"Raspberry Pi" IS NOT "electronics", nor is "Arduino"

[Rigby]

The topic is not whether the Arduino or Raspberry Pi are crap.

For what use?  I can tell you now that the Arduino is a terrible babysitter.  Just awful.

[EEVblog]

Eventually, the market, the profession, and the professionals will find a new balance point which will last until something else disrupts the balance.  Existing knowledge will be devalued by short cuts, packaged solutions, just the way it is unless said knowledge is not valuable enough to have a cost-lowering market.

And that the way it's always been throughout history.
Someone who studied EE 50 years ago would have learnt "the basics" a lot better than someone today, because there was so much less to learn in an EE course, and they didn't have the tools we do today. But if such a graduate from 50 years ago was transported to todays world, would they be better than today's graduate?
At solving maxwell's using a slide rule, you bet. But for a lot of other stuff they would be absolutely clueless. The industry continues to evolve.
And yes, all things being equal the one with the most in-depth fundamental knowledge will always be the better engineer, but no one can learn everything, it's impossible.

[EEVblog]

purists are purists because they spend very little time doing actual work.

Ah, that sums up my post in one sentence!

[Rerouter]

but no one can learn everything, it's impossible.

But we can still try 

[Rigby]

What makes me sad is that my university is now adopting the Arduino crap into their curriculum and they promote the plague of "use this library, you don't need to understand how it works, you have code samples right here". It sickens me, it really does. People have no clue what a datasheet even is, let alone know how to use one. What the hell are they going to do, when they finally get their engineering degree and set foot in the industry?

Do you calculate square or cube roots on paper, or do you use a computer/calculator?  Did you make your computer or did you buy it?  Do you wire your own resistors or do you buy them?  do you make your own shoes or do you buy the crap they peddle at "stores"?

You use modern shortcuts constantly.  You travel via vehicle.  You shop for food instead of growing it and slaughtering it yourself.  You get your water from the tap or a bottle, instead of heading to a local stream.

Unilaterally declaring Arduino "crap" is folly.  The Arduino has valid uses.  There is zero argument about this among the wise.  Is the Arduino or the Raspberry Pi perfect for every application?  Of course not.  Is it a good choice for education?  That depends entirely on what is being taught.

[han]

Maybe Arduino or rasp-pi is to "easy" for the professional

But, in my recent university the Electronic Engineering student is declined very sharply. from ten year before to this year only left about 1/5 of them. and without any breakthrough in learning material. maybe no more people interesting in EE
I think that kind of kit is very important for "youngster" so they have passions to learn more..

and today trend is robotic control. and it's very convenience using arduino c langguage instead "old faithful asm"
despite i dislike arduino programing. (i use avr studio)

I'm my self learn it hard way(asm langguage), but
I can fell the exciting to normal people when they try arduino say "hello word" in the modular 16x2 LCD..

some time is fun to do things from the basic....
but here is no need to reinvent the wheel when you can buy a car..


 

[Rigby]

Rpi and arduino are to electronics what lego mindstorms is to robotics.
A toy you play with. You may be a wizard with mindstorms but if i tell you : now go design a real robot arm including drive, that can do welding on a car chassis... You will end up nowhere.

Same with rpi and duino. Here is a bare chip , make a room thermostat with it .. Blank stare...

Your elitism is really wearing me out. I can't say you don't contribute, because of course you do.  Far more than me, but come on.  There are valid endeavors on this planet that you are not involved in and have not experienced.  There are things that happen on non-industrial scales that are fully valid.  Most of us have not been featured on the EEVblog or The Amp Hour, but that does not render our efforts or interests worthless.

Lego Mindstorms can be valid robotics.  They are simply not at the same scale with the industrial robots I believe you are referring to.  Nor do they have the same capabilities or performance characteristics, but that alone does not render it a toy platform.  An Arduino IS a valid solution for some things, and not just toy things.

If an Arduino is a toy, then every low-end microcontroller is a toy.  If an Arduino is a toy, why not an Intel 8051, which is STILL used to great effect in industry, and is LESS capable than an Atmel 328, which is the core of every Arduino I own?

If I have something I need to accomplish, and I can get it done with an Arduino or a raspberry pi, or KiCad or Lego Mindstorms, does that necessarily define any solution I come up with as a toy?  Absolutely not.

No, we don't all have the same knowledge and experience as you.  That does not make our efforts, interests, or platform choices necessarily irrelevant, and it does not make you automatically correct.

Despite my wording, I am not trying to attack you.  I have much more to gain by coaxing you into helping more and dismissing less than I do by passing you off.  I'm simply a crappy communicator, which leads to an inferred tone to my posts which is not intentionally implied.

