The nice thing about a Pi is you’re not worried about flashing it and losing all your data and replacing the microSD or even frying the whole thing. It’s small and cheap. That’s the main draw. Not many people have a spare desktop they’re comfortable playing around with—my parents would have definitely been happier if I had been messing up a Raspberry Pi as a kid rather than the family computer ;)

One of the killer features is also GPIO. Back in the old days, a computer of similar vintage to the Commodore/Tandy/Sinclair micros would have a "user" port that you could wire things to and then program with BASIC PEEK and POKE statements.

With a Raspberry Pi, you've brought that back in a way that doesn't risk expensive hardware. You can get a breadboard and something like the Pi Cobbler for an instant prototyping setup where you can play with electronic components and program them with C or Python with far less difficulty than a garden variety microcontroller. The Arduino comes close, but the computing power of the Pi offers a lot more flexibility and options.

I don't agree with the original post of not buying these. That being said, don't you solve that problem by teaching your kid about virtual machines or docker? Arguably that's easier than flashing an SD card.

> That being said, don't you solve that problem by teaching your kid about virtual machines or docker?

You can't reasonably expect a child to understand hardware virtualization, can you? Much less how to use something like Docker. Maybe if Docker was perfect and there were no version or dependency incompatibilities, and the Docker service behaved predictably, and a bunch of other things. Hell, I would've bailed a few minutes into the build process as a child. I get bored waiting on it as an adult.

Also real-life hardware can be super interesting, even if you're not hacking at it! I found much joy just cracking open the family's old Windows machine and having a look. It's hard to quantify the effect something like that has, but it's got to be greater than zero.

I think for a lot of kids the 'having your own computer' factor is nice.

However, for our daughter we ended up buying (1) a Micro:Bit, which is much easier for kids to tinker with, especially with MakeCode [1]. Our 5yo daughter loves to draw 5x5 emoji + write words, associate them with buttons, to upload them to the Micro:bit. It makes her really proud. (2) An Intel NUC, which is much faster and less constrained than a Raspberry Pi. (Obviously, it is more expensive, but she has one of the low-end Celeron NUCs.)

[1] https://makecode.microbit.org/

Virtualisation and so on doesn't help if you're wanting to do electronics, connect sensors, solder things – and you don't want to worry about destroying your expensive computer. I've never actually bricked a Pi, but I've been quite happy when hacking things together not to have to worry about damaging something expensive in the process.

Hardware will always still connect with certain child or interested hobbyist. There is a reason, people open up electronics... at age 5. For quite a few it is not for the virtualised code running that brings joy it's the black box of whatever. And we should encourage this behavior.

Edit: I write this with several generations of pi. sitting idle on a shelf. The most interesting project I used one for was Halloween automation of off the shelf decorations. Made up for the stagnant pi's sitting around and all the neighborhood agrees.

I also don't agree with the assertion, but getting a virtualization environment set up for "normal" development is far more complicated, letting alone getting set up with USB, GPIO, or anything else that Raspberry Pi comes with out of the box.

Why would anybody care that they're being bought and put in drawers or shelves? The RPi isn't in finite supply, and buying more helps the project overall even if nothing is done with it.

I would think the set of parents who can teach their kid about virtual machines and docker, but don’t have a spare Machine lying around for their kid to mess up is as good as empty.

You can't flash LEDs with a VM.

As for teaching your child docker being easier than flashing an SD card... you must have some bright kids, pal!

You want to trade having a screwed up SD card for having a screwed up kid?

I was 100% with you until

> 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.

How does buying one with good intentions that goes unused hurt any other effort? I don't think I'd have even heard of any other devices if it weren't for the attention that the Pi gets.

Because kids get them, don't do anything useful or fun with them, and conclude that engineering is not for them. They also eat up often-tight discretionary budgets for educational tools.

Pi's are dirt cheap, they aren't using up budgets.

> please stop buying these raspberry pi kit things

Not just a naked Pi (and even if that's the goal it's typically not done with just the pi, you need some amount of stuff around it too). E.g. the previous version of the Pi-Top is $319 (Pi included)

I know, the easy solution is to buy plain Pi's, not avoid Pi's altogether.

And what do you do with a plain pi that you couldn't do with an instance of Idle running on a desktop PC?

For example, if I want to create something to monitor and auto water my garden. I don't want to have a laptop sitting outside 24/7 or a line inside and require my desktop PC on 24/7.

So youre running an entire Linux environment to turn a relay/solenoid on and off?

Now imagine you’re a kid who had the idea to water your garden with a computer. On an arduino, you’d write about 20 lines of code.

On a PI...I mean, how do you even get a computer program to run at boot? What’s a computer program? Okay I have a .img file now what? Python? But some people say I should use $somethingelse. Okay I need another monitor to connect to it? Open up my router and find a DHCP entry so I can SSH into it? What do ANY of those words mean?

“Oh well I’ll get to it someday.”

Don’t get me wrong, I have plenty of raspberry pis in many different projects, and in fact I’d make a strong wager that I have deployed more raspi projects than most people who consider themselves huge raspi fans. For SOME things there isn’t a substitute. For most things they’re extremely discouraging.

I don't understand your comment. Yes, you could do it with an Arduino too, or any other computer, or a microcontroller.

From my experience, RPi might be more appealing since it runs a real OS and you can have a desktop environment.

What is "Idle" (link?)? thanks!

