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by margalabargala
760 days ago
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I've personally used Pis for things much better suited to microcontrollers, many many times, purely because I understood Linux and did not understand how to program microcontrollers. 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. |
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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.