Wow, so it is his thread. Is it possible to hijack your own thread?

(The subject still deserves it's own place.)

Discussing the pros and cons of any two devices will quickly devolve into name calling and ranting about.

There's a topic in here?

 

Rather the rest of it belongs somewhere else

 

I really have no axe to grind, like I said I have used PICs but I now use Atmels (with the arduino boot loader) but I'd be interested to know in what way Arduino is "limited in its ability"? Consider also that there is optiboot to overcome some of the Arduino start-up issues...

Try to make any reasonably complex task and you'll quickly understand what I mean. Arduino obfuscates the underlying hardware without alerting the user as to what hardware is required by the module, so the chances of getting a bad configuration go up.

Using an Arduino is expensive. A bare Arduino costs quite a fair amount, one might argue that using the AVR with no board might lower power unit cost, however, adding the bootloader would increase time to completion, thus raising cost.

I'm sure there are more, but these are pretty compelling on their own...

 

Arduino is an easy fun way of getting started with microcontrollers. But you don't have to stop there. After you understand how the Arduino system works you can go a little deeper and work directly with the native microcontroller, the Atmel AVR family.

That is, you really want to compare a Microchip PIC vs Atmel AVR.

Now you are comparing apples vs oranges instead of apples vs fruit cake.

 

Well said Mr Chips.