HN was my first stop (of course) - I'll be heading over there shortly to post.
Oh yeah, we're well aware of how much of a "pain" getting Willow going can be. I don't like it (at all).
That said, you configure and build once for your environment and then get a .bin that can be flashed to the ESP BOX with anything that does ESP flashing (like various web interfaces, etc) or you can re-run the flash command across X devices. So even now, in this early stage, it's at least only painful once ;).
Down the road we want to have a Willow Home Assistant component that does everything inside of the HA dashboard so users (like esphome, maybe even using esphome) can point-click-configure-flash entirely from the HA dashboard. Not to mention ongoing dynamic configuration, over the air updates, etc.
IMHO better to release early like this to a group of hackers than to wait until you have a nice out of the box setup going. This way you're going to get a lot of great feedback and hopefully some help. Awesome project!
HN was my first stop (of course) - I'll be heading over there shortly to post.
Oh yeah, we're well aware of how much of a "pain" getting Willow going can be. I don't like it (at all).
That said, you configure and build once for your environment and then get a .bin that can be flashed to the ESP BOX with anything that does ESP flashing (like various web interfaces, etc) or you can re-run the flash command across X devices. So even now, in this early stage, it's at least only painful once ;).
Down the road we want to have a Willow Home Assistant component that does everything inside of the HA dashboard so users (like esphome, maybe even using esphome) can point-click-configure-flash entirely from the HA dashboard. Not to mention ongoing dynamic configuration, over the air updates, etc.
I talk about all of this on our wiki[0].
[0] - https://github.com/toverainc/willow/wiki/Home-Assistant