Comment by Rebelgecko
18 hours ago
At one point, the raspberry pi was a decent option if you wanted something hobbyist friendly that could toggle GPIOs and connect to the Internet (and later Bluetooth).
I suspect Espressif has mostly taken over that market now
Yeah every "hardware hacker" I know has pile of ESP32 at home now instead of pile of raspberry pi's.
I have yet to even get started with ESP32, mainly because software-defined radio is my main use case. Once you start getting into absurdly high sampling rates, you start to need a lot of horsepower, and that's where the more powerful SBCs shine.
As an example, one of my Pi 5s takes an Airspy and an RTL, extracts 11 different FM broadcast stations, then encodes each audio stream and sends all of them to an Icecast server. There's processing power for more stations, but there are none I'm interested in among the others I'm streaming. With the current 11, it's using about 75% of CPU resources with no overclock. (Edit: this is a 2GB model, and it's running in roughly 500 MB.)
The pi, particularly the pi zero is still useful if you need something that can run normal software but not a full mini pc. One example I've seen is using a Pi zero as a "wireless usb" where you can plug it in to a machine that accepts files over usb, and can now drop files on to it over the network.
Maybe you could do this with a ESP32 but it's easy on linux where you can use all the normal tooling and filesystem drivers.
ESP32 can run FreeRTOS, and I think people nowadays have no idea how much stuff we could do in MS-DOS PCs even with all their limitations for the epoch.
ESP32 hardware is much better than they used to be.
Not everything needs to be under Linux monoculture, thankfully.
The Pi Pico is exactly that.