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by dzhiurgis10 hours ago |
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upvoteby devmor10 hours ago|
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Those are entirely different operational models.

While people do often use pis to do things you could do with an esp32, an ESP32 cannot do the majority of things a Pi can do.

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upvoteby Rohansi6 hours ago|
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Over time the Raspberry Pi use case shifted more and more away from GPIO. They all still have it but probably most of them are used as a Linux computer without ever touching the GPIO now. The people who do use GPIO on a Raspberry Pi are often better off using an ESP32 because they have better control of GPIO, consume far less power, and are actually cheap.

Personally I use ESP32s for GPIO to control things around the house and have one Raspberry Pi acting as a hub.

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upvoteby hellweaver6662 hours ago|
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I've been doing home electronics projects since around 2013, I used to use Raspberry Pi's for everything from lighting control to robots, camera projects and lots in between (I even had a mechanical keyboard with a Pi inside) and a massive collection of hats and addons. These days, I can do 99% of what I need with tiny little ESP32 variant boards for a fraction of the cost and significantly less complexity. Hell, you can even get esp32's with really nice touch screens attached for dashboards / animations. I built a whole cyberdeck using an ESP32 and no computer in-sight.
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upvoteby alextheparrot5 hours ago|
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their RP1 IO chip is such a disappointment for high performance GPIO use cases as well, literally can’t trust any IO decision they make after having hacked on that chip
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upvoteby bdavbdav3 hours ago|
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The full size Pi has less and less of a niche. GPIO / low power edge? ESP32s are great. Signage? The pi isn’t really all that great, and is expensive, get a cheap N100/150. Hacking on Linux? Literally anything else.
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upvoteby bdcravens10 hours ago|
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In many cases that’s an advantage. Tiny (or no) attack surface, less power, etc
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upvoteby slow_typist4 hours ago|
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The attack surface maybe smaller but less eyes on the firmware images for sure.
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upvoteby ehnto4 hours ago|
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At least most my ESP32s are off any net, and pretty low stakes applications.
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upvoteby dzhiurgis1 hours ago|
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Most of the time it's some UART or BT proxy for me, maybe toggle a light, etc. Sometimes it's all of that in one. Plenty of power for it lol.
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upvoteby locknitpicker3 hours ago|
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> Those are entirely different operational models.

In some of the tinkering applications, RPis are shoehorned into the very operarional model that is followed by ESP32s.

ESP32s may be harder to debug but they allow us to remove a big chunk of the complexity that lies between our code and what we want the device to do.

I think your criticism is more in line with "they are not exactly the same as RPis". And that is fine.

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upvoteby nfriedly9 hours ago|
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The original Pi Zero was $5, although it probably uses more power than an esp32.
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upvoteby jszymborski8 hours ago|
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IIRC that was the MSRP but you could never find them at that price.
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upvoteby overfeed2 hours ago|
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> you could never find them at that price.

Microcenter sold it for $5, limited to 1 per customer. Additional ones were $15 each.

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upvoteby dansquizsoft7 hours ago|
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Yeah the price was always a bit of a con (even if it was a great product!)
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upvoteby Beached8 hours ago|
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it is also more capable than an esp32. Im dinking around with both. esp32 is very restrictive in its compute capacity. It isnt multifunctional at all either.

A pi zero is to play with, an esp32 is so tiny, that it is more of a build for a single thing, and then set it and forget it doing that single thing.

You cant really stack more and more cool stuff onto it and keep building on it.

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