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Comment by chromacity | Hacker News Reader

Even before the hikes, SBCs were $50-$100 a pop, compared to pennies for basic MCUs and maybe $4 for high-performance ones. People were clearly willing to pay 100x more just for familiarity and the ecosystem ("hats", forums, etc). I don't know if 300x is going to make more hobbyists see the light, or just result in fewer of them being able to afford the hobby?

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> People were clearly willing to pay 100x more just for familiarity and the ecosystem

This is obviously logical. If I know how to program in Python or JS but not C and am familiar with SSH, I can do something with a SBC in a few minutes.

I get paid $200/hr. If I spent even one hour to learn what I need to deal with a microcontroller, the time cost is four times the cost of materials if I stick with what I know.

How many small projects do I need to do in my free time before it's financially smart to learn a whole new technology?

Most of the "professional" microcontrollers have complicated flashing schemes, expensive bespoke IDEs, and limited language support. Treating a lot of that like a moat around their products.

I find it remarkable that they haven't tried to make all of that easier. Any board with arduino support is easy to start using, with pared down c++, boards similar to the micro:bit support micropython and javascript as well as a few others, and a ton of modern development boards have UF2 support.

UF2 is a step change in how easy it is to flash a binary onto a microcontroller. You hold down a button before connecting it to a USB port, and then it appears as a USB drive for you to drop a file onto, once it's done "copying" the board is flashed and will run your code as soon as it resets.

If you want to gain familiarity with a board, you can drop a .uf2 file with a REPL on it and run code on the board a line at a time.

As if it would make sense that spending 2hrs relaxing on the beach or gardening your orchids would cost $400 to you. Money not made is not money spent. If you were doing a hobby project for learning, you were not going to be working during that time anyways, so your hourly rate doesn't matter.

Microcontrollers don't really make sense for hobbyists (unless their hobby is programming microcontrollers, of course). They only make sense when you think about deploying an application at scale, at which point the per-unit price becomes important. OTOH, if your hobby project goes viral and you want to profit from selling SBCs with it preinstalled, a cheaper SBC is a plus, but that's not very likely to happen...

With LLMs, it's potentially a lot easier to use microcontrollers now, depending on how widely available the documentation is now.

That's an apples to oranges comparison. Might as well bring up how people pay thousands of dollars for FPGA boards.

No. Many hobbyists default to SBCs whether they need them or not. No one defaults to FPGA if they don't need it.

My point is that the FPGA boards are several orders of magnitude more expensive than the actual chip. To be fair you should be comparing between the cost of the SoC and the microcontroller.

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