IDLE is a Python code editor, REPL, and runner. Ships with Python by default.

Wow, never knew that was there. Learn something new everyday. Thanks!

But the photos on the webpage very clearly show that having a Pi-Top 4 makes you cool. And being cool is pretty useful.

Oh, I guess I forgot the /s

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.

I think you are understating the current power of microcontrollers. They can run Python. You get a REPL. The days of 8 bit micros for hobbyists are over; 32 bit micros that are hundreds of times more powerful in terms of CPU, memory, flash, and APIs cost the exact same amount.

https://learn.adafruit.com/welcome-to-circuitpython/what-is-...

Here is a HomeKit device on a nrf52:

https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_nRF52_Arduino/blob/mast...

The library situation is pretty good these days. You can talk to TLS-enabled web servers. You can talk to Bluetooth devices. You can integrate sensors with a couple lines of code. It isn't trivial but it isn't hard either.

The advantage of using a microcontroller is that you don't have to stress out about all the other things that a computer is going to be doing. You don't have to write systemd configurations to start your application at boot. You don't have to prevent syslog from ruining your SD card. You don't have to update the Linux kernel when there is a 0day. You don't have to work hard to power the machine from a battery. (I have a Bluetooth-based temperature/humidity/pressure logger + epaper clock that runs off a 100mAh LiPo battery. A Raspberry Pi that isn't even turned on would suck that thing dry in 3 hours, not counting power loss in the boost converter that would be required.)

The advantage of using a Raspberry Pi is that you get a ton more CPU power and all the advantages of a computer. Your GPIO sensors can show their data on 2 4k screens. You can browse the web with Chrome. You can run complex software trivially.

They are both great for different use cases. I think someone that wants to make a tiny robot or blinky light would be better served by an $8 M0-based Arduino clone. I think someone that wants to run image recognition on a video feed would be better served by a Raspberry Pi. The power level of the Pi is greater than a micro. Getting something simple working perfectly without any future maintenance is easier on a micro.

> 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

The term "Arduino" is for the ecosystem; it doesn't refer to any singular microcontroller.

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).

To be fair the 4 bumps the devices up out of the awkward "somewhat better than an Arduino, but still kinda crappy at almost everything" the 2 and 3 were stuck in. Much better I/O speeds, h265 and 4k, enough memory (and dual-monitor support!) to run a real desktop workstation on it. I skipped the 3 because two of my three Rpi2s were gathering dust after the novelty wore off and they proved to be too weak to repurpose for much of anything useful (one hangs on as an MPD server) but the 4 is way, way more capable.

If you don't have access to such a device, the probability you'll do something with it is zero. Getting them into the hands of many people increases the chance that some of those people will actually do something worthwhile. They're cheap enough that you can tinker without losing a lot of money if you break it, and if it goes unused it's not a huge loss either.

> 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.

Biggest win for Pi is IMHO the combination of the two, you get both a linux box and an arduino-like platform with HW pins access and kit hats, all in a small package that can easily be fit anywhere - and at the same time it's cheap and simple enough to allow you to play freely without worries.

hogwash. Support the ecosystem, pass them around, take the chance of letting them sit on a shelf. $35.

Ah well, you're hitting a nail on the head there. I have bought a Pi 3b+ a few months ago, put some test webpage on it, and then switched it off for security reasons. Now it's sitting on my desk, because I lack the time to write the web program I wanted it to run. :/

- using one RPI running as a cheap desktop/internet/YouTube computer in a living room, because I don't want to accept the "Terms and Conditions" on my TV regarding automatically sending all my usage data to the internet - using another one to regularly backup all my data - using another two for undisclosed projects - planning to use another one as a Subversion repository server to store all my company documents which I share with my wife who is not a programmer but has learned to use Subversion (which BTW is better to store large binary documents than GIT) - etc.

So many of my Raspberry Pi projects end up as a VM in my homelab esxi server, because they're just easier to manage that way. Pi-Hole, Octo-pi, wee-wx, virtual radar, etc. All of these I started with a Raspberry PI, then realized what a pain in the butt it is to manage a PI when I can manage a VM instead.

Similar for me, except I just use Docker for container versions of whatever project I played with on the Pi instead of VMs. Makes simple automated upgrades possible with extremely few lines of scripting too, ideal for home server that I want to setup and forget about. I have a single docker-compose file describing the services I need and its worked great for me for years. Most Pi server-app projects already have an official x86 docker image too.

If nothing else, this has allowed me to use a cheap intel NUC instead of beefier hardware for a VM server. No more SD card failures...

Exactly. In process of moving hass.io to a VM environment on windows because I got tired of corrupt sd cards and slowness. Pis are great for prototyping and running a POC.

Pi4's strong enough I'm planning to run one of the 4GB models as my VM (well, Docker, probably) server.

Arduino based toys have their place, but in the end, the shield-bot is a toy. Where the Pi shine's in my opinion is this: It packs the processing power of a small desktop and combines that with enough interface options (GPIO, Clock, AD and DA, I2C, etc, etc) to interface it with real world projects. True, some things might be a bit too complex for a kid, but the opportunity to play and learn together with your kids are endless!

The shield bot is a learning tool. I don’t think a reasonable interpretation of what I’m saying is anything other than that.

An atmega and C++ are absolutely NOT toys however. And in fact, arduinos are so cheap at this point that I have put many of them into many finished products.