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Holding off on that Raspberry Pi 5 purchase since last year was a mistake. Raspberry Pi has raised prices three separate times since December 2025. With the price revision in April, some models were selling for 83% above their launch price. The 16GB Pi 5, which was selling for $120, is now $205 after the price hike. The company, like many others, pointed to the DRAM shortage as the cause of global price increases across several products.
I switched to using ESP32 boards about six months ago. Not because I fell in love with microcontrollers. It was because the cost of Pis kept compounding to preposterous levels for my projects. While I was untangling my smart home to save money, I didn’t expect it to become noticeably more reliable with microcontrollers. That’s what still surprises me about my new smart home, and it’s worth explaining.
Looking for some cool DIY ideas involving a Raspberry Pi and ESP32 combo? We’ve got you covered!
For a while, my Raspberry Pi 4B was handling everything. It ran Home Assistant, a couple of automation scripts, and a USB Zigbee dongle for the sensors. All shared the same CPU and a microSD card. That was a single point of failure. I didn’t think much about it because the setup just worked most of the time.
The problems showed up unexpectedly: a software update, a resource spike, or a reboot that took longer than expected. Suddenly, nothing in my smart home responded. I had to manually re-pair Zigbee devices that dropped off. Smart lights stopped responding to automation, and presence detection went blind. I kept fixing one thing after another until it hit me. Everything depended on one box staying healthy.
Though the ESP32s are clearly cheaper, they weren’t the fix. One board works as a motion sensor, another as a Bluetooth proxy, and a third as a weather sensor node. If one of these boards drops off the network, I lose only one function. It doesn’t impact the entire house. That’s how I stopped consolidating everything onto a general-purpose computer. Instead, I started treating each function as its own small and easily replaceable unit.
The Raspberry Pi 4 is a single-board computer that can be used for many different DIY computing projects, from programming to retro gaming emulation.
My ESP32 nodes report state changes directly to Home Assistant the moment they occur, whereas my old setup relied heavily on polling at set intervals. That introduced a small, constant lag between something happening and the house’s reaction.
It was only a fraction of a second, but the difference was noticeable. Turning on the smart lights now feels instant, instead of waiting a second, and that’s how quickly the automations work. I noticed it most when walking into the bedroom after dark, and the light used to lag half a second behind me. Now it turns on as soon as I cross the doorway.
Barring the configuration issue, automations fire without hesitation. Once the speed difference was noticed, there was no going back. It’s eroded my trust in automation when I don’t double-check the microcontroller nodes.
My old Pi 4 often needed a reboot roughly once a fortnight to keep everything working. Otherwise, the lag would creep in, the way it does for anyone running a general-purpose OS on a device that always stays on for months. Nothing broke, and it just became a little less responsive the longer it ran.
On the other hand, my ESP32 nodes haven’t needed that kind of intervention at all. All run the same firmware, do their assigned job, and keep running without hiccups. So I’ve stopped paying attention to them because they rarely slow down.
The same pattern appeared on my network, and my router logs became more predictable. Some update checks, handshakes, and other things still appear, but they don’t appear random anymore. All the ESPHome devices are nearly silent and behave reliably until they report something out of the ordinary. The overall chatter that typically originated from the Pi had stopped. My router now deals with the quieter ESP32 boards, which are easier to manage and troubleshoot.
The ESP32 is a fantastic development board that combines solid specs with an affordable price. Despite being cheaper than Arduino and Raspberry Pi Pico, it outperforms most of its rivals. Plus, the ESP32 even has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth functionality built into every board, making it great for projects where you can’t physically keep the microcontroller connected to your PC at all times.
With ESP32 devices running the smart home show, I haven’t removed the Raspberry Pi entirely. I moved Home Assistant off the Pi onto a small mini PC along with the USB Zigbee dongle. That split mattered as much as the ESP32 migration. The Pi was never a good fit for automation and network monitoring. So separating them eliminated the excuse to slow the other down.
Now the Pi strictly runs network monitoring with Pi OS Lite. I run NetAlertX to monitor for any suspicious devices joining the network. Uptime Kuma pings and reports the availability of my home server and self-hosted services. Pi-hole and Unbound work together on DNS filtering and recursive resolution. Keeping all four together saves me from checking four different logs. Now I check only one set. The Pi has no smart duty assigned to it. Instead of replacing the Pi, I assigned it a job that I should’ve done a while ago.
These are the commercial products I’ve replaced with ESP32-powered variants.
I didn’t set out to build a more resilient smart home. My intention was to avoid splurging $205 on a board that used to cost roughly half that. But the budget panic did something I didn’t plan for. It forced me to stop treating a single Raspberry Pi as a catch-all and start treating my smart home as a system with actual failure points.
Now I have a steady hub on a mini PC, several single-purpose microcontroller nodes running around it, and the Pi doing one job. The cheaper option wasn’t actually the win. Sturdier was. It just took a $205 price tag to make me notice. You don’t need one of your own to go check whether your setup has the same blind spot.
The Raspberry Pi is back, and the fifth iteration of the SBC is a lot more capable than the older models. From a new quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 CPU, support for dual monitor setups at 4K 60Hz, and a dedicated power button, there’s a lot to love about this palm-sized computer.