The raspberry pi occupies a really sad place for me. I know so, so many people who were very well intentioned, and bought a raspberry pi for one of their friends or family members. They've heard of "making", and the good associations that it has, and they see things about the raspberry pi, so they go on amazon and buy some pi-kit thing.

SO many of these things end up sitting in boxes or on shelves. The raspberry pi is pretty cool for a very small niche of things, but really the main thing making it interesting is that it's a cheap desktop computer.

If you already have a computer in your house, then you've already got a much, much more powerful version of a raspberry pi.

If you have a friend or family member who is interested in an introduction to software and hardware engineering, or electronics, then they'll be MUCH MUCH better off with one of these: https://www.seeedstudio.com/Shield-Bot-p-1380.html

and an arduino uno.

Please stop buying these raspberry pi kit things unless you have one of the specific use cases (a small desktop computer) in mind. They seem like so much marketing, and in my opinion, they are actually hurting the movement of people learning to program and build hardware devices.

Programming smaller microcontrollers could be much harder (and unfamiliar). You have to use C and C++ only, in which you don't have standard C library. You have to use either Arduino as an OS, and it has no multitasking and perverted TCP/IP stacks (built on top of single-thread everything-blocking paradigm); or RTOSes, which are cryptic (again, no libc and no posix TCP/IP stack) and you have to write or port your own implementation of everything, including software serial and i2c. Debugging is hard, usually you print messages to serial port.

This is in contrast to Raspberry Pi, which runs linux and you can program in any language and everything is like on your main PC.

Maybe latest model is overkill for anything except desktop PC or home server, but there are simpler models. I think it's pretty normal to use, for example, Raspberry Pi Zero for IoT, because good luck implementing HomeKit on avr/esp8266/stm32.

I hate commercical electronics manufacturers putting fancy desktop-level ARM controllers on everything, but let hobbyists use them without hesitation even if the only reason is support of python.

> You have to use C and C++ only, in which you don't have standard C library.

I run micropython on my esp8266 because I didn't like the lua that it shipped with. If this is a problem, then it's specific to Arduino.

Edit: lua, not node.js

At one time, long ago, it did - mainly the ATMega8 platform that was at the heart of the Wiring project, which ultimately begat the original Arduino (and Processing).

But the ecosystem expanded; first via different Atmel microcontrollers (many which became so-called "official" platforms), then eventually to other microcontroller platforms (and Microchip, maker of the venerable PIC microcontroller platform, eventually purchased Atmel).

The ESP8266 is a part of that ecosystem today, along with other so-called "ESP" controllers:

https://github.com/esp8266/Arduino

https://www.esp8266.com/wiki/doku.php?id=start-with-esp-12-a...

https://github.com/espressif/arduino-esp32

It wouldn't surprise me to find out there is a core available for the Raspberry Pi - or at least for the SOC on the board...

Hmm:

https://github.com/me-no-dev/RasPiArduino

I looked to see if I could find any kind of "real" core for the Raspberry Pi or Broadcom SOCs but I didn't find anything other than the above, which seems to be in active development. Honestly, though, you wouldn't really use a Raspberry Pi that way; more likely you would use the Raspberry Pi as a development platform for an Arduino ecosystem platform, that would likely be attached to the Pi via USB or some other method.

People, especially beginners, are often confused by what the name "Arduino" means; as I've noted, today it's an ecosystem composed of many different platforms, some "official", but many more that are not.

...and this of course doesn't get into the whole "real" vs "knockoff" vs "counterfeit" debate (which is a whole 'nother story).