[Simon]

What makes me sad is that my university is now adopting the Arduino crap into their curriculum and they promote the plague of "use this library, you don't need to understand how it works, you have code samples right here". It sickens me, it really does. People have no clue what a datasheet even is, let alone know how to use one. What the hell are they going to do, when they finally get their engineering degree and set foot in the industry?

Do you calculate square or cube roots on paper, or do you use a computer/calculator?  Did you make your computer or did you buy it?  Do you wire your own resistors or do you buy them?  do you make your own shoes or do you buy the crap they peddle at "stores"?

You use modern shortcuts constantly.  You travel via vehicle.  You shop for food instead of growing it and slaughtering it yourself.  You get your water from the tap or a bottle, instead of heading to a local stream.

Unilaterally declaring Arduino "crap" is folly.  The Arduino has valid uses.  There is zero argument about this among the wise.  Is the Arduino or the Raspberry Pi perfect for every application?  Of course not.  Is it a good choice for education?  That depends entirely on what is being taught.

If universities are teaching proper programming they should be showing people how to make their own libraries.

I was skeptical of the arduino at first but now I use it... for electronics, I'm naff at programming although I'm planning to get there one day so i use the arduino where i need a microcontroller running some software but I do do the Electronics. I have noticed plenty of people who think that just because they can program the Arduino they think they are doing Electronics. My idea of using the Arduino is to not even use the shield, I program straight to a chip on a circuit board which has to bear minimum and is wired into my circuit I may use the shield just to ensure I got the code right as it is easy to probe it and quick to set up.

What a lot of people don't realise is that this crap Arduino is actually driving a lot of commercial products I have had some interesting purchases of eBay of preprogrammed Arduino chips one company bought 10 and they are an industrial automation company so I wonder. I have also sold quantities of 30 to 100 chips preprogrammed to people who clearly have a purpose for them and it's not making  100 different projects because they can't be bothered to do it properly they are obviously using them for something meaningful and indeed I am designing products myself around the Arduino although I am also trying to learn to program so that I can be more flexible and choose different chips that are not more expensive just because they are also used on the Arduino and so popular.

[deth502]

i *think* i agree in theory with the op. i dont think they are "crap", but the point i feel hes trying to make, that someone will come along, take an arduino out of a box, and plug it in, then say "im an electronics expert!!" when they dont even know which side of a resistor is the negative side, it is a bit disgusting. *

but as for the willingness to accept them as a part of the whole, all i can relate to in me head is seeing someone 60 yes ago bitching about how solid state transistors aint electronics because they dont come in a glass tube, or someone 50 yrs ago moaning about how you need to build a circuit with resistors and transistors, and sticking a 555 or 741 in there is cheating, thats not "real" electronics.

so while i will agree that these things are more programming than theory, so dont count as "electronics", i also realize that "electronics" is evolving to that state, and my feeling that way is only through unwillingness to change the definition of "electronics" from what it was when i learned it to something new. its hard to unlearn something. perhaps if there was a new term coined to encompass the entire realm of "electronics" as defined and accepted by the "old timers" and the newer computing based electronics, it would be more accepted, but as was mentioned, then this all just boils down to semantics......




*yes, that was a joke, calm down.

[Stonent]

Maybe this is more of an argument of 555 vs digitalwrite(pin1,high);delay(1000);digitalwrite(pin1,low)

BUT...

It took Arduino to take me back to when I was a kid playing with Radio Shack kits. But once I got a computer I forgot a lot of stuff. Now Arduino puts both together, computers and building things with electronics.

Oh you can't pull an amp through an MCU pin? Well how do I do that? Oh a MOSFET? Ok. I think I understand now.
I want to monitor that, but I don't want to fry the rest of my circuit. How do I do that? Oh an Optocoupler!

Almost everything I can do professionally was self taught basically, so this is just more to it.

We're just a bunch of plumbers moving electricity around.

[Simon]

I think the distinction needs to be made that on the one hand you can know all about programming and stick all the wonderful programmes in the world into an Arduino chip but on the other hand if you cannot interface that chip to the real world we are doing is programming for programming sake. To try and help these people the various Shields have been developed and various boards that carry out predefined functions like driving motors. For those of us who come from the other side and do Electronics but want some help and simplicity in programming we design nice circuits and then hash something into a microcontroller program. The distinctions will become blurred I have seen some pretty funny assertions and assumptions made about Electronics on the Arduino forums I had a row with one guy about where to put a back EMF diode and he reckoned that he designs things for aircrafts. I have also had some fairly interesting questions on my eBay listings and have ended up having to teach some people how to control a MOSFET with a microcontroller i.e. which pin goes where.

From what I gather Rasberry pi is actually designed for the programming enthusiasts and is not marketed as an electronics kit although of course if one wants one can make one's own bought for it.

