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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

You should use something else for most of these, as the Raspi is hugely overkill. Something like an ESP8266 is much better suited for sensors and things like that, and it comes with onboard storage that it uses to run its code from.

Plus, it costs $3 each, is stamp-sized and has Wifi.

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The Pi boards actually replaced ESP32 boards running ESP-IDF firmware I wrote, I probably have 15+ of them at this point and still plan to use them for other things.

The ESP32s were routinely dropping from WiFi (some being crashes, some just disassociating and never connecting again). ESP-IDF has had quite a few WiFi fixes, but it's difficult to guarantee that your own code isn't directly causing the problem (which you get for free running in userland on Linux), and dealing with it was becoming a huge time sink.

Most of the Pi Zero W boards I have were $5 at Microcenter, the MicroSD adds to the cost a little but they're extremely reliable as a result, and my own code is no longer running in the same address space with the scheduler and WiFi driver under extremely tight memory constraints :)

I use the ESP8266 and ESP32 for projects too - but the PI is sooo much easier to work with with a full linux distro and programming languages and libs to go with.

the ESPs are most definitely better for higher volume solutions

Hmm, you think so? I hate having to always keep Linux up to date. I prefer to just load micropython onto an ESP and be done. I use the Pi for heavier workloads, but that does mean it very rarely gets used.

well trade offs ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

EDIT : now that you mention it - micropython is pretty cool -- and I haven't used it - need to try that on the ESP :)

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