The RPI was really good because it was a powerful SOC that ran Linux with lots of GPIO and easy to operate. Now there are a dime a dozen ESP32 based projects that give you the same flexibility. You should almost never buy a RPI for projects these days, its completely overkill

▲

joezydeco an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Unless you designed a product around the RPI as your compute module, and now you're stuck. I was recently at the contract manufacturer that's building my company's product - they have a number of clients in this situation.

You could respin, but you can't get that Broadcom part because Fuck You, We're Broadcom™. So now you're looking at a whole new platform if you want to proceed. It's still cheaper to pay loanshark prices for RPIs... for now.

▲

aivisol 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Do you have any references to ESP32 running Linux?

▲

Rohansi an hour ago | parent | next [-]

As the sibling comment shows, the very latest ESP32 model (S31, not S3) can run Linux. But they can only access maybe 64MB of RAM, and most boards for sale will have significantly less.

In reality, though, the use cases where you need Linux and GPIO are very slim. It's overkill, an ESP32 is realistically more than powerful enough, and Linux isn't even good for GPIO.

▲

MomsAVoxell 43 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

On ESP32, its also quite fine to run FreeRTOS, and you can quite reasonably write cross-platform code which runs on both FreeRTOS and Linux, if that's important.

▲

m4rtink 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Well, in many use cases it acts as a single use device & does not run Linux or any OS at all.

It controls whatevwhatever hardware, reads some sensors, etc.

Then when needed gets oders from a normal computer over network or BLE via some simple protocol.

▲

kotaKat 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sup. They just dropped some new hotness that does in fact run Linux. https://www.i-programmer.info/news/91-hardware/19197-the-esp...

	▲	IronBacon 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I was confused the other day when I was browsing ESP32 on Aliexpress and found models with a price tag of 30~60 euros instead of a couple of bucks. So those models have enough silicon to run a general full fledged OS. Picture me impressed!