waiting for that Raspberry Pi 5 The purchase from last year was a mistake. Raspberry Pi has raised prices three separate times since December 2025. With the price review in April, some models were selling 83% above their launch price. He 16GB Pi 5which sold for $120, now costs $205 after the price increase. The company, like many others, pointed to the DRAM shortage as the cause of rising global prices for several products.
I switched to using ESP32 boards about six months ago. Not because I have fallen in love with microcontrollers. It was because the cost of Pis kept increasing to absurd levels for my projects. While I was unraveling 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 is worth explaining.
My entire house would go dark after Raspberry Pi reboot
An overloaded SD card made my entire smart home run
For a while, my Raspberry Pi 4B took care of everything. He ran the startup wizardsome automation scripts and a Zigbee USB dongle for the sensors. They 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 worked most of the time.
Problems appeared unexpectedly: a software update, a resource increase, or a reboot that took longer than expected. Suddenly, nothing in my smart home responded. I had to repair manually Zigbee devices that fell. 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 a box staying healthy.
Although ESP32 are clearly cheaper, they were not the solution. One plate works as a motion sensor, another as bluetooth proxyand a third as a meteorological sensor node. If one of these boards falls off the grid, I only lose one function. It does not affect the entire house. That’s how I stopped consolidating everything on one general-purpose computer. Instead, I started treating each function as a small, easily replaceable unit.
- Storage
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microSD card slot
- UPC
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Arm Cortex-a72 (quad core, 1.8 GHz)
- Memory
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1GB, 2GB, 4GB or 8GB of LPDDR4
- Operating system
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Raspberry Pi (Official)
The Raspberry Pi 4 is a single board computer that can be used for many different DIY computer projects, from programming to retro game emulation.
Smart home automations just got noticeably more agile
I never noticed the lag until it was gone.
My ESP32 nodes report state changes directly to Home Assistant as they occur, while my previous setup relied heavily on polling at set intervals. That introduced a small, constant gap between something happening and the house’s reaction.
It was only a fraction of a second, but the difference was noticeable. Turning on smart lights now feels instant, rather than waiting a second, and that fast automation work. I noticed it most when I entered the bedroom after dark, and the light would often lag behind me by half a second. Now it turns on as soon as I walk through the door.
Except for the configuration problem, the automations are activated without hesitation. Once the difference in speed was noticed, there was no turning back. My confidence in automation has been eroded when I don’t recheck the microcontroller nodes.
I stopped restarting anything and my house runs smoothly.
Router logs became more predictable
My old Pi 4 often needed a reboot about once a fortnight to keep everything working. Otherwise, lag would occur, as it does for anyone running a general-purpose operating system on a device that always stays on for months on end. Nothing broke and it 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. They all run the same firmware, do their assigned job, and continue to function without a hitch. So I 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 upgrade checks, handshakes, and other things still appear, but they no longer appear randomly. A lot ESPHome devices They are almost silent and behave reliably until they report something out of the ordinary. The general chatter that normally originated from the Pi had stopped. My router now runs on quieter ESP32 boards, which are easier to manage and troubleshoot.
- Brand
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AITRIP
- Connectivity features
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USB
The ESP32 is a fantastic development board that combines solid specifications with an affordable price. Despite being cheaper than Arduino and Raspberry Pi Pico, it outperforms most of its rivals. Additionally, the ESP32 even has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capabilities built into each board, making it ideal for projects where you can’t physically keep the microcontroller connected to your PC at all times.
I didn’t retire my Raspberry Pi, I reassigned it
Still working for one job.
With the ESP32 devices running the smart home program, I haven’t removed the Raspberry Pi completely. I moved Home Assistant from the Pi to a small mini PC along with the Zigbee USB device. That split was as important as the ESP32 migration. The Pi was never a good choice for network automation and monitoring. So separating them removed the excuse to hold each other back.
Now the Pi strictly runs network monitoring with Pi OS Lite. Yo run NetAlertX to monitor 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 having to go through four different records. Now I review only one game. The Pi is not assigned any smart tasks. Instead of replacing the Pi, I assigned it a job that I should have done a while ago.
It turns out that the price increases did me a favor.
I didn’t set out to build a more robust smart home. My intention was to avoid wasting $205 on a board that used to cost about half that. But the budget panic did something I hadn’t planned for. It forced me to stop treating a single Raspberry Pi as a whole and start treating my smart home as a system with real failure points.
Now I have a stable hub on a mini PC, several single-purpose microcontroller nodes running around it, and the Pi doing some work. The cheapest option wasn’t actually the winner. It was more resistant. It only took a price of $205 for me to take notice. You don’t need your own to check if your setup has the same blind spot.
- UPC
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Arm Cortex-A76 (quad core, 2.4 GHz)
- Memory
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Up to 8GB LPDDR4X SDRAM
- Operating system
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Raspberry Pi operating system (official)
- Ports
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2× USB 3.0, 2× USB 2.0, Ethernet, 2× micro HDMI, 2× 4-lane MIPI transceivers, PCIe Gen 2.0 interface, USB-C, 40-pin GPIO connector
The Raspberry Pi is back and the fifth version of the SBC is much more capable than previous 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.
