We usually require more pins, but if medium-sized ESP32-C3 modules are priced near the ESP8266-12-style modules, we can’t see any reason to buy the latter; for us it will literally be an ESP8266 ...

In particular, ESP-Hosted-NG his turns your SPI- or SDIO-connected ESP32 (including -S2/S3/C2/C3/C6 into a WiFi card, quite speedy and natively supported by the Linux network stack, as opposed to ...

We made something similar but using the RP2350A board, the Raspberry Pi Pico 2, and published a guide on how to get Wi-Fi on the Pico 2 using an ESP32 ... with more GPIO pins than the RP2350A ...