I went to their forum, and it is not very active.
Is this a good route to take for future hardware?
Are you talking about the WeMos forum? I don't think it was ever super active but they screwed up and deleted all the content so I think that pretty much killed it.
The various D1s are just ESP8266 breakout boards and the hardware definitions are in the ESP8266 core for Arduino so really it doesn't matter much what happens with WeMos. ESP8266 support in the Arduino world is pretty good and, despite the ESP32, seems to be getting better all the time. The one thing you should be aware of is that there are many counterfeit/clone WeMos boards sold for a little less than the prices of the official boards. I've bought quite a few that seem to be fine, a few that were DOA. Other people have reported getting ones with flash chips that only work a few times. So if you buy a "WeMos" board not from their official Aliexpress sale and it's bad don't necessarily blame WeMos. All the official WeMos boards I bought have their logo on the ESP8266 shield and the counterfeit/clones did not. However, it looks like their boards are now sold without the shield so there might be no way to tell whether a board is real just by looking at the hardware.
and most of clones have smaller flash memory. e-shop shows 4M and you get 4Mb = 512 kB
I despise that "M" trick. Like it would kill them to add an extra letter to be clear whether they're talking about bits or bytes. Better yet, write the full word out since likely they couldn't even be trusted to get the case of the "b" right.
pert:
Are you talking about the WeMos forum? I don't think it was ever super active but they screwed up and deleted all the content so I think that pretty much killed it.The various D1s are just ESP8266 breakout boards and the hardware definitions are in the ESP8266 core for Arduino so really it doesn't matter much what happens with WeMos. ESP8266 support in the Arduino world is pretty good and, despite the ESP32, seems to be getting better all the time. The one thing you should be aware of is that there are many counterfeit/clone WeMos boards sold for a little less than the prices of the official boards. I've bought quite a few that seem to be fine, a few that were DOA. Other people have reported getting ones with flash chips that only work a few times. So if you buy a "WeMos" board not from their official Aliexpress sale and it's bad don't necessarily blame WeMos. All the official WeMos boards I bought have their logo on the ESP8266 shield and the counterfeit/clones did not. However, it looks like their boards are now sold without the shield so there might be no way to tell whether a board is real just by looking at the hardware.
Thanks for the info about their forum.
I was considering the WeMos boards because they seem to be like the Arduino Uno with built-in wifi.
I don't recommend the big D1. It is not like Uno. Only looks like one. Buy the D1 mini.