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Comment by MPSimmons | Hacker News Reader

I am urging everyone who wants to do this to see if they can't first do what they need with a small board like an ESP32. Their energy usage is a small fraction, they cost ones of dollars, and they're sufficient for a whole lot. If you're of the Python persuasion, many boards support both MicroPython and CircuitPython.

It's worth looking into for the cost savings on initial purchase and ongoing power draw.

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I hear the nay-sayers regarding the time cost and complexity of embedded programming, but as a hobbyist I think this is a great recommendation to at least consider.

The projects that I've been able to accomplish on a microcontroller have been more reliable (over decades) than my Pi-based projects, and I don't have to worry as much about them being part of some botnet because I forgot to change the default ssh configuration (wasn't it `pi:raspberry`?).

Beyond micropython, the no_std rust support for ESP32C3 is getting better every month. For people doing little home automation projects because they are fun, the additional constraints can make things a lot of fun and very rewarding.

But yes, for those that are already handy with Linux, a Pi is generally going to be much easier, though IME will be at least 10x as expensive, and the additional setup to get it in the same ballpark for reliability (SSD booting vs network booting vs ro-rootfs, watchdog setup, etc) and the increased power usage (esp for a Pi5) should at least be small part of the decision making.

Can I run a media server on an ESP32? No.

Can I run my password manager server on an ESP32? No

PiHole? No. Unifi controller? No

I think people making this comment are envisioning people use Pis as garage door controllers etc., but reflexively suggesting ESP32s as Pi replacements isn't helpful.

I don't disagree with what you're saying at all, but in my defense, the blog entry posted literally starts with the sentence:

>I use Raspberry Pis around my home as everything from low-power FM transmitters to UPS energy monitors.

Even for the garage door opener use case, one nice thing about Pi is you can run Cloudflare tunnel on it – you can then access it from the internet without messing with port forwarding or TLS certificates.

Not an exact substitute but mentioning it because people might be interested: esphome added support for wireguard some what recently.

For one device it works well, but when you get a bunch, I find it simpler to use one Pi (actually now a Lenovo m920q, it could be a Pi, I just needed a bit more power for other stuff) with the tunnels and make it talk to all the iot stuff. Has a few advantages: - Updating the more security sensitive parts is a lot easier (only one machine can talk to the internet). - Lets me use ultra-low-power 1-coincell a year stuff. - Integrates everything in a single point so coordinating stuff is very easy (like, single action to close the blinds, turn on projector and set AC a bit cooler).

Your point about the PI is spot on: a full linux stack means you can get up to "shenanigans" with all sorts of tooling!

A PI with MQTT server and ESP32 as clients is a match made in heaven! For 30 bucks you go from nothing to PI zero, and a hand full (literal) of esp32 devices. Its a fun stack to play with!

Tailscale also works excellent on even an original Pi Zero W if you want it on a VPN easily.

So the straightforward answer is no, an ESP doesnt work for your situation.

They only asked that people consider it; no need to get snooty because it doesn't work for you, despite being very obviously inappropriate for your use case

A useful deciding factor is whether your application benefits from an operating system and its utilities, or not.

Why would you buy an expensive raspi for these scenarios? Wasn't it meant to be a computer learning platform for people with no access to powerful computers? Your applications don't need GPIO pins, so you could just use any small PC.

This is a fair point with how Pi prices have gone, and I don't think I'll be buying a pi5.

Good! You don’t need a Pi 5. You can still buy Pi 3b, which I use for many things successfully.

What small PCs would be suitable RPi alternatives? For many/most use cases they'd have to fit the same category -- so similar power consumption, similar physical size, passive cooling.

It’s unclear whether the usages are with Pi or Pi Zero, although advice applies to both. I have found more use with the Pi Zero W versus the full Pi. Some stuff certainly could be done using ESP, but faster to get done on Pi for me.

> Why would you buy an expensive raspi for these scenarios?

I know, right? I had to mortgage my family's ancestral home for the $35 to buy a raspberry pi 4 at microcenter. Luckily they had SD cards on sale, so I was able to buy the power supply and storage for the cost of a kidney. And now I can manage my home automation devices!

Pis are expensive? A Pi 4 and all accessories is about $100. Where am I going to do better? Every time someone says this I go look at NUCs and other minis and I don't see anything cheaper.

