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I regard the ESP32-C3 as the natural successor to the ESP8266, but considering the relatively minor price differences on sites like Aliexpress, I'd opt for a more robust option like ESP32-S3, which offers significantly fewer limitations.

However, I'm personally anticipating the upcoming releases of zigbee/matter compatible chips for my home automation endeavors (such as the ESP32-H2, ESP32-C6) and possibly their esphome support. I'm enthusiastic about building low power devices that can operate efficiently for up to a year on simple alkaline batteries. While these chips already have an effective sleep mode with low power consumption, the Wi-Fi component remains a notable energy drain.

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I've been developing my home automation stuff recently. I have a esp32 calling home over wifi about every minute, and I wanted to try a battery version. I just happened to have two rechargable AA and a AA battery holder.

You're very correct the wifi is a huge drain. I configured it to go into sleep mode between measurements and I was able to get 3x the life out of it, but for 2 AAs without a real battery circuit, it just meant about 36 hours.

I'm excited for the zigbee/matter chips, I'd like to really get power down so I can embed sensors in things like guitar cases.

Would BLE work for your use case? I have a few ESP32 projects that fire out occasional sensor readings using BLE advertisements which is a lot faster and also lower power than trying to hook up to WiFi on every wake cycle.

Have you tried ESP-NOW[0]?

It's been a while since I used it but from what I remember it works really well between ESP devices and you can certainly do a many to one/gateway approach. The range and power consumption is outstanding all things considered.

[0] - https://www.espressif.com/en/news/ESP-NOW

Just to avoid confusion, when you say ‘zigbee/matter’ you're referring to Matter over Thread, as Matter can also run over WiFi for ‘big’ (wall-powered) devices.

Yes, sorry for the confusion, you’re absolutely right.

Aren't the ESP32-C6 and ESP32-H2 available today?

They are- at least the c6- I actually just had it arrive on my doorstep this morning.

I get more is better, but even the c3 and c6, are really incredible overkill for most applications. Maybe another way to put it is that there is tremendous utility in just having a cheap low power chip that can read sensors, do some super basic processing on them (converting a voltage to a temperature or humidity reading, etc) and then send them back to the mothership, wherever that may live (could be the cloud) to store it and take action.

I might be missing the forest for the trees here but multicore chips with cores that push into the hundreds of megahertz, I actually don't know what the use case is. Driving touchscreen UIs?

It might be that many modern IoT standards have some form of encryption as standard - which requires a contain baseline of power from the chips it runs on. Or might be that the cost delta between the hypothetical low perf iot chip and a higher perf iot chip would actually be so low as to make the former not worth producing. Pure speculation though.

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