Raspberry Pi vs. Arduino for learning from "bare metal" and up

I personally use both, they both are great for their perpose. The Arduino is great for motor, LCD and sensor control. I find the only drawback is the programming only allows one operation to be performed at a time. The Raspberry Pi can do all of this and more as you can run linux on it with almost any programming language. They are both worth learning and developing, it all depends on the application.

Dale

Hi Tom;

I would agree with your premises (and I'm a huge Arduino and Raspberry Pi (aka RPi) fan!).  I like the Yun, but there's not the depth and breadth of knowledge base, nor open software stacks that there are for the RPi.  The original thought behind the Arduino was to make a uC simple enough to program and operate that a non-Engineer could do it.  "Arduino"; there are two of them now in the midst of a court battle to determine the owners of certain trademarks and IP, is a microcontroller board.  The Raspberry Pi is a known as a "Single-Board Computer" (aka SBC) that was intended as an educational platform for primary and secondary students to learn hardware.  Of the two, the RPi has more capability to be a bare-metal machine.

Don't discount some of the other, lesser-known SBC's and uC's; although the communities won't be anywhere near as large..  BeagleBone Black is an excellent SBC that uses a TI Sitara CPU.  TI also now has their MSP432 board with on-die WiFi and UART (I really like this board); and the "Educational BoosterPack Mark II" with several sensors, output devices, and even a TFT LCD.  It also is supported by IAR Workbench, TI's Code Composer Studio, Keil, and Energia (which uses the C-like Arduino language, and is meant to look like the Arduino IDE); so you can use ASM, Arduino, or C/C++ to program.  Cypress PSoC is another board with real merit.  There are a plethora of others that different folks likely know.  Intel's Edison is a newer entry that is something of a bridge between uC and SBC.

I mention the others as it seems to me that it's easier to learn to write firmware for a uC than for an SBC (I'm an electronics Engineer, also).  The Arduino Uno R3 has been the flagship for Arduino for several years; although they have several other boards.  The now-defunct Arduino "Esplora" was their equivalent to the TI Educational BoosterPack, so we'll see how TI does with theirs.  If it's a factor there's also the cost difference.  You can pick up an Arduino, or a good clone, for less than $25US.  The RPi is referred to as, "The one hundred dollar $35 computer".  Programming the firmware you have to provision the UART, TCP/IP stack, and audio and video output for it to function as an SBC (you can also run these headless, but that's a little trickier for some).  The uC's only require the UART to get started (and FTDI has done virtually all the work for that).  Many people get started with lower-level languages by writing a bootloader for the Arduino.  Not simple, but it's easier than firmware for an SBC.

I'm mainly trying to point out a comparison of uC and SBC, rather than trying to say which is "better".  You'd know which is preferable better than I.

I tend to take the other approach, figure out what you want to acheive, then look at how to do it

RPI and Arduino are very different and have a good place in different environments, the PI typically running a higher level OS is better a the "Master" controller and UNO / Launchpad / other uController as the "Slaves" performing the mundaine low level stuff that is more timing critical

All of this can be run in C like languages or higher in the case of the PI. Devices like the Yun are simply a combination of an embedded Linux controller and an Arduino UNO. the UNO part taking charge of the timing critical parts and the Embeded Linux part handling less timing critical higher order functions like WIFI, Ethernet, SD Card magic etc. a good merging of two subsystems into a single board solution.

Using a PI as the master and one or more UNO like boards as the slaves acheives a similar thing but on a grander scale

So unless you want to learn how to code an OS multitasking or otherwise, I would suggest using a PI like device for what it is goos at, an HMI (Human Machine Interface) (Ignoring the often used prupose as an educational platform for linux and programming or mega low cost desktop )

I guess what I am saying is the answer is not a single chip or platform, the question even is not a single approach, it all depends on what your trying to make ?

Not sure if I confused or helped there but I hope the latter

Peter

If you really want to get into the nuts and bolts look at getting an ESP8266 module and using it with a plain vanilla Arduino or an ARM Cortex dev board like the ST Nucleo or Discovery parts. Very cheap parts, quite a lot of web support and real control of what is going on - no need to use a single byte of other people's code on the target.  (Although you'll be using code embedded in the ESP8266.) Development tools are free from IAR,Keil, GCC etc.

MK

Actually, those ESP boards are little gems, for simpler projects you don't even need an arduino, Launchpad or any other controller, they can do it all on their own, A friend of mine (Since I was 16) has a significant ammount of skill on these and has posted alot of it on his ESP facebook and web channels

ESP8266 WIFI Miracle Board | Scargill

https://www.facebook.com/esp8266wifi