No, generally not. Sure, there is overlap. The power requirements, processing elements, available peripherals, storage capacity, form factors, tool chains and cost are all in very different classes, however.
Now, the tooling around ESP32s is so good that that's no longer a reason. I would never reach for a Pi over an ESP32 unless I need something an ESP cannot offer, like USB ports or compute or gigabytes of memory.
This describes my trajectory over the last 10 years with the Pi perfectly too. I think a lot of people have jammed a small SBC like the Pi into what should be a micro-controller shaped problem hole, because it's comfortable and familiar.
It's just like hacking software at a dev day job, and it runs a Linux distro everyone is super comfortable with. It has GPIO you can learn how to call from any language you like, I already know ssh/systemd/apt etc etc. It will get the job done, albeit often less efficiently and reliably than a microcontroller, and I didn't have to spend a lot of time learning things.
I also think the huge success of ESP32 in the last few years has meant you don't see SBCs being used for what should be micro-controller problems as much in general anymore. Ten years ago, you regularly saw Pi 1/2 etc in this role in a lot of projects online. Speaking for myself, I avoided Arduino in the early years because I didn't want to step out of my lane etc.
> Speaking for myself, I avoided Arduino in the early years because I didn't want to step out of my lane etc.
Personally the reason I've avoided Arduino is the absolute pain in the butt that it used to be to get it connected to a network. Almost everything I build benefits from some sort of connectivity, and the Arduino was only really good for things that were purely offline. Even before the Pis had wifi, they had ethernet and I could just plug them in.
And now that ESP32 exists there's no reason to buy the wifi-enabled arduinos they now make, at 8x the price.
For what many people are doing with them, ESPHome has simplified the process to programming an ESP32 to do what they want down to nearly nothing.
"Running Linux and being able to direct-drive voltage pins" is certainly still an existing market, but it is rapidly being encroached upon in both directions.
Why deploy a $25 Pi for a custom weather controller that uses ~2.5w, when a $5 ESP can can do the same thing on 25mW, and run off a battery?
ESP32 is obviously not a desktop or server platform. Personally, I don’t think Pi’s are either: flaky and fussy power requirements, and packages aren’t always cross compiled to arm64. I’ve wasted enough time compiling my own packages, and encountered my share of random issues that I’ll never use it as a server platform again.
I found a bunch of libraries (e.g., https://github.com/espressif/esp-zigbee-sdk), but nothing that seems easily usable as a zigbee controller/hub to flip switches in the house, out of the box.
OTOH, running home assistant on a pi is monstrous: overly general and bloated for my use case, need a beefy Pi to get decent performance and not need >1 minute to reboot after a power outage.
Yes, I was talking to someone who was using a Raspberry Pi as a hot tub controller. Something a $1 ESP8266 could easily do.
And let's be real, it doesn't have 25W power consumption. You can attach enough things to it to get to 25W if you try really hard but that's hardly the same thing. The latest cheapo Intel parts are contenders (at ~10W, where the pi 5 actually operates) and if you just want perf you're better off with that. But if you want a low-level connectivity, a rich community, docs, and tailor-made projects, you still want a pi.
But as for whether they're chasing performance, the RP2040 isn't their flagship product. The Pi 5 is.
And I've had a Pi 5, under heavy CPU (not peripheral) load, start throwing undervoltage warnings when using a 5V3A power supply from a Pi 4.
Power
Idle power draw (at wall): 1.8 W (See note)
Maximum simulated power draw (stress-ng --matrix 0): 9.7 W
During Geekbench multicore benchmark: 7.9 W
During top500 HPL benchmark: 11 W (2.75 Gflops/W)This is compellingly saying that I was too hasty in assuming the low voltage warnings were from the 18W supply topping out. Thank you for this.
Personally, I had tons of power issues due to underspec cables with a Pi4. Irritating.
The ESP32 supports all of those protocols and Wifi and Bluetooth, and it has low power sleep modes. And there are RISC-V versions which is quite nice from a a warm fuzzy point of view.
