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A comment on Unpopular Opinion: Don’t Use a Raspberry Pi for That. Parent comment

Re:Unpopular Opinion: Don’t Use a Raspberry Pi for That by ahepp on Wednesday March 22, 2023 @12:06PM (#35263198)
I can't really disagree with what you're saying about Pis often being overkill, but I've been using Raspberry Pi Zero Ws for more projects where I might have used ESP32s, and I've been very happy with the choice. Basically any project I have that isn't battery powered or timing critical, I'd prefer to use a Pi.

Zero Ws have a $10 MSRP (of course, huge shortage at the moment). I think they're pretty cost competitive for DIY IoT.

Buildroot makes it really easy to create a custom Linux OS with your software preinstalled, any kind of custom kernel tweaks you want, and an impressive amount of software packages available. If you strip unneeded functionality from your kernel you can boot a lot faster too.

Here's a list of some stuff I like about a Pi Zero W vs an ESP32

* Ease of programming. Flash an SD card and swap it out, without having to hook the device up to a programmer.

* Extremely solid TCP/IP stack.

* Multitasking with real process isolation.

* Program organization (related to above). I find the OS abstraction very useful for enforcing cleaner designs.

* Access to Linux software packages. I can easily add nginx, apache, or lighttpd to my rootfs. It doesn't involve mangling any of my other software packages

* Interactive access. I can debug the applications by sshing into the Pi and looking at logs. I can scp new files onto the Pi.

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Re:Unpopular Opinion: Don’t Use a Raspberry Pi for That by arbuge on Wednesday March 22, 2023 @01:12PM (#35264093)
"huge shortage at the moment"

AFAIK this "at the moment" period has now extended all the way from the time they were introduced to the present day. One long moment for sure.

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Re:Unpopular Opinion: Don’t Use a Raspberry Pi for That by ahepp on Wednesday March 22, 2023 @01:47PM (#35264585)
My recollection is shit really hit the fan after the pandemic? It looks like the Zero W was released in 2017. I remember up until the last couple years, you could at least get one per order from Adafruit/Sparkfun at MSRP. I think there may have even been a time when you could get like, 10 per order or something?
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