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MountDoomlast Tuesday at 4:32 PM2 repliesview on HN

> Arduino got obsoleted by the Raspberry Pi and its clones/compatible devices.

Not entirely. Arduino was always targeted at the "casual DIY" segment - artists, school robotics clubs, and other folks who wanted automation without a steep learning curve. This was a notch below the "serious hobbyist" tier where you could save a lot of money by just buying a bare-metal version of the same chip and write some code in C (or Rust). Or the pro tier, where there's way you're paying $20+ for a glorified breakout board.

Casual DIY always had a ton of inertia. It's also the reason why every other design for an analog guitar pedal or whatever is using components that are 50 years old: ancient designs are just copied-and-pasted forever. So I don't think Arduino is dead there, although other platforms are definitely eating some of their lunch.


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DamonHDlast Tuesday at 4:41 PM

I designed a consumer product based on a respun Uno, that has sold >500k units. The toolchain and hardware remains pretty capable, and can run super low power with care (~1 microamp most of the time).

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xg15last Tuesday at 5:07 PM

> Not entirely. Arduino was always targeted at the "casual DIY" segment - artists, school robotics clubs, and other folks who wanted automation without a steep learning curve.

Exactly. But my point was that this demographic would today get a more powerful and more accessible platform for their projects by buying a Raspberry Pi.

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