restlessdrifter692 said:Harold Jones5, I can't quite follow what you wrote there, but I assume they're just different variations on the same theme (I'm a total amateur when it comes to electronics and programming).
Arduino is built on Atmel AVR ATMega chips that come pre-loaded with a bootloader. It’s mostly for hobbyists and people just starting out in electronics. ARM and MIPS are a bit more "serious" processors, generally used for commercial products, though I've seen some hobbyists tackle them too—usually professionals playing around with gear in their spare time. Look, a chip by itself is useless; it has to be "connected" to something to be functional, running some kind of program. That is exactly what Arduino is: a bridge between the chip and the world. You have USB and GPIO pins where you plug in things Arduino calls "shields"—which are basically just daughterboards. It’s a very "Lego-like" system; for many projects, you won't even need a soldering iron. The basic principle is picking up a signal (analog), feeding it to a processor that processes it, and then sending a signal back out through an "output." Now, that signal could be a simple high-low toggle or various "protocols" that actually carry data (like serial TX/RX, interrupts, or SPI) which need to be interpreted. You start small, like turning on an LED via a digital output (I'm not entirely sure if there are analog outputs or just digital ones here), and from there, the possibilities slowly open up. First, you might want to fade an LED, and you'll quickly learn that simply lowering the voltage on an analog output won't give you the results you expect because an LED doesn't work like a tungsten filament bulb. That's when you discover PWM, which uses a digital output to simulate the effect, and that's how the learning curve starts.
Eventually, you'll move on to increasingly complex tasks. Depending on how fast you learn, within six months to six years, you'll find the memory is too small and the processing speed is too slow. You'll jump to a more powerful processor, then an even stronger one, perhaps one with specific capabilities like parallel processing (where you'll learn about vectorization and SIMD), or ultra-low power consumption. Eventually, you might even want a processor that handles certain tasks in hardware that you would otherwise have to program, which is where Intel enters the picture... and so on.
