I Built A Whole-Home Ad Blocker With A $7 ESP32-S3 Board - And It Took Just Minutes
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-i-block-ads-with-cheap-raspberry-pi-alternative/
They say that necessity is the mother of invention, and the skyrocketing prices of Raspberry Pi boards have definitely been the kick in the pants that I've needed to look at cheaper, perhaps also better-suited, alternatives. I mean, the Pi is a great board, but for a lot of applications I've used it for over the almost 15 years that they've been around, it's also been overkill.
The other day, I needed to put together an ad-block solution, not because I dislike ads, but simply because I was working with quite a limited bandwidth. I reflexively reached for a Raspberry Pi board, but stopped when I remembered how much they cost nowadays and put it back.
I was going to use PiHole on the Pi, but then I remembered coming across an ad-block project that worked on an ESP32 board. And the good news is that you can pick up one of those boards for under $10.
There's a huge difference between a Raspberry Pi 5 and an ESP32 board (specifically the ESP32-S3 board). The Pi 5 is powered by a 2.4 GHz quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 64-bit chip, gigabytes of RAM, and the ability to use microSD or fast NVMe SSD storage, while the ESP32 makes use of a dual-core Tensilica Xtensa LX7 32-bit processor that can run at up to 240 MHz, 520 KB of RAM, and up to 16MB of flash storage.
A Pi 5 can use as much as 12 W of power (and that's before you hook up various HATs and such), while an ESP32 board uses milliwatts.
For this project, I'm happy to go with the ESP32, but there are a few compromises that I'll have to live with -- more on those later.
First, you need an ESP32 board. Look for the ESP32-S3 with 8MB of PSRAM (there's a 4MB version too, but using this board will result in compromises) rather than the classic ESP32. The ESP32-S3 is faster and more efficient, and you need this power to run the ad-block software. The cheapest way to buy these boards is in a 3-pack for $20.
When you get an ESP32-S3 board for the first time, it's normal to think, "Wow, this is tiny, there must be more to it," but there isn't. It really is a computer you can balance on a finger.
Well, you will need a USB-C cable to transfer data and power the board. However, you don't even need a microSD card for the board to work.
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