I burned out 3 NodeMCU boards in one day because I apparently know nothing about circuits (especially transistors) and kept effectively shorting a digital IO pin to ground.
Two of them appear to have blown voltage regulators. If I plug them into USB, the 3.3v pins give 0.25v on one board and 1.0v on the other. The third one appears to work fine, but I can't get it to accept flashes reliably. At least 90% of the time, it can't even open the COM port to flash (Says the device is busy). When it DOES actually flash, in the end it will often throw an error saying there was a hash mismatch, indicating the firmware was corrupted during the flashing process. I have had once or twice where it flashed with no errors, but my code appears to fail to run.
It's not like I'm gonna really notice the $13 I'm spending on Amazon to replace the boards (I know I can get them cheaper on AliExpress or some other Chinese site, but I wanted them in two days, not four weeks), but still I hate spending money I don't have to.
Not really. If I manage to burn it out that $10 MCU just became a $20 MCU. And if I want it to run off a battery, extra peripherals and compute power I don't need don't help me any. And if I want to make more than one I want to to be cheap.