> are these things mutually exclusive? I think that once you factor in things like battery life, mass production price and complexity, they are. You can have

> are these things mutually exclusive? I think that once you factor in things like battery life, mass production price and complexity, they are. You can have a swarm of lamp-toggling or temperature-showing things built with two reasonably unpretentious chips and a very simple production process, that allows you to build them cheaply and reliably, and have little enough processing power that you can run them off a small battery. Throw in the stuff you run Node.js on (of all things...) and it's suddenly not such an unpretentious chip that also ensures running them on battery is out of the question. A lot of people think hardware design is all about milking the processing power. Part of it is, but there are a lot of things that don't get much exposure because most software developers take them for granted. Battery life (and its cost) is a prime example.