It's also very cheap today as well to hand-roll this stuff. However, I - and many of my peers in CS-land - don't have the EE knowledge to correctly put togethe

It's also very cheap today as well to hand-roll this stuff. However, I - and many of my peers in CS-land - don't have the EE knowledge to correctly put together a analog circuit. Particularly as so many of the components for interesting stuff have different voltages... understanding how to link this stuff is really hard! However, an Arduino abstracts that away. The 'hard' stuff has been done, for the cost of being inefficient and expensive. I spent about 6 hours with a circuit simulator in the last few weeks trying to design a simple LED based circuit relating to a some 555 timers. Totally failed. I simply got exposed to my own ignorance even more! I got the corresponding Arduino thingie working in about an hour.