[Sanddancer]

A lot of more recent Arduinos use more sophisticated cores than the AVR. There are several models that use ARM cores, there are a few that use x86 variants, etc. One of the advantages I can see with the Arduino infrastructure is that the libraries are fairly reasonably cross-platform, so you can use them on multiple projects which use different micros without having to rewrite a bunch of code.

[aceperry]

Arduino has made a huge impact on the "maker" community. It has enabled lots of non-electrical engineers to produce hardware that was previous not possible or easy for non-programmers. Most of the time, 8 bit micros are sufficient for the types of projects involved. Even embedded engineers use them when convenient.

And the ecosystem of Arduino "shields" has become so popular that lots of people and companies make shields. Even the newer environments such as ARM's mBed will accept arduino shields due to their availability.

[JoshTriplett]

Exactly. You can get a board that accepts Arduino shields and lets you program with the Arduino environment, but also natively supports high-speed buses like PCIe, USB, SATA, and Ethernet, and provides a more direct programming environment based on Linux or a smaller embedded OS.

[gh02t]

I'm curious, what board in the Arduino form factor are you talking about that can do PCIe and SATA? Those require fairly sophisticated processors AFAIK (read: expensive).

Also, for many uses programming in Linux is the exact opposite of direct when comparing to banging out some bare metal C or C++ on a dinky 8-bit micro. Maybe using a RasPi to blink LED or read a temperature sensor is more accessible to some people and that's a good thing, but it's like killing ants with a tactical nuke.

[mianos]

On the other hand, the genuine arduinos with morr modern cores seem to be very expensive. The arduino used to be fantastic a number of years ago but they move a long way down the value chain in recent years. I have boxes of all the original ones but have not used them in years.