I'm an NFC enthusiast as well! Technically the flipper zero meets your criteria, but I'm guessing there's something else about it that doesn't quite meet up to your needs. When you say programmable, although the Flipper zero is "programmable", it's more like apps and you don't have full control over the device, which could be a limiting factor for whatever you're doing.
My flipper zero at least, does not have touch, and that was one of my requirements.
By programmable I mean "I can modify/flash my own firmware", which is also true for the flipper as it's all open source... and I had to do that anyway to fix their 14443B reader code to work for my application.
It's sort of a self imposed problem as well because the community produces a bunch of pull requests, but only the corporate staff members can approve and merge them into the official firmware. It begs the question why have an official firmware if it's not at least slightly maintained.
> why have an official firmware if it's not at least slightly maintained.
Because it's still useful to have a blessed child so that people getting into the space have somewhere to start. You could accept zero additional PRs and it would still be a useful thing to have.
The hardware is static so the rate of software rot is pretty low. It can effectively not be maintained as long as it's already in a stable state. Adding new features is cool and all but it also adds more bugs.
But the great thing is that there's a community, all using the same hardware, and people can fork. So people can still get those updates that they want. Maybe the only thing to do is create a community fork that is much more open but doesn't come with the same stability promises. But that can still be a lot of work, even if you get community maintainers
I'd be more enthusiastic if they hadn't left the flipper zero community in the lurch and basically abandoned it over the last year (and more obvious in the last 6 months). A new product doesn't mean as much when the business behind it doesn't demonstrate follow through in their first product (even something as simple as giving the community the ability to merge PRs or do releases of bugfixes).
What you describe sounds bad, especially the inability to accept help.
But accepting help does take time and attention. Launching anything means splitting attention between supporting what you created and using what you learned to create something new.
Pre-v1-launch is a wonderful time because it is so focused. But you can’t go home again.
I think we might need another term for working both remote and with a flexible schedule. I'm working remote, have been at a few jobs, but while my location isn't an office, my schedule is fixed, the same as if I were going in.
