Arduino versus Raspberry Pi

When I first started getting interested in the Raspberry Pi, I came across a few comments on blogs about how the Rpi was not as good as the Arduino. I soon realised that this was like comparing apples and pears.

The Arduino is based around a microcontroller. It is excellent for control applications where accurate timing control is important. It also takes very little power. However the Raspberry Pi is a complete computer motherboard with the following differences. See here for a quick presentation on getting started with the Rpi.

Size: The Raspberry Pi is a lot smaller. A PC motherboard can be 20cm x 30cm

While the Raspberry Pi is about 6cm x 9cm. That is 10 times smaller in area.

Power: The Raspberry Pi uses a 5W power supply. A PC uses at least 50W.

Memory: A PC has a hard disk for storage. The Raspberry Pi uses an SD card.

Operating system: Most PCs use Windows and a licence fee has to be paid to

Microsoft. The Raspberry Pi uses Linux, which is open source.

Hacking: PCs are getting slicker all the time and normal users are discouraged

from “looking under the bonnet”. The Raspberry Pi encourages experimentation.

Connecting to the outside world: With a PC, there are set ports used for this,

such as USB. With the Raspberry Pi, there is a GPIO port to connect to the

outside world.

Programming:  With a PC, one has to use software such as Visual Basic to do any programming. This not easy for a newcomer. The Pi in Raspberry Pi refers to Python which is an easy to learn programming language.

So if you had an application where you had mains power and wanted to interface to the internet and still carry out some control tasks (for example send out an e-mail or sms message for an intruder alert) then the Raspberry Pi is best for you.

However if you wanted to design a battery powered alarm for your motor bike, then the Arduino would be ideal.