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Comment by comboy | Hacker News Reader

You can always go with nodemcu with wifi and storage on board. ~$2.5 on aliexpress with shipping

i keep seeing people say that, but i can't find (reputable) seller with price <$3. do you have some links for sellers with that price that you've done business with?

Here's $2.85 with lots of feedback: http://www.aliexpress.com/item/new-Wireless-module-CH340-Nod...

Personally I've bought from this one: http://www.aliexpress.com/item/NodeMcu-Lua-WIFI-development-...

So far tested 3 units and they work without any problem, packaging was also very good.

I don't see any cheaper than those currently, but once you have everything tested, if you want to cut the cost you can always just use esp8266 directly which goes for $1.8

That isn't comparable in any way

Why not? Most people don't use rpi as a home desktop. These GPIOs are there for a reason and I think that's what people mostly care about unless they are making some magic mirror or other form of a display.

There is a lot more software for Linux boxes than there is for the NodeMCU, for example.

Furthermore, their processing power is orders of magnitude apart, as is RAM and storage. NodeMCU targets embedded, and there are plenty of cases where a rpi is used but a NodeMCU would be more than sufficient. But that doesn't mean that they're equivalent, there are also plenty of use cases where a NodeMCU is horribly underpowered.

I think the ESP8266 supports operating in SDIO mode, it's the descendant of a chip used to add wifi to low-end tablets. So it could be used as a literal replacement for an on-board WiFi module, if SDIO pins are available on the Orange Pi board.

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