Arduino isn't just for hobbyists at this point -- it's already had a huge impact on the research world. I do HCI research, and making prototypes of interfaces a

Arduino isn't just for hobbyists at this point -- it's already had a huge impact on the research world. I do HCI research, and making prototypes of interfaces and devices takes a few weeks instead of months. It allows you to iterate on hardware much faster -- it's a lot like what Rails did to web development. It also greatly reduces the amount of documentation I'd need to do for a project, because C code with Arduino is much more intuitive than many alternatives (no need to manually set registers and mess with a lot of low-level microcontroller quirks).