150 karma · joined May 13, 2015
One of my original goals was to make the financial entry-barrier as low as possible. Another — to provide educational context for covering a full-stack IoT development from firmware to backend to frontend. This means using cheap hardware and open-source software. In fact, I spent around 9$ on everything that was needed for this project.
I wouldn't say that this project is over-engineered with cool tech. I tried to keep the setup as minimal as possible, sticking to industry-standard data exchange protocols and frameworks.
Of course, all of the software part could be written using ANSI C or C++, but from my point of view, it wouldn't make the project simpler, because there are more specialized tools that are better suited for the particular task, be it backend, frontend or firmware (Rust, HTML5+JS and C in case of this project). I have outlined rationalization behind this particular technology stack under the "Choosing the technology stack" heading.
You are right that in a commercial setting, there might be myriad more inputs that constrain the technology choice like team experience, your company's recommended technology stack and etc. Of course, we can't take into consideration all these hypothetical requirements, as they depend on the environment you are working in and the commercial goals of the project.
To make your comment complete, could you share your ideas on how to architect this alternatively to get the same result with less than ten bucks, maybe an hour or two, and just a handful of code, if any? If it is a viable alternative I'll consider adding it into the post as an alternative tech stack, so people reading it will see more alternative options on how to build this project.