Raspberry Pi Vs Arduino : The Battle of the Micros
Hello guys, in today’s articles, I will try as much as i can to do justice to the comparison between an Arduino and a Raspberry Pi. Oftentimes, there has been a comparison between Window Vs Linux, Edilson Vs Tesla, AMD Vs Intel and micro-controller Vs microprocessor. People get confused when it comes to selecting/choosing the right boards for their next project which later leads to an argument or comparison.
Comparing these two boards is like comparing a calculator with a laptop, it’s kinda funny tho. The two boards have their advantages and disadvantages over one another.
Getting To Know Arduino Board :
Arduino is a micro-controller board invented by Massimo Benzi in Italy. It was a simple hardware prototyping board whose primary function is to control a basic electronic components, such as motor, led, LCD, sensors, modules etc.
The heart of Arduino is the little chips on it, the ATmega328p microcontroller.
Microcontroller are chips that were created by Texas instrument which has a capability to store, run and execute programs.
Features Of Arduino Board:
- It doesn’t requires much power. It can be power by 9V AA battery.
- It has a GPIO (general purpose input output) pins used in controlling electronic components.
- It support different types of shields such as motor shield, LCD shield, Ethernet shield etc.
- It’s cheaper and popular in market.
- It code can be written on Arduino IDE using embedded C programming language and BlocklyDuino.
NB: Even as micro-controller is self contain, you still have to connect it to a computer in other to program it. After burning your code, you can disconnect it from the computer and make it stand alone device.
Getting To Know Raspberry Pi :
Unlike Arduino, Raspberry Pi support a microprocessor which require a system from separate chips to be able to run, store and execute code. Raspberry Pi was invented by Eben Upton at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom for improving the programming skills of his students.
A raspberry pi can be compare to a motherboard of a computer. If you are familiar with computer motherboard, you will agreed with me that microprocessor is the heart of a computer and then we have ram, graphics controller, Ethernet controller, hard drive and others physical components that requires for a computer to run. The fun part of it is that if we shrink all that down to a single board, then you have got yourself a raspberry pi board.
Raspberry Pi is a mini computer on itself which is why is difficult to compare with arduino board.
Features Of Raspberry Pi Board:
- It has a built in USB, graphics, wireless, Bluetooth and audio that run on Linux operating system. So you can literally used it like a normal computer system.
- It requires more power to run unlike arduino
- It also supported some shields and has a GPIO too.
The added layer chips and software makes it more complex to operate unlike Arduino board.
If It Is Complex To Operate, Why Then Is It Compare To Arduino ?
It’s generally compare with arduino because of its GPIO pins. Just like arduino these pins can be used to control other electronics components such as led, LCD, sensors etc.
To program raspberry pi, you don’t have to connect it to other computer. It can be program directly from the Pi board since it’s a computer on it own.
Python is the primary programming language for programming these pins but you can also used some other popular programming languages.
What Board Is Suitable For My Project ?
To answer this, you don’t want to buy a calculator to watch a YouTube video and you don’t want to buy a computer just to build a simple calculator.
If your project only require you to work with sensors and simple robotics functionality, buying a raspberry pi will be over killing. But if you will like to add some complex functionality to your robotic such as web cam, web server, AI, Tensor-flow etc Raspberry Pi will be better…
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