When talking among engineers about Arduino, I find that it always requires a bit of explanation, because there's Arduino, but then there's Arduino.
"Arduino" is the name of the original, humble little microcontroller board.
It's a brand name for a series of boards ranging from simple and cheap, to quite elaborate.
It's a ecosystem of firmware development tools and libraries that revolve around the Arduino API, that has attracted a large community of participants including hobbyists and students but also third party developers. Adafruit and PJRC (Teensy) are exemplars. This may be its most valuable part, at the present time.
I've been developing with microprocessors since around 1984, when I hand-assembled 6502 code for an Apple II. I wrote my own assembler for an early microcontroller, and built my own device programmer. As tooling evolved, I stayed a step behind the most advanced commercial developers, for instance by using a free vendor-supplied assembler, and then following that vendor when they switched to C.
I got one of the original Arduino boards and started playing with it. To be honest, I've always preferred tools that were favored by hobbyists and students, including 8-bit BASIC, Turbo Pascal, HyperCard, Visual Basic, and now Python. For anybody who's familiar with the Python ecosystem, "Arduino" is like that today. It's grown way beyond its original implementation, but I think you have to experience both the technology and the community to fully appreciate it.
I believe the original humble board, and bare bones IDE, still deserve a place, because there's such a huge amount of tutorials and easy designs that use them. They're still a good place for a hobbyist to get started.
"Arduino" is the name of the original, humble little microcontroller board.
It's a brand name for a series of boards ranging from simple and cheap, to quite elaborate.
It's a ecosystem of firmware development tools and libraries that revolve around the Arduino API, that has attracted a large community of participants including hobbyists and students but also third party developers. Adafruit and PJRC (Teensy) are exemplars. This may be its most valuable part, at the present time.
I've been developing with microprocessors since around 1984, when I hand-assembled 6502 code for an Apple II. I wrote my own assembler for an early microcontroller, and built my own device programmer. As tooling evolved, I stayed a step behind the most advanced commercial developers, for instance by using a free vendor-supplied assembler, and then following that vendor when they switched to C.
I got one of the original Arduino boards and started playing with it. To be honest, I've always preferred tools that were favored by hobbyists and students, including 8-bit BASIC, Turbo Pascal, HyperCard, Visual Basic, and now Python. For anybody who's familiar with the Python ecosystem, "Arduino" is like that today. It's grown way beyond its original implementation, but I think you have to experience both the technology and the community to fully appreciate it.
I believe the original humble board, and bare bones IDE, still deserve a place, because there's such a huge amount of tutorials and easy designs that use them. They're still a good place for a hobbyist to get started.