Arduino, was: Re: OT: uP solutions

To be clear, I don't dislike the Arduino, not at all. It's great at what it does, just like a PET. I just don't like when people get the idea to shoehorn it into something it's totally inappropriate for, which is something I*do* see a lot (much like Mouse's example where a simple 555 circuit would have made much more sense). I was just as mad when management at one of our clients forced us to use Linux on a little embedded board where the microcontroller was only going to be used for housekeeping; with a tiny little event loop for an OS, we could have done the job with a 50 MHz ARM, but instead we ended up with an 800 MHz PowerPC which caused us no end of trouble (not least because it was a buggy chip, which is maybe a separate issue). I like Linux, and I like PowerPCs, but they didn't belong there.