Arduino, while nice and useful (I used it more than once), it's much less than raspberrypi. Arduino's power comes from the community, nice IDE and a lot of exam

Arduino, while nice and useful (I used it more than once), it's much less than raspberrypi. Arduino's power comes from the community, nice IDE and a lot of examples that are easy to grasp even for someone who is not a CS major. It is wonderful if you want to make you off-shelf PC communicate with simple engines, many types of sensors, things like that, and it's easy to connect to Processing or puredata, it's basically what you get if you want an interactive art piece and don't want to mess with assembler, bootloaders, and whatever. However, Arduino is 30 USD for ATmega, 20 I/O pins and a USB you can use to program it. Raspberrypi is 35 USD (1) for ARM as powerful as the one in iPhone, with 256 MB RAM, HDMI output, two USB ports you can use to connect peripherals, allegedly powerful graphic processors (though it's probably going to have proprietary bloby drivers) and an Ethernet ports. Oh, and some I/O pins too. It's basically a general purpose computer, allegedly as powerful as Pentium III (2), as big as Arduino, and taking slightly more but still incredibly small amount of power. For further comparison, BeagleBoard has slightly better connectivity but worse CPU and graphics, and is bigger, and is 150 USD (about 4x the cost). PandaBoard is faster but similar and is 170 USD (little less than five times the cost). And yesterdays Arstechnica article speaks about similar computer in shape of a small flashdisk with slightly faster CPU than raspberry and ! GB ram costing 200 USD. This is like free.fr for ARM development boards. It doesn't mean Arduino is finished or something (it's best thing was always the simplicity - anything you can do with Arduino can be done with plain ATmega and some hacking and they're dime a dozen) but it's nice. (1): though local prices vary. Here Arduino is listed as about 1 USD less than raspberry. (2): I can't remember where I read that, and it might've been Pentium II, so don't quote me on that, plese