For me when I consider the cost of my time the Raspi in my experience is much more expensive. I've enjoyed my experiment with the Raspi but honestly would have saved si much time and hassle if I'd just went with a cheap x86 machine. My first Raspi will also be my last.

What were you doing that wasted time?

They are so widely used and well documented that for typical uses, they are no more complicated to do than an x86, in my experience.

How about PhotoPrism? ;-)

No, honestly I am impressed at the performance with which my RaspPi 4 is running a PhotoPrism instance with about 120.000 photos. This might also be thanks to the application software, but still quite a feat.

How about a camera server?

Why yes a ESP32 can do that, and you get to play with a another cheap stack.

How about Blinking leds or a Display, or led strip... WLED and artwix have you covered!

A project like ESPresense is evolved from a PIzero project.

Let's not forget that some of the pi's appeal is that it has those GPIO headers!

> How about a camera server?

I love ESP32s and use them both for fun and professionally but let’s be careful about overselling them. Can you get single photos from a specific set of imaging sensors? Yup. Can you encode 1080p h.264 video and stream it with eg RTSP? Definitely not.

Also simple power switchers. Would be crazy to run Linux for every device I want to smartly switch off and on IMO

If you need an OS and a cheap device use your old netbook or computer you have laying around instead of turning it into ewaste. You can do it all with a rpi zero if you insist on buying another device.

Agree. Old laptops have a built in UPS, screen, keyboard, active cooling, and can idle at very low power usage. Some machines even let you set a battery charge limit (say 50%) so the battery lasts for a long time without degradation. There are linux scripts around for this.

> Can I run a media server on an ESP32? No.

You can run a web server though. Now I’m curious if I can push enough data to stream audio. I know the chip can handle 48k stereo samples, presumably I could stream that much over wifi. I may have to play with that this week. The bigger problem is attaching storage, many ESP32 SoCs don’t have USB peripherals, and many SDcard implementations can’t do much better than Audio throughput (SD has some insane lisencing costs for small dev shops), so I’m not sure the best solution for large amounts of data.

Can I run a media server on an RPI? No. -- It's interface is slow and bus speed is shared. No redundancy either.

Can I run my password manager server on an RPI? No -- do you want to loose all your data because the SD card failed?

PiHole? Unifi controller? Maybe

RaspberryPi has PCIe, you can attach NVMe SSDs with an adapter. You are not limited to the SD card.

ESP32 and related are pretty cool, but it's a whole different mindset; if something doesn't work, you can't just connect an HDMI/keyboard to debug live with all the regular utilities one might know and that come for free with any mainiline Linux.

There are definitely limitations, but if it's a thing that you're going to leave untouched for years, it's worth looking at a device that will use 1/10th (or less) the power.

Maybe, but if it is going to take you drastically longer to write the software because there's a smaller ecosystem / the stuff you need doesn't have a readymade library / you've never done C/MicroPython / there aren't the Linux tools that will help you debug or do a simple crontab to run your script on a schedule... The ROI might not be there even with the lower power consumption.

That's true, and an important consideration. I'm not an ESP fanboy, but I really do appreciate it as an engineer for how simple and cheap the development boards are, especially considering things like ESPhome exist. It's kind of ridiculous how many projects can be built by just writing a yaml file and a little soldering - https://esphome.io/guides/diy.html

My time is worth more than the increased power draw

They are more stable in the long run since there is no OS. Honestly people make their lives harder using a Pi when using a microcontroller would be much easier and stable in the long run.

I ran a rpi for 2 years with no reboot.

Sure they are capable of running for years but they can fail at inopportune times. Every time one has died on me, it always seemed to be the microSD card that died. And that's with using reputable industrial cards and log2ram.

Also there's more complexity and overhead on a pi for simple tasks. And you potentially have to worry about updating the system and packages and other maintenance.

Not saying microcontrollers like the ESP32 are completely invulnerable to failure but it certainly is less likely.

And for another anecdote on uptime, I have a few Arduino-powered devices operating 24/7 for well over a decade now.

One of my RPis died somewhere in the mobo. I can turn it on and mount it over USB and read the SD card but it doesn't boot.

Another one lost the ethernet card. It was before they had Wi-Fi, or I didn't care to use Wi-Fi, I don't remember.

A Pi zero died, full stop.

A number of SD cards eventually died.

Not a very reliable platform compared to my laptop. On the other side my laptop costs almost a couple of orders of magnitude more.

