Why embedded software development is harder

A pretty good summary.

If it were me, I would insist some more on the hardware and the delay of hardware.

Have a "bug" in your circuit board? The most mundane thing, you planned room for a 5mm component but it's slightly larger and it can't fit.

It takes 5 minutes to adjust the schematics. It will take minimum 2 weeks to manufacture a new board and until it's delivered to your lab.

The project is now 2 weeks late.

I'm endlessly amazed that the Arduino platform is as hard as it is to code for. The editor is ridiculous and there's absolutely no API guide or look up for what you can do on it.

Every criticism I give is met with "but it's for kids so shut up!" - but that makes my point more valid!

Image how much easier it would be for kids to learn if it auto suggested words and things like any decent ide, or highlighted why their code won't work before they try to flash it, and had useful links and resources to how to do things.

I use to work in professionally teaching people Arduino and writing other programming stuff. I'd rather keep them away from Arduino, there's no room for self-learning at all. It's only for people who already know C.

"Normal" software can be hard too if you get to do big-brain algorithm stuff like computational geometry. My experience was that I just didn't get to do that kind of thing very often.

Also there are less of those religious arguments over code style in embedded since it's all written in C and will look like ass no matter what.