With Raspberry Pi prices climbing and little gain in DIY uses, ESP32 boards are stepping in as a budget-friendly, compatible, and simpler option for smart home setups, outperforming traditional single-board computers in many practical ways.

Using Arduino IDE and the ESPAsyncWebServer library, you’ll learn how to make a simple web server on the Raspberry Pi Pico W that serves a basic HTML page. This project sets you up to later add buttons or text fields for remote pin control.

Create a compact 4WD spy car using the XIAO ESP32-S3 Sense, a camera, motors, and a 3D-printed chassis for about $30. It streams live FPV video to your phone and comes with a military-style web dashboard for remote control.

Raspberry Pi’s general-purpose input/output pins handle communication with add-on boards and circuits. Learning their basics is key before diving into any project using them.

This project shows how to use the CA3089 chip, plus a few passive components, to build a straightforward monitor that measures ionospheric changes and helps diagnose shortwave radio signals precisely.

You can expand your Arduino projects beyond just four digits by using the MAX7219 8-digit 7-segment display, which simplifies wiring and supports daisy-chaining for larger setups. The guide covers connecting the display and coding to show various data.

This project uses an anemometer sensor to measure wind speed, displays it on a 0.96-inch OLED, and uploads the readings via ESP8266 to Arduino IoT Cloud for easy remote access.

Power up a Raspberry Pi and get a private AI assistant with no internet or subscriptions needed. It runs local language models via Ollama and offers a neat chat interface through Open WebUI, all controlled headlessly with a simple LCD showing the IP address for browser access.

Using an ESP32 and a high-res MLX90640 sensor, you get a 32x24 thermal image that’s processed into a smooth, colourful heatmap. The web interface enhances the image and highlights temperature extremes, making thermal monitoring easy and interactive.

The CM5 TV Stick Lite turns the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 into a neat HDMI device with a built-in Type-A plug, USB-C power, and dual USB 3.0 ports, letting you plug it straight into a screen without extra cables or bulky cases.

Modulino modules from Arduino are compact, pre-assembled devices that communicate over I²C with a simple Qwiic connection, letting you easily add functions like LED flashing or buzzers and program them using supplied code samples.

The Renesas RZ/V2H Robotics Development Kit packs AI vision, motor control, and power management into one board, powered by an Arm Cortex CPU with an 80 TOPS AI accelerator and plenty of memory and ports including Raspberry Pi GPIO compatibility.

This project builds a wireless garage door opener using two ESP32 boards linked by REYAX’s RYLR988 LoRa modules, giving you long-range, low-power remote control beyond typical Wi-Fi or Bluetooth limits.