alt Hacker News> 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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They are entirely different. By Arduino, i assume you mean Arduino hardware ? They are usually just a breakout board for a given MCU.
Raspberry pi, is a full ledge computer, with boottime measured in seconds
Let’s see… use the Arduino IDE, plug it in via USB, and press Upload. Your program starts on boot, every time, reliably and quickly.
OR buy an SD card, learn what the heck “writing images” is, find a spare keyboard and monitor so you can see the RPi, learn how to use Linux for your first time, figure out how to copy files between your Macbook and Linux, figure out how to setup Wi-Fi, figure out how to run a program, then restart your RPi to find that your program didn’t start on its own, then figure out the million different ways in Linux to start a program on boot, only to find it takes forever before your program starts when you plug the RPi back in, then it turns out Linux screws up your timings so your LED art project doesn’t even work…
This is true up until it really REALLY isn't.
The main strength of microcontroller-based hobby boards (I hesitate to say "bare-metal", but something like that) is that tuning them for long operation on a small pouch cell is pretty straightforward. There is no such easy path to prolong battery life on a Raspberry Pi (not including the RPI Pico). After that, with microcontrollers, you have direct visibility into most interrupts you may need to use. You do not have that in the standard Raspbian linux distro.
They are foundationally different items, and it does not take a tremendously complicated project to reach the boundary between them. Need a robust wifi stack or to run a camera? You need something with at least an RTOS (like an ESP), or an actual operating system. Need to service a rapidly spinning rotary encoder without missing clicks or blocking other operations? You need a microcontroller.
Its certainly true that you can make a Raspberry Pi do everything an arduino can (and mostly vice versa), but in terms of what's accessible to a early-intermediate hobbyist, they are different tools for different tasks.