You don't need to do your development on the Raspberry Pi, and I wouldn't recommend doing so. It's pretty easy to develop code on your desktop and push it to yo

You don't need to do your development on the Raspberry Pi, and I wouldn't recommend doing so. It's pretty easy to develop code on your desktop and push it to your Pi via SSH/SCP/etc. You might also be able to set up a connection to push via USB but that might end up being more complicated anyway. For many projects, people choose something higher-end than an Arduino because their project requires more compute or memory than the 8-bit microcontroller in the Arduino can provide. Common issues: - You need to do math with larger numbers (anything > 16 bits is really slow on the Arduino), or need to do lots of math. - Your working data exceeds the ~2 kB of RAM. - Your project's binary exceeds the ~32 kB of flash. With that being said, the Raspberry Pi isn't necessarily the best candidate for every project that exceeds these constraints. The Pi is basically the cheapest possible board that includes a graphics card that can handle HD video, Ethernet, and WiFi. It also has a lot of RAM compared to other single-board computers. It is weaker for "real-time" applications like signal processing - if you need to do that sort of thing you might want to look into buying a BeagleBone Black, which has two "programmable real-time units" (PRUs), which are basically small auxiliary microcontrollers that can be used to handle the real-time work. There are other cheaper/lower power parts in between the Arduino and the Raspberry Pi/Beaglebone level of complexity, but many of them require complicated tooling and libraries that might be difficult to use if you're not already pretty familiar with embedded development.