I think RPi still has a place for hobby electronics projects where you want GPIO. I don't think people are going to use it as a standard computer (desktop / media server / etc) though.
But any sane design would offload the IO to a more capable MCU that has more than a single SPI channel, among other weird limitations.. Sure, hobbyists often do weird things, but the niche for RPi is pretty much 'basically a computer, but you could theoretically blink an LED' - the actual experience of using those peripherals is much worse that what you'd have in Arduino or Platformio. Try attaching an interrupt handler to a GPIO pin on Linux, now you need to write a kernel module :)
ESP32/ESPHome may have taken over the lower end with its easy config but there's still no real Pi competitor. A decade after the first RPi release, I still dread using any other platform when I have to design a board that requires more compute than an ESP32.
The irony here is that other SOC/SBC makers are focused more on throwing a barely stable design onto AliExpress for $20 than investing in good upstream support that would allow them to charge a premium.
Raspberry Pi wasn't always able to charge a premium, that benefit came from years of investment into software and community. I have not yet seen another SOC vendor or board partner realize this in any significant way.
Besides the price, anyway.
This is their latest "High performance industrial grade embedded computer" that I can see on their website
Of course you'll have good upstream support for something as old as the i.MX6UL, it's been out for 8 years (7 years at the time they released the TS-7250-V3).
No wonder Raspberry Pi has upended the market, when a single core Cortex-A7 is the competition.
Even an Allwinner chip that has a terrible BSP at release has good upstream support 7 years later.
I disagree. The NXP (i.MX line) and the TI (am62x) and the STM32 MP1/2 all have good mainline support.
What you say is true of most of the Chineese chips and of mobile chips but if you go with mainstream suppliers targeting the industrial / automative markets these days mainline Linux support is good at the SoC level. At the SoM level some are better than others but it's not that hard to pull the approriate DTS into your mainline kernel build even if it isn't already upstream.
RPi is probably better for hobbyists but that's not due to the mainline status but a community more in tune with hobbyists than the more industrial products.
I've built professional embedded Linux systems based in i.MX5/6/8 and STM32MP1 with mainline based BSP rather than vendor stuff but have only ever used the RPi for one off tools.
I honestly think that's where most of the demand is. It's an aspirational product, like a jacket you could theoretically go up a mountain in or a watch that works underwater or whatever.
That said, if you’re rolling a DIY remotely manageable industrial automation project? It’s the obvious choice.
Hard to beat being able to apt-get openssh, python, etc. etc. and the ecosystem of pluggable hats for just this purpose.
https://roboticsbackend.com/raspberry-pi-gpio-interrupts-tut...
This is testament on how out of touch they are.
The entire ARM ecosystem is far more mature than RISC-V, plus the main RPis are ARM so they have experience with it and probably access to ARM people.
The main reasons to use RISC-V currently are cost and customisability. There are also some quite high quality open source RISC-V cores you can use off the shelf.
If you just want to buy a chip and put it on your own board you don't really care that much about the ISA as long as the toolchain, bootloader, kernel support is there and stable (which is pretty much the case with RISC-V now).
But if you're desiging your own silicon the ability to make or modify an existing open source RISC-V implementation can give you the flexibility that currenlty only the very largest players in the ARM ecosystem that have architecture licenses have (I think that's pretty much limited to Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung).
I expect the smaller but important players like NXP, ST, TI will be bringing out RISC-V chips taking advantage of this.
ARM have also been talking about making their fees dependant on the price of the final product so that could also push people to RISC-V, not just to pay less but also to not have to jump through the hoops that would be required to provide all the information to do that.
They are good devices, but they are bigger than Pi and are whiny. Their fans never turns off and creates background noise. I have quite a few of them.
On the other hand, Pi’s 25W contains tons of overhead for other devices. A 5TB external hard drive still requires way more power than a 1 TB one or an SSD.
It’s easy to dissipate 9 watts with some clever design.
