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points by filcuk 1 day ago | 0 comments

An ESP-C3 costs about £1.50 and runs my terrarium automation with web portal for data logging and scheduling

Where can you get a EPS-32 for 1,50, with shipping, taxes and duties included?

Because in the EU whether it's amazon or AliExpress, the cheapest I can get one now would be 4,50 Euros a piece, and that's only if you buy them in bundles of two or more.

Or is it that the UK lacks the lunacy parcel taxes and duties of the EU so things are much cheaper over there?

[–] myrmidon 1 day ago

The bare SoC you can get for ~1.20€ in Germany:

https://www.reichelt.com/de/en/shop/product/esp32-c3_soc_wif...

But even paying 5-30€ for a devkit still seems insanely cheap to me; that's like several bars of chocolate at current prices, even kids can afford that (or make someone buy it for them).

[–] megous 1 day ago

There's no escaping the fact that EU fucked the hobbyists that previously were able to ship stuff not even made or available in EU at sane prices from china. I f I were to buy things I did in last 12 or so years based on current rules, I'd pay like 200% on customs/taxes and bullshit charges like 3+EUR per made up category on invoice or whatever it's now.

Hopefully, it will put a downwards price pressure on middlemen/resellers, now that buying directly is prohibitively expensive.

[–] PorciiVorbesc 1 day ago

>There's no escaping the fact that EU fucked the hobbyists that previously were able to ship stuff not even made or available in EU at sane prices from china.

EU doesn't care about hobbyists, it cares about protecting the interests of the monopolies of the major retailers who lobby the politicians, who disliked that people could order the same Chinese shit they sell at 100x markups, directly from China, and cutting them off as middle-men.

But don't worry, in their heads, this way we'll get to on-shore our HW/electronics manufacturing industry back. Any day now. I can already see the factories pumping out ESP32s "Made in the EU", popping up everywhere across the EU, creating jobs and a competitive electronics industry. Alarm clock buzzes

[–] sunaookami 1 day ago

>bullshit charges like 3+EUR per made up category

Add 2€ to that for the new handling fee from 1st November onward.

[–] gorbypark 22 hours ago

"Fun" fact, they charge VAT on top of the new "handling fees" (aka tariffs). Each item category is now 6.05 euros extra in Spain (5 euros + 21% VAT).

They also seem to have no way to really tell item categories apart, so it's effectively a fee per single item. You can buy multiples and only get the extra charge once, however for example, if you order one ESP32-C3 and one ESP32-C6 from the same vendor, you will likely be hit with 2 * 6.05 even though technically they'd fall under the same item category.

[–] PorciiVorbesc 1 day ago

It would be cool if the EU would also find ways to add value to the economy, instead of just adding more taxes that extract value from it.

[–] PorciiVorbesc 1 day ago

>The bare SoC you can get for ~1.20€ in Germany:

Obviously, in the context of hobbyists at home, we were talking about the ESP32 SBCs, and not the bare solderable chips themselves.

>But even paying 5-30€ for a devkit still seems insanely cheap to me

Yeah but I wanted to know if the 1,50 price is realistic since it's quite a big difference, 200%+, between those two price ranges.

If price differences didn't matter for hobbyists, then Arduino wouldn't have been killed, and ESP32 taken over the world.

Clearly both people and businesses are highly price sensitive, especially in the current economy.

>that's like several bars of chocolate at current prices, even kids can afford that (or make someone buy it for them).

Needless whataboutism straying from my point, as with such line of reasoning, you can justify anything that's bad: "Getting punched in the balls isn't so bad, because you could always get cancer which is much worse."

[–] andruby 1 day ago

Not exactly £1.5, but you can get them just under €3.0 shipped (with duty etc) to EU when ordering a bundle of 10 on Ali.

In November last year I could still buy them for €1.57 each.

https://files.catbox.moe/1i7z4q.png

[–] PorciiVorbesc 1 day ago

>In November last year

A lot of things have changed since then: EU taxes and duties, AI-induces HW shortages and price hikes. For example RPI prices today are untenable compared to a year ago.

That's why I asked about the prices of today. Whatever people paid in the past, is not necessarily applicable anymore.

[–] andruby 23 hours ago

Yes I know, and agreed. <€3.0 is still cheap enough to buy a dozen and keep in a drawer for a bunch of applications

[–] stkdump 20 hours ago

Glad I stocked up on them before the tariffs took effect.

[–] graemep 1 day ago

Prices seem about the same here with delivery. I have not yet checked very extensively though.

[–] jon-wood 1 day ago

This is the way forward these days. In my opinion the situations in which a Raspberry Pi is the right answer are vanishingly small these days - for interacting with physical things like relays or LEDs use an ESP or similar, run Micropython on it if you're not into writing C and the like, or ESPHome if you want something dead simple.

If you need an actual computer there are so many options along those lines now, and almost all of them are better than a Raspberry Pi in various aspects. Finally, if you just want to put some stuff on a screen then most TVs already have an operating system and a web browser on them, target that and you can get rid of the computer dangling off the back entirely.

[–] everforward 1 day ago

I’ve said this other places but an x64 processor is probably better value these days unless you need video and GPIOs on the same device for some reason.

Even then, you can get a USB to GPIO adapter. I don’t use RPis much these days and it’s kind of a shame because RPi + Python usually has a quicker dev loop than C + esp-idf. I need 5 of some of them though, and I’m not buying a dozen RPis these days.

[–] rbanffy 1 day ago

> most TVs already have an operating system and a web browser on them, target that and you can get rid of the computer dangling off the back entirely.

Would be super cool if TVs (or monitors, that also have some brain and an OS running on a small SoC) could be flashed with an X terminal.

[–] asymmetric 1 day ago

OT but I would love to see your terrarium build!

[–] _spduchamp 1 day ago

Yeah! Let's see that!