Arduino, was: Re: OT: uP solutions

I find the dislike of the Arduino by some people in this forum a bit silly, yet funny in a history-repeating way. The Arduino, in my opinion, occupies roughly the same space that the Vic-20 (or ZX-81) did back in its day. It's a great intro to the field. Sure, the cool kids are building their own computers using S-100 cards, the rich kids are buying far more capable Apples and Tandys; the pros use minis. And while most Vic-20 users never get beyond playing copied versions of Lunar Lander, some of them get sufficiently interested to go on to better things and delve deeper, hitting the limitations and working around them. Remember - neither the VIC-20 or ZX-81 came with any info on how to program them in anything other than the (very limited) BASIC. More importantly, the Arduino disrupted the microcontroller dev board market in such a way that to get any mindshare these days you need to have a sub-$100 board to get hobbyists interested, AND have a (reasonable, and open or at least free) click-and-compile IDE with it. Joe. PS. I apologize for mixing technologies of different time frames in the example above. That whole period was a bit of a blur to me. Pedants, be pedantic, please :-) -- Joachim Thiemann :: http://jthiem.bitbucket.org