[HH] Arduino and Raspberry PI

[Tom Metro]

markw at mohawksoft.com wrote:
> The Raspberry PI has a good amount of processing, but lacks the I/O
> to do what the arduino can do.

Not disagreeing, but what sort of I/Os have you wanted that it didn't have?

While you can add I/O expanders, like the Gertboard (see list archives),
last I saw pricing it was $46, so it adds significantly to the project cost.

You would think they would have beefed up the native I/O on the Pi,
given it was made for hacking, but I guess the educational projects they
envisioned for it didn't involve that much low-level hardware
interaction, or at least not enough to justify impacting their $35
target price. (Their vision seemed to be more about letting each kid
have their own computer on which to hack software. Not so much about
hardware interfacing.)

The interesting thought experiment is what would it have added to the
price to make the Pi Arduino shield compatible, as you suggest. For a
little bit more product cost, it would reduce the cost of expansion.

There are other ARM-based boards with better I/O and similar performance
capable of running a full Linux, but you'll pay more than $35, and
you'll have a much smaller supporting community.

 -Tom