A way more interesting and more complete honeypot is https://github.com/honeytrap/honeytrap. It combines a great list of services exposed to the internet and is very extendable. Currently development has a somewhat lower priority, but in the near future, it'll be ramped up.
Developing on an ESP8266 is completely different than a RasPi Zero. If you want a challenge, and want to write code that can run in 80KB of RAM and have the code and all of its dependencies fit in 4MB of flash, then that’s part of the reason why microcontrollers are popular (also because a lot of them are easy to get going with).