retrolefty:
Welcome back. Biggest change if you haven't kept up with the arduino product line is that the platform and IDE has become a lot more complex with boards like the Leonardo, 32 bit arm based Due board, brand new Esplora board. So the breath of new users and questions and problems they bring forth seem to have jumped up significantly. IDE has lots of new features but breaks a lot of things from the pre IDE 1.0 version. On the other hand the amount of external shields and modules and devices that can be used with the arduino boards is booming it seems and more affordable then ever.Hell even retail Radio Shack stores are now selling arduino boards and some shields, didn't see that one coming.
Anyway glad to have you back and getting it going again.
Lefty
Cheers!
I've kept a bit of an eye on the IDE changes and new boards (more on that later...) but I haven't used anything since the initial 1.0 release and Uno.
Not sure how much the Due is going to do with the popularity of boards such as the Raspberry Pi personally, but I suppose we'll just have to wait and see.
For me, Arduino is good because it's generally simple code for a simple microcontroller, doing simple things. Moving away from DIP chips and towards more powerful, impossible to DIY components isn't ideal in my mind.
The Esplora looks like an interesting step but as usual, it seems they've kept it all secret before release and as such, missed out on a trick or two - where's the on-board wireless? Hell not even a standard wireless footprint is included.