You can get an Arduino Nano clone for considerably less than $5 on eBay. The cheapest price I can find a local Pi Zero for on eBay is $24 AUD (without an SD car

You can get an Arduino Nano clone for considerably less than $5 on eBay. The cheapest price I can find a local Pi Zero for on eBay is $24 AUD (without an SD card). I use Arduinos and similar boards to drive addressable LED strips. A lot of these strips require extremely precise timing, which is difficult or impossible to get from a Pi for some strips. From another perspective, the limitations of the Arduino boards (e.g. RAM measured in kilobytes) force you to think harder about how you want to solve a problem, which can be quite an enjoyable challenge.