Hacker News Reader

Why is Arduino so popular? Brand name recognition, a decent standard library, and a ton of sample code and tutorials online.

I agree that it's not a great platform, though. I personally prefer STM32 these days; it's dirt cheap (a basic development board is <$5) and powerful (72 MHz / 20 KB RAM / 128 KB flash on one of those boards). I believe there's even a way to integrate it into the Arduino IDE nowadays!

Arduino is popular because it was the first one that got big and built up a community. It's the same reason the RPi is so popular despite not being especially compelling from a pure spec standpoint.

You can get more performance for less money with other boards, but you'll have to figure out a lot more stuff on your own.

IME Arduino is so popular because it's so cheap. I can buy Arduino ProMicros on Alibaba cheaper than I can buy the Mega168 MCU itself. And that's not counting the PCB, additional chips or board.