>> The fact nobody else has bested them is a sad comment on industry.

I wouldn't say nobody has bested them.

The real professional Arduino is the Mbed, run by ARM.

It's for professionals, by professionals, and it shows in good quality.

But, you pay for the abstraction - it's inefficient with hardware resources.

Another alternative is modm.io.

It's a modern take on the hardware abstraction layer, claimed to be very efficient.

It may just be that with it's combination of high efficiency and portability, you would get the cheapest mcu for your project.

I must respectfully disagree based on research conducted within the last 2 weeks. Everyone claims their IDE is the business, in fact all the closed source ones are all crap, poorly documented and only allow you to easily taget a subset of platforms from a subset of development environments. For example, out of the box MBed Studio doesn't support many lower and mid range chips in the STM range. If you want to buy a high end chip with a MAC, it might be a great option (look at their hardware gallery[0] for an idea of what they're clearly targeting). It's apples and oranges. AFAIK most pro's apparently still use Keil, which is Windows only and expensive.

[0] https://os.mbed.com/platforms/

// only allow you to easily taget a subset of platforms from a subset of development environments

I'm not sure the mbed is intended for products with a deep focus on price.

So less hardware selection might fit.

But modm.io does have support for some low end devices.

modm.io looks interesting, thanks. Unsure I agree with the premise that using a value line 32 bit MCU implies a "deep focus on price". To me, that would mean something like EM78P173NSO MDT10P509S11 SN8P25D HR7P155 PMS150C or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_packaging#Glop-top

> At small volume with assured availability right now you can plug together off the shelf microcontrollers and ethernet modules for $3-5 per node.

Source? I'm looking for that right now and can't find any cheap microcontrollers that include an ethernet jack. The price I find make a Raspberry Pi a viable solution... which is quite sad.

Not included. Use external module, eg. ENC28J60 (dominant and open source drivers for ~all platforms) which is cheapest, SPI based and 10M limited. For higher throughput look at Wiznet modules or bigger MCUs with MII/RMII which gets much pricier - with low end MCUs you can't generate or process that much data anyway.

Thanks! I didn't know the ENC28J60 could be that cheap. I had seen it in the past but it was always 10-15$ and with a microcontroller, that made it quite expensive. Next time I order a bunch of ESP8266 from China, I will add a bunch of them too.

To get a sense of realistic prices use 1000 piece quantities quoted on electronic component stockists in Guangdong such as http://lcsc.com (or via https://jlcpcb.com/quote#/parts which is a significant subset thereof) and http://hqchip.com (but avoid the red=import results). For a popular component such as a network module, roughly assume chip cost plus 1-2RMB for the PCB, resistors and socket and assembly. Same approach works for microprocessors.