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Comment by Macha | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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.

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.

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

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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