Comment by nativeit
1 day ago
You’d die on the back of unreliable operation and relatively high maintenance. A DIY system built off of cheap ESP32s is never going to be reliable enough. The system as described above is the sort of thing I would happily operate for myself, but would never attempt to sell as a product. Anyone who’s tried to hold together a few dozen ESP32-powered IoT devices will likely attest—they’re very impressive for their cost, but hardly reliable on the scale of years.
Oh totally. I actually thought about exactly that. I'm basically thinking "this -will- fail at some point, so when it does, I want to be able to replace a failed unit very rapidly."
I'm tinkering with an auto-provisioning function that tells a given ESP what node type it's connected to and configures itself from there.
> but hardly reliable on the scale of years.
I’ve had similar experiences with “enterprise”-grade hardware.
But sometimes the “price” isn’t just the hardware, but also having someone on-call 24/7 to support and possibly fly-out to investigate within X hours.