There is sadly a growing lack of understanding of what I call discreet Electronics, everybody is trying to do things in software rather than just used the correct circuitry. For example I have seen somebody putting filtering code into a microcontroller to overcome a spiky signal from a sensor and even this did not work I came along and fixed it by putting a capacitor on the microcontroller input knowing that they were already resistors in series with the line and so creating a low pass filter which instantly solved the problem instead of the half measure which was overloading the microcontroller's abilities by putting software in where it was never supposed to be. And this was not even an Arduino it was a military project-based of an expensive microcontroller.

[free_electron]

Rpi and arduino are to electronics what lego mindstorms is to robotics.
A toy you play with. You may be a wizard with mindstorms but if i tell you : now go design a real robot arm including drive, that can do welding on a car chassis... You will end up nowhere.

Same with rpi and duino. Here is a bare chip , make a room thermostat with it .. Blank stare...

Your elitism is really wearing me out. I can't say you don't contribute, because of course you do.  Far more than me, but come on.  There are valid endeavors on this planet that you are not involved in and have not experienced.  There are things that happen on non-industrial scales that are fully valid.  Most of us have not been featured on the EEVblog or The Amp Hour, but that does not render our efforts or interests worthless.

Lego Mindstorms can be valid robotics.  They are simply not at the same scale with the industrial robots I believe you are referring to.  Nor do they have the same capabilities or performance characteristics, but that alone does not render it a toy platform.  An Arduino IS a valid solution for some things, and not just toy things.

If an Arduino is a toy, then every low-end microcontroller is a toy.  If an Arduino is a toy, why not an Intel 8051, which is STILL used to great effect in industry, and is LESS capable than an Atmel 328, which is the core of every Arduino I own?

If I have something I need to accomplish, and I can get it done with an Arduino or a raspberry pi, or KiCad or Lego Mindstorms, does that necessarily define any solution I come up with as a toy?  Absolutely not.

No, we don't all have the same knowledge and experience as you.  That does not make our efforts, interests, or platform choices necessarily irrelevant, and it does not make you automatically correct.

Despite my wording, I am not trying to attack you.  I have much more to gain by coaxing you into helping more and dismissing less than I do by passing you off.  I'm simply a crappy communicator, which leads to an inferred tone to my posts which is not intentionally implied.

The point i am trying to make is that , while arduino and pi can be fun and a shortcut to making a doohickey, they don't really teach electronics.

Lego mindstorms doesnt teach robotics. Sure you can make a robot arm or self balancing robot but it doesnt teach you how to do load calculations for the arm segments , the required motor power and other critical things.

You can perfectly mkae a scale model of the golden gate bridge using knex. That doesnt make you an architect or bridge builder.

If all you are after is making a doohickey, be my guest. But don't expect it to teach electronics. Arduino forums are full of people asking how to calculate the series resistor for an led... And questions if there is a shield for xyz. No? Bummer. Well make one! But that is a step too far.

[Simon]

but you are ignoring my point, here and now the arduino is being used to power comercial products, so while it's not a purist ideal it gets the job done and ise a useful tool to help learn programming. Being dyslexic makes me very dense in programming and I can't handle both learning the mcu environment (registers and all that) and the c language and just reading about C does not make me retain the information I need to use it. So the arduino is a happy compromise, I can forget the hardware layer and just concentrate on learning C and then start to worry about learning the mcu hardware.

[ignator]

In the end, digital is high speed analog. It is not a different field when it comes to designing the circuits that make up computer logic switches (gates). Electrical engineers designed state machines along time ago, from valves (tubes). They evolved to include sequencing by the use of memory for program storage. It was electrical engineers that invented programming. And this evolved into a new field call computer science.
I got into electrical engineering because of a PDP8 that the school system had, that was accessed by everyone in the school system using TTY terminals with dial up 110 baud connections, where the phone handset had to be inserted into the terminal. I was in 7th grade, and this was 1969. And I spent the time printing out the games, like blackjack, and reverse engineering how they worked.

It's all electronics.

[zapta]

Arduinos, RPs, transistors, Software, FPGA, wires, capacitors, networking, solder iron, cloud computing, and such are just arrows in the quiver of the maker. The segregation into disciplines  such as 'electronics' is not that important.

As for Arduinos, I don't understand the contempt. I think they are a lot of fun, including the lego like boards and sensors, the back to basic IDE and the community around it.

[casper.bang]

This is essentially an abstraction level discussion, so similar to what we in the software business have been going through discussing i.e. Scala vs. ASM. Yes, there's nothing you can't do in ASM that you can do in Scala, it's just that the programming model makes you so much more productive and handles so many complexities for you.