I still use one RPi 3B+ with a TV hat and it has been on for about two years. It doesn't do anything else.

I switched to Odroid for everything else that could run on a small server, because it was impossible to find Raspberries. They work well, I'm happy with them. The only problem: I have to pin the kernel to their own version with their own drivers. The distro is Raspbian and I upgraded it a couple of weeks ago.

I never had an sd card in an rpi die, in years of continuous uptime, except for reboots.

I had one rpi become useless when its network stopped working.

I run servers for longer without reboot. But that doesn't mean the OS wouldn't run better with some cleanup reboot from time to time.

or let alone a well designed or industrial sbc (of which rpi are neither)

Just took a look at the power consumption of Pi Zero. It will use $0.70 worth of electricity on my local grid, in a YEAR.

I bet me writing this comment used more while keeping my laptop alive.

I love ESP32s, built a long running device for my car, where the power draw is important because I don't want to deplete car battery. It uses almost no power. However if it was running connected to a power grid, I'd not care about the electricity cost.

If something goes wrong I just plug USB into my regular computer with all my normal tooling and can see the serial console, edit the filesystem, etc.

Or if I'm using something like Circuit python I'll just connect the web console.

A Pi Zero will spend about a dollar a year in electricity.

I've recently taken an interest in embedded programming and this is something I can't look past. Unless you're producing something at scale, I don't think there is much of a difference economically between writing code in a low level language and running it on a bare metal ESP32, vs running a Python script on a lightweight Linux on a Pi Zero. The cost difference is going to be a few dollars over the life of the product.

battery powered devices is a whole segment rpi cant even put a foot in the door

do hobbyists care? usually not

Just to clarify, does RP2040 count as rpi in this context?

In the context of an argument over single-purpose microcontrollers vs. general-purposes computers with modern featureful operating systems: No, it doesn't count. Nothing counts at all. ESP32 doesn't count, ATMega doesn't count, RP2040 doesn't count, Pi0/1/2/3/4/5/eleventy doesn't count.

The whole argument is reprehensibly incoherent at its very core and there is no aspect of it that has any meaningful value.

Microcontrollers and general-purpose computers are both very useful things.

And while there is some overlap in how they can be used they are used, they are also very different things, with very different costs (to purchase, and to implement).

It's a tired old argument that has been happening for as long as we've had both affordable computers, and also affordable microcontrollers (several decades, by my count). It has never been resolved, and it cannot ever be resolved.

Both things can co-exist. This isn't like Highlander or the Superbowl: There can be more than one. It's OK.

i am specifically calling out the broadcom sbcs, the rp2040 is a lot more reasonable (considering you can buy the standalone chip to begin with, unlike the raspberry pi)

Electricity cost is not a problem, lack of ability to run of batteries (because if large amount of power consumption) is in some applications.

N100 costs about $1.50 a year in electricity yet is like 30x faster.

I assume you are referring to an Intel N100 and not the OnePlus N100 smartphone...

Still a whole system is not just the CPU so suggesting a CPU as a RPi replacement seems a little odd

The N100 CPU itself takes costs only $1.10/year, the rest is minimal platform. Ofc if you add more/larger/faster RAM, many drives, NVMe, PCIe, the platform electricity cost skyrockets, but the same is with RPi5 with fewer options.

For my last (a bit more complex setup) I am using a pi zero and several ESP8266/32 communicating with it, simply with http and wifi. My first time using micro python instead of Arduino as well.

Absolutely love it and to my surprise it's super stable. Something about WiFi power states often messed up my projects in the long run, but no issue with micro python architecture so far.

Just want to shout out to tinygo, for this old Go programmer, it makes working with ESP and friends loads of fun.

Admittedly, reverse engineering a single digit 7-segment LED display wasn’t the best use of my time, but by crikey it was fun.

https://github.com/doctor-eval/clocky

I had a look into it but unfortunately there seems no tinygo support for ESP Wifi/BT.

Do these devices allow for effortless OTA updating?

I run ssh, https server (with some dynamic pages written in python), there is a 3T disk attached to get files, I download torrent.

The other ones have touchscreens and speaker attached, I use them to listen to internet radio, watch cartoons and control relays.

Your cheaper solution doesn't allow for any of this to happen.

They simply asked people to consider it as an option, clearly your use wouldn't run on an esp very well

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