RE: Raspberry Pi vs all

e14 Contributor — Tue, 10 Sep 2013 16:28:48 GMT

http://www.hwmakers.eu/arduino/raspberry-pi-vs-all/#comment-32094

RE: Raspberry Pi vs all

morgaine — Fri, 30 Aug 2013 17:39:56 GMT

Cabe Atwell's comparison (linked in coder27's comment above) makes good engineering sense, as it compares like with like --- all the boards feature application processors and run a Linux kernel under the hood.

In contrast, the article at hwmakers.eu is comparing a large number of boards based on bare-metal microcontrollers (FRDM-KL25Z, both AVR and ARM-based Arduinos, MBED, STM32F0-Discovery, Uno32, and Flyport) against two dramatically different products based on application processors and Linux kernels (Raspberry Pi and MK802II), and one of those two (MK802II) is an Android dongle rather than intended for embedding.

Such a comparison makes no sense at all. The feature sets are different, the architectures are different, the resources provided are different, the methods of programming are different, their intended targets are different, and what you can achieve with them is different too. The only way of salvaging that article into something moderately useful would be to remove the RasPi and MK802II entirely and then compare the remaining bare metal microcontroller boards.

Alternatively, remove all the bare metal microcontroller boards and add some Linux-based ones that are similar to RasPi --- the BeagleBone Black is probably the closest and is in the RasPi's same price niche. The article linked by coder27 provides many more useful candidates.

You have to compare like with like, otherwise a comparison becomes largely an artifact of however the writer wishes to present it. Predictably, the result is a hotch potch, and even the author says "no clear winner". That's because you can't compare vastly dissimilar things in any really useful way, especially when the board most mentioned is not representative of the rest.