> I don’t think it’s a power issue as it’s getting 5V1A from a power outlet directly to USB-C into the device.
It's not the total voltage/wattage the PSU can provide, but the voltage at the processor.
The ESP's varying current draw notoriously causes too much noise and a lot of boards don't have large enough decoupling capacitors so the voltage drops too much and it glitches out. Also a warning that USB PSU's can very MASSIVELY in quality (I'd suggest an apple one for testing if you have one handy).
I think you're right that the RISC-V processor is either better behaved and draws power more consistently, or the board has shorter traces to it's bypass capacitor or a larger bypass capacitor.
> Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32S3/C3, WaveShare ESP32S3 Zero, Unbranded ESP32-WROOM with OLED, Orange Pi Zero W (untouched), Raspberry Pi Zero W (L->R, T->D)
After testing all of these, the only one reliable to work for long periods of time (one month currently) was the XIAO ESP32C3/S3.
I suspect they may be having power issues? For the ESP32's specifically I highly recommend adding a beefy capacitor over the power rails, as those can be rather sensitive to voltage fluctuations especially when transmitting. Both the RPi and ESP's can be finicky depending on the power supply/cable/cable length too, and the RPi's sdcard does tend to fail from sudden power loss. They should all be capable of at least a month, my pi's and esp's have gone several months.
I'd be curious to see the results from other ESP32's (or even the pi) with a larger capacitor added.
Maybe I'm remember incorrectly but I was in middleschool when the RPI 1 came out and my dad got me one.
There was tons of guides, tutorials, etc. when I got it, which I think was close to launch? The os image was already made, tutorials on how to set it up, use ssh, setup a basic webserver, etc were all there at or very near launch.
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Software support is almost never an issue for sbc's, and because they run linux, there's a significant amount of resources of how to use them.
Usually they fall apart because they don't have on-going software/firmware support the way RPI has always had a very well supported, and up-to-date linux image ready to flash.
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Although I will admit I think far more packages were compiled for arm back then compared to riscv packages today.
The ESP has a few deep sleep modes, and there's a lot you can do to optimize them.
I highly recommend Andreas Spiess on youtube.
EDIT: Heads up that moisture sensors have reliability issues, Andreas's video 463 talks about them.