Hardware is a little different of course, but in practical terms not too much. Case of point, I dived back into electronics about 1-2 years ago and started building some discrete circuits, one of these being a mailbox notifier. It was fun to work with discrete IC's like the 555, 741, Schmitt triggers and logic gates - however as I started needing more features it became harder and harder to work work with and the battery drain would be unacceptable. That's when I jumped onto the MCU bandwagon (AVR ATtiny) and were amazed that I could have all my features (deep sleep state, counter for mail drops, measurement of brightness, hysteresis, button-debouncing etc.) and cut massively down on components (I.e. use PWM rather than use resistor for LED) while making battery life a non-issue.

In other words, I agree that one should watch out with these hobby boards for everything - but picking a tiny MCU and configuring it to replace the work of TTL/CMOS/timers is perfectly valid in my opinion and not doing so, if it's advantageous, just makes you an old conservative fart. 

[han]

some PLC engineer say AVR is trash because it cheap and will not stand industrial environment.
but i find ATMega128 in Zelio smart relay.

when i teach AVR in university, i see MCS-51 is like bad cheap old stuff, but surprise, i see MCS51 in prototype board in $30 K test machine....

it's hard to teach your self all the different language. ladder diagram in PLC, flow chart programing in labview, VHDL, Verilog, C/C ++ , C#, VB, VB.net, asm , delphi, pascal, java, ... and many other language. too many thing to learn in a lifetime...

i dislike the arduino because i already learn the EE word in hard way.
but from neutral point of view. i want a single programming language for all application.
so arduino-ing everything is easy st way to enter EE world. and after that.. learn the hard things later

there is no need for everyone to learn asm. the hardware is fast enough to do un-efficient high level programming.

[Simon]

i recently produce a "fix" for a control system prototype. We realized at the last minute that we had not asked for all the correct features from our subcontractor and they wanted a lot of money to fix it because it meant a code rewrite, so i made a small arduino board to do the job, not so useless after all.

[AlfBaz]

As for Arduinos, I don't understand the contempt.

It couldn't be easier to understand.

Most who have contempt for these modules have put in the hard yards to learn various processor architectures, the details of all the peripherals, come to grips with C/C++ language and all the processor specific pragma's and __attribute's, studied assembly output of the compilers to see what different constructs produce the tightest code, spent hours debugging code and studying protocol standards, scoping signals to see why they are being corrupted on a self designed pcb's... the list is endless.

Then along comes somebody with no experience, no knowledge and produces something with one of these modules and all of the associated code libraries and they're streaming HD movies to 60 inch flat screens

Where it would get difficult to criticise these technologies is where they are being used as pre-packaged low level physical layer so that something more ground breaking and technically challenging can be achieved by people that have the skills and knowledge to tackle high level system constructs and don't want to be bogged down in the low level stuff. Like somebody who is mechanically adept but know little about electronics can build some fancy automated machine, instead we usually end up with a community of people who are trying to see how many ways one can light up an LED

We end up with more focus from vendors, forums, blogs, technical resources in general being dedicated to the masses in an effort to cash in on it's popularity. It just seems to be a positive feedback loop that ends up detracting from community discussion and advancement of the very technology that these platforms use

[Simon]

well tell you what. I'm going to take a new moral stance: you have no right to use low level programming either unless you can make a microcontroller yourself....... how about that, it's the same sort of bigotry 

[AlfBaz]

well tell you what. I'm going to take a new moral stance: you have no right to use low level programming either unless you can make a microcontroller yourself....... how about that, it's the same sort of bigotry 

Simon, that's the point you are missing by being a high level user
Most people who know assembly will easily have enough knowledge to make their own microcontroller

[Simon]

well tell you what. I'm going to take a new moral stance: you have no right to use low level programming either unless you can make a microcontroller yourself....... how about that, it's the same sort of bigotry 

Oh please don't let's drop down several layers of abstraction all at once. Sensitive persons might mistake it for plummeting into an abyss.

i thought the idea of abstraction what they we can take the stupidity out of it and apply it to a situation that clearly shows how stupid it is 

[Simon]

well tell you what. I'm going to take a new moral stance: you have no right to use low level programming either unless you can make a microcontroller yourself....... how about that, it's the same sort of bigotry 

Simon, that's the point you are missing by being a high level user
Most people who know assembly will easily have enough knowledge to make their own microcontroller

You mean they can design a silicone chip die and put it in a package ?

[G7PSK]

Do you need to understand micro crystalline structure of materials to be an architect and design buildings, the structural engineer leaves the metallurgy to the metallurgist in the same way you don't need to be a solid state physicist to use the building materials of electronics, you just need an general understanding of what each brick in the circuit dose. To each his own. 

[Icarus]

You can perfectly mkae a scale model of the golden gate bridge using knex. That doesnt make you an architect or bridge builder.

+1

I think they are evaluation boards.