4 ms·
Forgive me if it's an ignorant question, but what's the benefit of an ESP32/ESP8266 over a Pi Zero (W), apart from saving ~$5, assuming all your applications ar
by otter-in-a-suit 5y ago
Forgive me if it's an ignorant question, but what's the benefit of an ESP32/ESP8266 over a Pi Zero (W), apart from saving ~$5, assuming all your applications are indoors and don't need to run on battery?
I've only recently gotten into the whole topic, and have yet to see the benefit of dealing with micro-controller toolchains, MicroPython etc. if power consumption is not a big factor. Seems like a full Raspbian offers a lot more flexibility.
I've used a Pi Zero W that runs regular Python and sends messages to a REST API on my home server (little go thing) + MariaDB + Grafana, for similar use case (although I will now need to build the washer/dryer idea :)).
- fullstop 5y agoYou're missing the cost of the uSD card. esp8266 and esp32 boot almost instantly and don't really have a file system. My issue with Pi setups is that they eventually fail due to SD card corruption.
- tene 5y agoIf you're happy with a Pi Zero for your use-case, then there probably isn't anything you'd appreciate about moving to a microcontroller. One big driver for microcontroller use is power, as you've suggested. A quick look on Google shows that the Pi Zero uses about 100mA at idle, and even its "sleep" mode uses 30 mA. In contrast, the esp32-c3 datasheet lists power consumption at 130 micro-Amps for light sleep and 5 micro-amps for deep sleep. If you want to run something on battery or small solar, you can go a lot farther with a microcontroller using power-efficient sleep. One other thing that might be relevant to some use-cases is deterministic realtime control. When your program is the only thing running on the processor, with no OS involved, you can have much more reliably control over your timing and latency. This isn't an area I know much about.