There are definitely limitations, but if it's a thing that you're going to leave untouched for years, it's worth looking at a device that will use 1/10th (or less) the power.
Just took a look at the power consumption of Pi Zero. It will use $0.70 worth of electricity on my local grid, in a YEAR.
I bet me writing this comment used more while keeping my laptop alive.
I love ESP32s, built a long running device for my car, where the power draw is important because I don't want to deplete car battery. It uses almost no power. However if it was running connected to a power grid, I'd not care about the electricity cost.
Maybe, but if it is going to take you drastically longer to write the software because there's a smaller ecosystem / the stuff you need doesn't have a readymade library / you've never done C/MicroPython / there aren't the Linux tools that will help you debug or do a simple crontab to run your script on a schedule... The ROI might not be there even with the lower power consumption.
That's true, and an important consideration. I'm not an ESP fanboy, but I really do appreciate it as an engineer for how simple and cheap the development boards are, especially considering things like ESPhome exist. It's kind of ridiculous how many projects can be built by just writing a yaml file and a little soldering - https://esphome.io/guides/diy.html
They are more stable in the long run since there is no OS. Honestly people make their lives harder using a Pi when using a microcontroller would be much easier and stable in the long run.
Sure they are capable of running for years but they can fail at inopportune times. Every time one has died on me, it always seemed to be the microSD card that died. And that's with using reputable industrial cards and log2ram.
Also there's more complexity and overhead on a pi for simple tasks. And you potentially have to worry about updating the system and packages and other maintenance.
Not saying microcontrollers like the ESP32 are completely invulnerable to failure but it certainly is less likely.
And for another anecdote on uptime, I have a few Arduino-powered devices operating 24/7 for well over a decade now.
One of my RPis died somewhere in the mobo. I can turn it on and mount it over USB and read the SD card but it doesn't boot.
Another one lost the ethernet card. It was before they had Wi-Fi, or I didn't care to use Wi-Fi, I don't remember.
A Pi zero died, full stop.
A number of SD cards eventually died.
Not a very reliable platform compared to my laptop. On the other side my laptop costs almost a couple of orders of magnitude more.
I still use one RPi 3B+ with a TV hat and it has been on for about two years. It doesn't do anything else.
I switched to Odroid for everything else that could run on a small server, because it was impossible to find Raspberries. They work well, I'm happy with them. The only problem: I have to pin the kernel to their own version with their own drivers. The distro is Raspbian and I upgraded it a couple of weeks ago.
