One of my first projects was an embedded thing, long before 2016, where the number of deployments was exactly one. (It was a ruggedized device embedded into an

One of my first projects was an embedded thing, long before 2016, where the number of deployments was exactly one. (It was a ruggedized device embedded into an experiment that we literally dropped from an eight story building twice a day. The device in question did just fine, although, unsurprisingly, a bunch of the rest of the apparatus needed rather regular repairs.) The development experience was miserable. The embedded code was in C, and, when something went wrong, there was about a 50% chance that the bug was in the proprietary compiler from the vendor and not in the C code at all. There was probably some way to debug the live system, but I never found it. I’m not sure where was any way to simulate the system well enough to run our code short of actually uploading it to the device. The world has come a long way :). An RPi or Arduino or anything else along those lines would likely also survive the treatment we gave this thing as long as all the connectors were very well secured.