[simonbarker87]

I would say that if you are looking at getting started with embedded electronics from an electrical engineering/professional stand pint and looking to put things into production then don't start with Arduino and certainly don't view an RPi as a viable embedded solution.

A PicKit 2 and a 16F series Microchip microcontroller would be a much better starting point just to get up and running without feeling overwhelmed.

[TD-Linux]

I agree with not starting with the RPi (to avoid the complexities of the Linux kernel), but I started with the PIC and SX series (before Arduino was a thing) and wouldn't recommend it anymore. If you want to learn an assembly language and twiddle registers then maybe you'd like the PIC, but I don't think it's more "professional" - virtually everyone uses C if at all possible at this point, and the AVR (or bigger PICs) are just as "production-ready" as the old PIC16F series. And you can still twiddle AVR registers with C if you so desire.

[simonbarker87]

Assembly on PIC is horrible, I agree. I've only done one project in assembly on PIC and since then only used C with PIC which works fine across the whole range.

[std_throwaway]

I come from the angle of "absolute beginner" who is trying to get started quickly. If you are really "looking to put things into production" you might be right. Using those boards I proposed will always have big disadvantages.

The original article is not written for absolute beginners, but for people who would go through the pain of soldering 100 pins to a self-designed PCB and failing 5 times before getting a working version.

[jfroma]

I loved that one. We spend an entire year on high school programming the 16F84 on assembler. We re-implemented all projects we did the previous year with nand gates like semaphore, infrared barriers for counting stuff etc with pics, and it was mindblowing for me.

I also remember we did a board for writing the program in the pic because it was too expensive in my country.