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Comment by giobox | Hacker News Reader

> It was a "microcontroller" you could program in Python with a friendly Linux environment and is now an expensive, power hungry, hot computer with a microcontroller hanging off of it

The Pi project was never originally a microcontroller - it was always a full-blown SBC you could program any way you want with some GPIO pins attached. People literally used them as (slow) home computers.

The company didn't sell its first microcontroller until years later in 2021 with the Pico, by which point we already had Pi 4. I do though think its a real shame prices for the SBCs have risen as they have.

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At one point, the raspberry pi was a decent option if you wanted something hobbyist friendly that could toggle GPIOs and connect to the Internet (and later Bluetooth).

I suspect Espressif has mostly taken over that market now

Yeah every "hardware hacker" I know has pile of ESP32 at home now instead of pile of raspberry pi's.

The pi, particularly the pi zero is still useful if you need something that can run normal software but not a full mini pc. One example I've seen is using a Pi zero as a "wireless usb" where you can plug it in to a machine that accepts files over usb, and can now drop files on to it over the network.

Maybe you could do this with a ESP32 but it's easy on linux where you can use all the normal tooling and filesystem drivers.

ESP32 can run FreeRTOS, and I think people nowadays have no idea how much stuff we could do in MS-DOS PCs even with all their limitations for the epoch.

ESP32 hardware is much better than they used to be.

Not everything needs to be under Linux monoculture, thankfully.

I have yet to even get started with ESP32, mainly because software-defined radio is my main use case. Once you start getting into absurdly high sampling rates, you start to need a lot of horsepower, and that's where the more powerful SBCs shine.

As an example, one of my Pi 5s takes an Airspy and an RTL, extracts 11 different FM broadcast stations, then encodes each audio stream and sends all of them to an Icecast server. There's processing power for more stations, but there are none I'm interested in among the others I'm streaming. With the current 11, it's using about 75% of CPU resources with no overclock. (Edit: this is a 2GB model, and it's running in roughly 500 MB.)

The Pi Pico is exactly that.

It's still true that people, out of convenience and familiarity, used Raspberry Pi for tasks where a microcontrollers would have been perfectly adequate

There was definitely usecase overlap due to the presence of the GPIO, but huge numbers of Pis ended up doing things a microcontroller can't - stuff like the PiHole and Retropie projects, and never used their GPIO pins at all.

Thinking of any of the early Pis as microcontrollers ignores a huge amount of the ways in which actual end users interacted with the thing, and even the way it was sold and marketed. Upton was trying to replace early hacker-friendly home computers like the BBC Micro/Apple II, for a new generation.

> but huge numbers of Pis ended up doing things a microcontroller can't

Mate you know full well it was multiple things... Marketed to education as an actual computer, to the maker demographic as a microcontroller, as a way to learn coding but also robotics etc

>Thinking of any of the early Pis as microcontrollers ignores blah blah blah

Same applies to thinking of them as SBCs

This just clarified something for me. I've always been annoyed when I see a Pi with nothing connected to its GPIO header; why not just use a cheap thin client? Or an old laptop, for that matter? But that's missing the point. Here's the point:

Pre-Beagleboard-and-Pi, if you wanted an programmable thing to work with GPIO, you used an Arduino or a BASIC Stamp, or just a plain old PIC. But they wouldn't run a real OS.

Pre-Beagleboard-and-Pi, if you wanted an embedded Linux box, you used a WRT54G or a Soekris or an old laptop. But getting GPIO out of them was a PITA. (And often involved lashing an Arduino to the side.)

The Beagleboard (released in 2008), could finally do both. It had gobs of I/O and first-class support for it under Linux. It was pretty affordable. Then the Raspberry Pi came out in 2012, with a similar amount of GPIO, but demolished the price point to where it made sense to use it in place of a microcontroller.

That's really the magic of the Pi. You can keep one cheap gizmo around, and use it to solve (a large fraction of) two classes of problems. It doesn't fully replace everything a PIC or a PC can do, but it replaces an awful, awful lot of them.

> I've always been annoyed when I see a Pi with nothing connected to its GPIO header; why not just use a cheap thin client?

There have also been times when Pi's were cheap enough and x86 idled so power-inefficiently that you'd save money over a reasonable time horizon if you couldn't run your old laptops at full throttle.

Absurdly extreme example, but at one point I decided to replace a couple (maybe 3) RPi's with a single old Dell rack server off Ebay plus replaced my router with one running pfsense. I knew it would be mostly idle, that thing had 2 Xeon processors to replace 3 cheap ARM processors.

Between the 2 rack servers, my power bill went up by enough to buy a new Pi or two every month. It was like $80/month extra in power bills.

Then the esp8266 came along, offering wifi and gpios and an arduino-like programming experience at a price point of literally $1

And the ESP32 is offering CPU power on par with many of the embedded-x86 SOCs that powered some of the early wifi routers...

A $2 Chinese ESP32 dev board is more stout in many ways than the first Pentium machine I had, which sure did feel fast-enough to run the whole world with at that time. :)

In this amazing world full of such inexpensive choices, it seems so bizarre to me to demonize any of them. They're all excellent in some way, and it's OK that there's more than one.

This isn't football, handball, American politics, or Highlander: There can be more than one. It's OK.

This is what I keep repeating in many threads about ESP32, the little thing is actually quite powerful, especially for those of us that experienced MS-DOS PCs.

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