Hi guys,
I guess that as my small contribution I should explain my process to decide what yo use and why so if anyone is up to a similar situation this could help, first at all most of the decition are based in personal convenience rather than the technical.
My first requirement was that the linux availavility of the toolchain, because as I mentioned in the
original post most of my computers have Linux installed (Arch and Manjaro if you are curious), my first mistake was limit to Pic and Atmel because they are the most pospular (as pointed by ...
here)
Then my second requirement was the language, since I basically don't have any experience with microcontrollers I wanted at least a known languaje (I could do some assembly code, but I'd rather not to) I use python in a daily basis along with bash and yaml (Ansible for automating stuff) but uC for MifroPython seems to be a little expensive at the moment I'd rather to use C or some C based language (just because I already knew C), but then when I read a little more it was obvious to me that C is one of the stardard.
As you can imagine by now, none of those "filters" woth anything, because all mayor microcontrollers in the industry have (at least) nice support for linux. So, the next I couls think of was the price, but the difference are not that much at least not for hobby/start/messing around, jujst check the pirces in Ebay, Amazon or Ali Express. So I choose the wrong criteria
.
Also I got some other recommendations (as mentioned
here) there are a lot of ARM based solutions that can do the job, they are a little more expensive, but you get more processing power . I'm waiting for my STM32F103 to arrive (thanks
janoc for the suggestion) .
At the end I decided based on the calculation power (ARM) because I want to play with some AI and IoT, but I'm goint to start with arduino because of the community, documentation available and it have a lot of prebuilt modules (since I'm a beginner in electronics), at the long run I plan to do some of my own modules and go deeper, hopefully be able to design some simple gadgets/toys for me. That's my starting point from there I'll see what else I need in the future like lower power consumption, more calculation power or less if no need.
Well, that's my little contribution, not that much, but I hope somebody can benefit from this.