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Can anyone recommend a #RasPi alternative for #embedded #electronics projects? There's the #Arduino, which is nice, but sometimes you need something with a little more oomph.

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in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

ESP32 has a pretty beefy CPU for a microcontroller, packs much RAM and comes with Wi-Fi/BT.
in reply to Michał

@RicoElectrico I'll second the recommendation on ESP32. I probably have 10 of them now and they are quite capable.

That said, the Pi Pico is decent too, especially if you have unusual high speed signaling requirements.

in reply to Ray Kelm

@Ray Kelm I don't expect especially high speed signaling to be a requirement. I do want to be able to establish a TCP connection to a PC over wifi, though.
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

my current project is doing just that and with #esp32


[edit]This setup uses a handful of #esp8266 with sensors, all in a mesh with network, plus one esp32-c3 as the bridge to the normal home WiFi network, and a #RaspberryPi Zero for data storage

infosec.exchange/@GuillaumeRos…

This entry was edited (3 months ago)
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

I buy from AdaFruit. Their boards are more powerful than the Arduino, and not as powerful as a Raspberry Pi.

If I need an operating system, I plug an AdaFruit board into a Raspberry Pi.

My most popular project in that area is: github.com/shapr/bloohm

in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

I am really liking the OrangePi and Armbian devices. I have a Zero3 and a 3LTS - nice little devices and surprisingly capable
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

look for RISC-V boards, there's a bunch of new ones. They're cheap because of no royalty fees. Some can run Linux. I bought a couple, but didn't yet have the time to work on them.
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

Arduino produces a range of boards, including ones that are far more powerful than the Uno.

I would recommend the Pi Pico though if you're looking for something faster than the Uno and still cheap. There's Arduino IDE support for them as well.

This entry was edited (3 months ago)
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

@xorbit I just started using one, a C6 (that’s what they had in stock in the shop where I was ordering the other stuff.)

I program it with the Arduino CLI, because that’s what I’m used to and I don’t want to learn another toolchain before I know if I need to. I’m impressed so far. The dev board is cheaper than an Arduino Nano, it has many features, WiFi, Bluetooth, Flash memory is very flexible.

docs.espressif.com/projects/es…

in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

depends on your use case. Pi and Arduino are extremely different beasts.

Do you need lots of GPIO? Network? Wi-Fi? Memory? Flash? Camera/LCD connections? Floating point or integer only? A multitasking OS (with X! and a GPU!), an RTOS, or bare metal? Interoperability with some ecosystem? With good community support or something raw that you can slog through in god-mode and never need to update?

in reply to William

@William I do not need a full-blown OS, but I would like some GPIO, and the ability to trivially network it. Presently I'm looking at the ESP32.
Unknown parent

Jonathan Lamothe
@Michael T. Richter @Patrick Van Oosterwijck Good to know. I don't know which one it was I was looking at, but the chip didn't appear to be hand solderable.
Unknown parent

Patrick Van Oosterwijck
@qqmrichter It doesn't tend to be very important which core it uses from an application point of view, the tooling selects the correct compiler etc. More important are the interfaces and particular radios you want. The base environment is ESP-IDF but there's an #Arduino core and other languages like #MicroPython, #Lua, #JavaScript, #Elixir, #Rust etc that have been made to work on them. Very well supported ecosystem. Some of these other languages may only work on Xtensa or #riscv though.
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

@qqmrichter To get started you wouldn't really use a bare chip, there are tons of dev boards, breakouts and solderable modules out there. If you care for having Ethernet with PoE, I sell one called wESP32, but if you don't, there are many cheaper options out there. wesp32.com
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

esp32 and esp8266, the latter is cheaper and would work fine for most of your needs.

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