ASSOCIATION OF SOFTWARE ENGINEERING STUDENTS, FUTO

which board should you actually start with? Arduino vs ESP32 vs Raspberry Pi 4 months into robotics as a hobby, here's what i'd tell myself on day one: 1. start with arduino use it when you're learning: - motors - servos - sensors - basic circuits atmega328p, 16 mhz, 2 kb of ram, and 5v logic so most hobby parts plug straight in when your code runs, nothing interrupts it, and that makes timing easy to reason about best place to learn the fundamentals without debugging an operating system at the same time you outgrow it the day you add wifi or a camera 2. move to esp32 use it when you want: - wifi - bluetooth - wireless control - anything that reports back to your phone dual core at 240 mhz, 520 kb ram, radios on the chip, around $5 a board more connectivity and still hands on, so you keep writing the same kind of code two things that cost me a weekend each: 3.3v logic, so your 5v sensors need a level shifter or they read garbage and on the original esp32 the adc2 pins stop reading the moment wifi turns on 3. go for raspberry pi use it when your robot needs: - computer vision - ai and ml - ros 2 - heavy processing now you're running a computer inside your robot, with all of the upside and all of the cost linux decides when your code runs, so pwm timing jitters and servos twitch and pulling the power without a shutdown corrupts the sd card, which i learned twice also worth knowing, raspberry makes a real microcontroller too, the pico, about $4 so the quick version: never wired anything before -> arduino want wifi and the best price -> esp32 need vision or a camera -> raspberry pi and yes, you can use more than one arduino -> control esp32 -> connect raspberry pi -> compute that combination is what took me 4 months to understand the pi is the brain and the microcontroller is the spine, and a real robot wants both also, if you want to learn robotics engineering for 6 months, read the article below: