Hello, I need help from the forum community to choose a board for an aquarium controller.

Current situation: The current aquarium controller uses an ESP8266 and a Microchip PIC24FJ‑family microcontroller. The user connects to the ESP via Wi‑Fi using an Android or Windows installed application. The ESP communicates with the PIC microcontroller over UART and then sends the data to the user. All aquarium devices are controlled by the PIC microcontroller; the ESP only transmits data between the mobile device/PC and the PIC microcontroller.

What I want to do: I want to control the aquarium devices through a web browser. The PIC microcontroller part will remain unchanged; I only need to replace the ESP8266 with something more powerful to host web pages. The new user interface will be rendered in the browser and will have about 10 pages. Each page will have approximately 5 buttons, 30 labels (10 of them clickable), 10 checkboxes, 5 small pictures (mostly icons), and 7 drop‑down menus. One page will contain 5 linear graphs, all rendered on the same X and Y axes. Each graph will contain about 1500 data points. The user interface will not be very fancy. A small amount of data will be read every second, for example the aquarium controller’s current time and existing alarms, current aquarium parameters like water temperature etc. I also need HTTPS protocol support.

So the question is whether an ESP32 board (for example with an LX7 processor) can handle such a user interface comfortably, or if I should look at a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W instead? Or maybe I need something even more powerful?

I have knowledge of MAUI, Visual Studio and C#, so it would be good if I could use this experience for my new user interface.

 

So the question is whether an ESP32 board (for e ample with an LX7 processor) can handle such a user interface comfortably, or if I should look at a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W instead? Or maybe I need something even more powerful?

I have knowledge of MAUI, Visual Studio and C#, so it would be good if I could use this experience for my new user interface.

I use ESP32s (Dev Kit C V4 WROOM-32D) for projects that require a web UI. I've only got 4 different pages, but expanding to 10 shouldn't be a problem, it's only a matter of storing the html / js / cs files in the ESP32's file system, which should have plenty of room unless you have huge images to load. I use VS code with the PlatformIO extension for developing the ESP32 code in Arduino C++. I don't know whether it's possible to use C# for ESP32 code development.

 

I use the same combination as you have, ESP8266 (ESP-01 module) and PIC24 in a project. It uses a web server, hosted by the PIC through the ESP via a serial line. Why do you think you cannot do that? The ESP-01 uses only the pre-installed firmware.

 

By web server, I mean the PIC serves up small HTML files with standard controls, and gets back commands. It is controlling the colors and patterns on LED strips with 8 coordinated receivers. It is by no means a complete web server, just enough to perform the functions I need. I wrote it myself and it is only a few pages of code. It even allows custom programming of light patterns via a program you enter into an HTML text box.