| Why outsource to India? Pick any random set of Software Engineers from any country. I guarantee you that you are more likely to find people who can develop fast on an RPi than on an ESP32. Now if you're a startup needing to build very fast and iterate quickly, it's obvious you're going to use the RPi4. Then, once you've grown, you can make the system more efficient, port it, etc. It'll be a growing pain, but a sustained one. And without being completely immersed in ridiculous amounts of VC-funding (hopefully) I'm the CTO of a company who helps startups go from the idea to the scale-up phase. We helped build a tiny startup to one of the most promising startups in europe using this idea. We're very proud of what we've achieved. Could we have built something with an ESP32? Sure, and we might have even made it in the same timeframe given the amazing team we have, but it was less risky to bet on the RPi than the ESP32. In fact, the first iteration had an ESP32 and we were brought in because they needed to move faster and it was becoming hard to develop for and iterate at their pace. Again: perhaps we could have built the same with the ESP32, but it's a matter of risk analysis! Sometimes I feel like people talk about these things in a kind of vacuum of perfection and utopia, outside of the real world. In the real world things get messy and move very fast. Supply-chain issues arise, hardware has to be swapped, people move cities and quit their jobs. Where we have excelled as a partner is in dealing with very very very fast change and using an ESP32 for that would have made things harder. Now instead of a dead product there's thousands of the thing we helped build out there, and growing. And we're finally moving away from the RPi4. Technology is actually a very small part of what we do. Most of it is creating the logistic and the "system" around the technology to get everything to work. Sometimes, as engineers, we forget that. |