This looks to have better software with it though. I get that you can probably port between but i'm happy to pay a few dollars to save my own time here.
We're talking $4 vs $16 for a board for engineers that cost much more than that an hour. Pick whatever you like. In fact go buy both and play with both the above and this. The cost is literally nothing. These boards are not what goes into a large production run product.
That has not been my experience at all as a user. ESPHome is even easier than Arduino and I haven’t touched firmware code in years.
The price makes a huge difference when you have dozens of them operating which is trivial with a decent hydroponics and smarthome setup. I also have a dozen boards just sitting idle ready to be called up to replace a failed one or use for a new project because they’re so cheap.
Who actually uses Arduino in production? Everyone just uses modules (for ESP32) or rolls their own using the Arduino board as a reference. They’re so simple the NRE is definitely worth the unit cost if you’re already rolling a daughter board at 1k units.
> This looks to have better software with it though. I get that you can probably port between but i'm happy to pay a few dollars to save my own time here.
There's no porting involved, you'd literally just flash the chip the same way you would if you were updating the firmware.
As a hobbyist, the price difference matters when I want to put 5 or 10 boards around the house, or inevitably fry some.
We're talking $4 vs $16 for a board for engineers that cost much more than that an hour. Pick whatever you like. In fact go buy both and play with both the above and this. The cost is literally nothing. These boards are not what goes into a large production run product.