Well, the easy answer is the arduino is "easier" to get into than most other embedded development boards. These days, though, that's becoming less and less tru

Well, the easy answer is the arduino is "easier" to get into than most other embedded development boards. These days, though, that's becoming less and less true. You can pick up an ESP8266-based board complete with USB-serial built in and motherfucking Wi-Fi for 15 bucks from Adafruit, and it's identical to an Arduino code-wise (i.e. you can use nearly all the nice fuzzy constructs that the Arduino version of Processing provides), plus motherfucking Wi-Fi. I've been prototyping something with one the last couple of weeks, and it's great. Compared to, for example, my senior design project in college, which predominantly involved writing shitty C code for ATMega-series microcontrollers, it's a breeze. I get C++, a huge standard library, consistent types, a Java-esque wrapper around std::string, and all the register ops to toggle or read pins and enable/disable features are completely abstracted away. It's like comparing writing an app server in Node.JS to writing it using Java EE. Obviously, equally possible in both languages, but one just feels so much nicer than the other.