They greatly simplify the whole SBC and effectively bridging the gap between RPis and Arduino - in cost and easy of use
It's not a full desktop experience, but they're running full Ubuntu - so you code on your laptop and it'll run on the thing - run whatever language you want and blink lights, shoot out emails or do whatever other hobby projects you want using your desktop dev environment. No fiddling with icky micro Arduino/ESP32 libs.
RPi have shown themselves to be a Broadcom shop - so their product direction is dictated by Broadcom's chip offerings
Example: LicheeRV Nano
https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/02/08/licheerv-nano-low-co...
Even on rpi4, it's near impossible for a normal person to use the gpu because videocore6 is so locked down that you get zero lib support or documentation. And I'm pretty sure the only assembler is still from reverse engineering instead of the manfr.
Raspberry Pis do lag too, but they have significantly newer kernels, and are supported directly by several mainline distros.
I've chased a number of alternatives to Raspberry Pi in the interval where Rockwell SBCs were beating the pants off Pi 4s, only to find that they were shipping 4.x Linux kernels. My particular application uses USB audio devices, which don't really work prior to extensive rewrites of the USB audio stack in the 5.15 kernel. Raspberry Pi OS kernels are 6.1 or better. And Ubuntu on raspberry PI has later kernels than that (not sure which currently). Versions of Linux prior to 5.15 supported very old USB Audio 1.0 devices, but not currently available USB Audio 1.1 devices.
I imagine you would run into significant problems with video drivers being out of date on non-Pi devices as well. Raspberry Pi had to do their own Vulkan port, which seemed to require significant development effort.
I don't think that's likely to change soon. Rockwell doesn't really have a strong incentive to improve their kernel ports beyond what's necessary to support Android. And smaller SBC manufacturers aren't likely to have the resources to do a kernel port themselves.
Furthermore if the platform is popular enough the community starts to step in. You can even see in the comments section of the previous link:
https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/02/08/licheerv-nano-low-co...
Some hobbyist went through the trouble to rebase their patches on top of a newer kernel version: https://github.com/sophgo/linux_5.10/pull/1
Furthermore, b/c unlike Broadcom/Rpi chips, these chips are widely available for commercial use - I'm gunna guess 3rd party companies are more likely to dedicate resources to maintain the software stack (even if the chip manufacturer is doing a crappy job of it)
Exactly. Then there is more powerful Lichee Pi 4A (https://sipeed.com/licheepi4a) which directly competes with RPi4 and more powerful chips are in the making like P550 (https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive-premier-p550).
I think it's the right time for IPO. RISC-V development is making huge progress fast. They are also upstreaming some changes. While SG200x is quite old and has unfinished Vector 0.7 extension, new chips claim to have vector 1.0. The documentation is still lacking but their progress is clearly visible.
My thought is that they cater to different uses, because RPi (and its ilk) support an operating system. So you can decide whether you need or want an OS or not. For instance my file server benefits from all of the networking, file system, and so forth, of Linux. It supports, at the very least, a workable UI for setup and diagnostics via SSH and a terminal program.
A microcontroller is preferable for applications where you don't need a full blown OS, and where the size, cost, or power consumption of something like an RPi are burdens.
In some cases, an RPi is overkill but provides the convenience of hosting things like onboard dev tools. And unit cost isn't as much of an issue if you're not planning on selling or duplicating something. And an additional option is a microcontroller running as a peripheral to a full blown PC, where you get the benefits of the GPIO, but the comfort of desktop software tools.
My general advice for those getting into hardware-related hacking is to give both a try and develop your own taste for which one is preferable for which use.
The RPi company looked into the future and saw microcontrollers eating the lower end of the market, which is why they are now chasing performance.
Unfortunately IMO they are not executing on this well. The RPi 5 requires 5V at 5 amps to run properly. It's now near-impossible to run via the 5V header pins, no existing power supplies can support it, and at 25W of power consumption the Intel systems you mention are now serious competition.
EDIT: actually it's worse than that. Here's a $99 Intel system that claims 6W power consumption: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CKXL2MPM?ref=product_details&th=...
Aside from GPIO headers it's hard to justify a Pi 5 over that on any grounds.