arduino

[Rob Seastrom]

With all due respect to the folks who say "$PLATFORM is better than
Arduino, you should skip the arduino and buy X or Y", you're rather
missing the point.

I've had encounters with a few embedded microcontrollers and SOCs.  If
you don't know what you're doing, getting JTAG, ISP, or however they
want to be programmed up and running is non-trivial.  Good luck on
non-Windows platforms, and a lot of the time the dev kit is spendy too.

The thing that the Arduino has going for it above all is that it's
pretty plug-and-chug; getting to "Hello World" is a 5 minute
operation, and it's something that a bright 10 year old can do without
help (I've seen it firsthand).

There are plenty of libraries to do a lot of useful stuff, making it
fairly accessible.  Again, well within the grasp of bright and
so-inclined preteens.

A lot of applications don't need the higher end stuff, particularly
stuff that's quick and dirty or decorative.  A friend of mine who does
embedded stuff for a living grabbed an Arduino a couple of years ago
to drive the blinkenlights on his son's robot costume for Halloween.

In other words, the Arduino, while limited, is highly useful for its
intended entry level application.  Having the discussion turn into an
enumeration of our favorite platforms that are more capable in some
way or another is a bit of a distraction and smacks of editor or OS
wars.

my $0.02

-r