Murphy's Law being what it is, this is also about the same time she announced that she didn't know what she was going to be when she grew up, but she knew it wouldn't be a programmer because she wasn't any good at it.
(And have been for a few years now.) My children, however, are apparently completely oblivious to this and took very little interest in any of it except when I'd specifically ask them to check something out.īut they did seem interested in software and had been playing with a kid-level app creator, so I bought the older child the SparkFun Inventor's Kit. There are wires and buttons and LEDs and disemboweled Game Boys everywhere. The Arduino?Īs you can imagine, in the course of writing that book, my house has become a small Radio Shack. Of course, leave it to a nine-year-old to prove my entire theory wrong. If you have an Arduino, you instead have a pretty blue board and no idea what to do with it. There's a learning curve, and again, if you have a Pi, at least you can get a computer up and running fairly quickly, play with it for a bit, and then figure out what's next from there. People who ask this question are also often asking not for themselves but rather, "Which of these devices should I buy for a child?" And to that end, if you're a kid who opens that box on Christmas morning, it's not exactly a set of Lego bricks with an instruction booklet and an hour or two to a finished piece. It's a quick path to completed-project satisfaction with plenty of room for growth. You can flash the card with Kodi (formerly XMBC) and have a working media center in minutes. If you're starting from square zero and have no idea what to do, you can at least plug an SD card and a monitor into the Pi and have a computer.
This isn't "should I get a Mac or a PC?" or "should I try Ubuntu or Fedora?" with relatively the same endpoints and finer distinctions. Often the people who ask this question are at a point where they don't even realize that the two devices aren't the same. Probably the most frequent question I hear is, "Should I get a Raspberry Pi or an Arduino?"ĭepending on the person asking, I've almost always said yes to getting a Raspberry Pi, and not just in hopes of selling a book or two. I spend a lot of time at conferences and events like Maker Faires, and having co-authored a book on the Raspberry Pi, I spend a lot of time talking to people about things like small electronics and open hardware.