[arm-allstar] Why Arduino?

[David Lang]

On Tue, 6 Dec 2016, "Thor Wiegman via arm-allstar" wrote:

> The Arduino thing sounds cool but it leaves me with a question:  Why use an 
> external microcontroller for this instead of the Raspberry Pi's GPIO?

It boils down to the fact that they are afraid that hooking up to the Pi GPIO 
pins could fry the Pi if you either wire something wrong or too much RF gets 
into the wires.

The same thing could happen to the Arduino, but if it does, you fry a $3 module 
instead of a $35 module.

I'm not sure I agree with their choice, this is either going to work or it 
isn't. If it doesn't, then frying modules will result in unusable systems 
(albeit slightly cheaper to replace)

I'm hoping that once they actually release the code (and this release process is 
far to much like proprietary software to make me happy), I'm hoping that some 
people will hack it to support the native GPIO pins instead of requiring the 
external box/board.

David Lang