That's what esp32's are for. $5 and uses fuck all power.

Those are entirely different operational models.

While people do often use pis to do things you could do with an esp32, an ESP32 cannot do the majority of things a Pi can do.

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Rohansi an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Over time the Raspberry Pi use case shifted more and more away from GPIO. They all still have it but probably most of them are used as a Linux computer without ever touching the GPIO now. The people who do use GPIO on a Raspberry Pi are often better off using an ESP32 because they have better control of GPIO, consume far less power, and are actually cheap.

Personally I use ESP32s for GPIO to control things around the house and have one Raspberry Pi acting as a hub.

	▲	alextheparrot an hour ago \| parent [-]
		their RP1 IO chip is such a disappointment for high performance GPIO use cases as well, literally can’t trust any IO decision they make after having hacked on that chip

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bdcravens 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

In many cases that’s an advantage. Tiny (or no) attack surface, less power, etc

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nfriedly 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The original Pi Zero was $5, although it probably uses more power than an esp32.

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jszymborski 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

IIRC that was the MSRP but you could never find them at that price.

	▲	dansquizsoft 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah the price was always a bit of a con (even if it was a great product!)

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Beached 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

it is also more capable than an esp32. Im dinking around with both. esp32 is very restrictive in its compute capacity. It isnt multifunctional at all either.

A pi zero is to play with, an esp32 is so tiny, that it is more of a build for a single thing, and then set it and forget it doing that single thing.

You cant really stack more and more cool stuff onto it and keep building on it.