I actually just bought one of these! I'm working on a project where I need a battery, IMU, speaker, and quite a bit of processing power (for real time audio), a

I actually just bought one of these! I'm working on a project where I need a battery, IMU, speaker, and quite a bit of processing power (for real time audio), and their m5 core2 aws IoT product met all those requirements for only 40ish dollars. I only just got it, but it took me only a couple straightforward hours to set up the dev environment and compile and flash their sample hello world project. (I haven't done anything with esp32 before). I don't think it's analogous to the rpi, though (which I haven't used) --- you can't put Linux on the m5stack products because they're meant for much simpler tasks.