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points by Rohansi 2 days ago | 0 comments

Over time the Raspberry Pi use case shifted more and more away from GPIO. They all still have it but probably most of them are used as a Linux computer without ever touching the GPIO now. The people who do use GPIO on a Raspberry Pi are often better off using an ESP32 because they have better control of GPIO, consume far less power, and are actually cheap.

Personally I use ESP32s for GPIO to control things around the house and have one Raspberry Pi acting as a hub.

[–] hellweaver666 2 days ago

I've been doing home electronics projects since around 2013, I used to use Raspberry Pi's for everything from lighting control to robots, camera projects and lots in between (I even had a mechanical keyboard with a Pi inside) and a massive collection of hats and addons. These days, I can do 99% of what I need with tiny little ESP32 variant boards for a fraction of the cost and significantly less complexity. Hell, you can even get esp32's with really nice touch screens attached for dashboards / animations. I built a whole cyberdeck using an ESP32 and no computer in-sight.

[–] alextheparrot 2 days ago

their RP1 IO chip is such a disappointment for high performance GPIO use cases as well, literally can’t trust any IO decision they make after having hacked on that chip