At first glance, they seem to have made some clever hardware design choices, and there are lots of options for the software development environment. I don't plan to buy one or dig deeper until I think it solves a problem I actually have, but I'm curious what other forum members think.
Wont be getting one unless it has wifi onboard. Or maybe zigbee. Anything else is just too much hard work for any practical home automation for me. Even then it will need to compete with the ESP chips.
Agreed, I suspect it is partly a marketing ploy. Introduce without WiFi then add it later and many of those that bought the first version will buy new ones. There is plenty of space on the board.
Adafruit have also announced a few boards based on the silicon. I agree with the comments above about lack of wifi. But at a deeper level I must ask who needs this? There are a multitude of similar boards available. It offers nothing new or novel.
Haha, a point certainly. But what about those days when you deeply crave getting to grips with C++'s string handling?! Nothing beats a microprocessor for that.
It is hard to beat the simplicity of handling sensors though on a microprocessor. Pi's are not so nice in my opinion for that low-level stuff. I hate having to hack around in the bowels of Linux. I'd even rather have to tear my hair out over C++'s string handling.