20 whereas Espruino is £25 - not a huge difference, especially as the Espruino software is so much more complex than the Arduino bootloader. It looks a bit different in the US, but I can't do too much about that at the moment as it's just the way the tax/exchange rate is - I sell at basically the same price to everyone. It probably doesn't help that while the headline figure in each currency is about equal, the UK price includes tax and the US one doesn't. I'm not sure what I can do about that now it's on shelves in the US, but I might be able to negotiate something better with the new board. Posted at 2014-08-16 by bluecamel Yeah, I'm in the US. For example, adafruit sells the Arduino Micro for $22.95 and the Espruino for $39.95. The new board sounds exciting. Can't wait to see what you come up with. Posted at 2014-08-16 by tage In my opinion, the pins should be delivered with the board, but not soldered. He who cannot manage the task of inserting and soldering a couple of pin headers should stay away from electronics. Posted at 2014-08-16 by bluecamel tage, I agree that they should be included, but the rest is just egotistical. I've plenty of friends who can't solder but write awesome software and want to play with this stuff (and have made some really cool projects without soldering). Posted at 2014-08-16 by tage ..the reason why I don't think it is a good idea to sell the board with pin headers soldered is that the pin headers take up a lot of space, especially when they are used. that is, wires with connectors are plugged in. many users would buy the board because is is very compact. but the connectors would really make it difficult to fit the board into a small space, compared to if you just solder the wires into holes. and soldered connections are a lot more reliable than pin headers and matching connectors. so I would definitely sell the board with pin headers but not soldered. it can be difficult to remove pin headers that are soldered. Posted at 2014-08-16 by bluecamel ummkay Posted at 2014-08-16 by @gfwilliams I think I really just have to give people the option... While I think pretty much everyone is capable of soldering the connectors, it still puts a lot of people off getting started - especially if they haven't done anything like it before. I'd prefer to just supply a bare board too - but given Espruino is all about how easy it is to get started, I think it makes a lot of sense to have one version with pins. Posted at 2014-08-18 by @allObjects first of all, I'd like to commend you - as simple as that. You stepped into this endeavor with the right motives, and you show an incredible spirit, creativity, dedication, perseverance - and last but not least - awesome productivity. With most products the question is how to balance engineering and marketing. Both cost, latter opens the wallet, and - or but - first one keeps it open (after discovering that it was not just a marketing bluff and a good sales pitch). Too much engineering (time) upfront makes the money (ROI) come (back) in too late... or too little or never at all, because by the time the product hits the market, the requirements/demands have already changed (...that's why 'agile methodology' came to be to help with this dilemma - especially in the domain of software development - it helps to be shippable at any time, ...on and with every increment in business value.) You may not have promoted Espruino with the term 'agile product development', but you live it - include it in your new home page ;-)... All of us Espruino users experience agile through Espruino's evolution of firmware and (Web) development environment. JavaScript is inherently and thus exceptionally well suited for the agile approach. The built-in, straight forward and simple extensibility is architected into its implementation of its object-orientation and runtime engine (VM). I could imagine that those aspects were crucial reasons enticing you to call Espruino into live. The next paragraphs belong more into the topic 'About JavaScript'. I like to pick them up in this context, because for me they are part of the overall, high-level architecture of the Espruino product as a whole - and its mission to make it easily accessible to a broad community. Part of this 'easily' is guaranteed with feature rich Espruino board working righ out-of-box: plug in and use - with no hick-up(s). The (Web) development environment shows even a ready to example in the editor. Therefore, I'd better had said: just plug and play! - See yourself what got me hooked and started at http://forum.espruino.com/conversations/1781/: Running LED lights - with the three (3) on-board LEDs - controlled by three (3) buttons... oops: only one user button on the board though... ;-) Therefore: buy the original Espruino board! None of the few saved $, £, ¥, or what ever currency you prefer - may be esteemed and stable CHFs - bring you back the time you lost tinkering with this 'other' board and most likely made you gave up on it, or even worse, giving up on the technology all together,... and missing out for the rest of your life... (...what a big mouth full). Generally, I'm a 'cheap' guy - or more nicely: I like frugality - overcome with creativity - hence the software buttons ;-) - but I have no regrets what so ever having bought into the very solid engineered Espruino board. - This much for: 'Why to buy the genuine Espruino board'. ////////////////////// As a language and implementation, JavaScript follows more Smalltalk's than Java's model: In JavaScript - as well as in Smalltalk - the prototypes or classes - respectively - can be (incrementally) extended at practically no cost, where as with Java either a subclass or a modified/extended clone has to created. JavaScript goes even further than Smalltalk: in JavaScript one can extend just one or selected particular instance(s) versus all. Agreed, with Java requiring subclasses for extensions, future coexistence/integration is much less a source for (name) conflicts. The limits of extending classes (by adding methods to the existing class) and subclassing has anyway to be overcome with composition... and even there, JavaScript has its advantages. Btw, for how to apply the class hierarchy pattern of class-based object orientation to prototype/object-based JavaScript, please take a look at http://dojotoolkit.org - in particular at http://dojotoolkit.org/documentation/tutorials/1.7/declare/. The tutorial provides a very nice, concise explanation of how prototypical/object-based object-orientation's binding happens. It helps to grasp the very dynamic oo nature of JavaScript:
I'd like to see something like declare natively implemented in Espruino's runtime. It hides the somewhat cumbersome, JavaScript native Xyz.prototype.abc = ... syntax and much more, such as invoking the super classe's method (which means even more reuse, more extension with less code writing - a nice feature in a memory constrained setup). The availability and use of 'declare' fosters the thinking in classes rather than a collection of functions pinned to a (pseudo) object, as seen a lot in Java with static methods of a Java class - or simply - a function library, where the subject - in this case the this-object, has to be passed as well in order to work (oo). On the other hand, it cannot be that bad. Java 8 finally learns what JavaScript was already born with: Lambda expression - functions / methods as parameters. Never too late to learn something new and become smarter... that's though true for JavaScript as well... ;) ...will see what ECMA is coming up with in the times to come. Have a great Espruino time! - until next time - allObjects Posted at 2014-08-21 by @gfwilliams Thanks! :) About declare: Presumably it could be implemented inside a module for now... The problem I have is it's hard enough to cram JavaScript into such a small device, let alone other libraries too. If something like it becomes part of a later ES standard, I could definitely look at that though. |
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Posted at 2014-04-09 by BogdanG
Hi Gordon,
Each time I read this page:
http://www.espruino.com/Reference
I wonder what this statemen means, especially for owners of non genuine espruino boards: "Other Boards - Unsupported".
Please clarify.
Thanks,
Bogdan
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