Oh, that's a nicer one than the others I found. I see that sort of thing as being useful in situations where the PC is required anyway, like a lot of automated

Oh, that's a nicer one than the others I found. I see that sort of thing as being useful in situations where the PC is required anyway, like a lot of automated lab setups. You need the PC for data acquisition and analysis, and it's nice if you can control the rest of the equipment from the same program. I've used Measurement Computing's digital IO and data acquisition boards for that sort of thing. Having a separate microcontroller has its uses too, of course. Like you said, it certainly packages smaller. Plus, you can get much more reliable timing. I'm currently helping a friend with an antenna rotator project, and that requires some brains right at the motor/encoder unit. For that I've written some software to reliably send control data packets back and forth, which is necessary but adds quite a bit of complexity.