Why should I buy an Arduino?

This might not be the best board to put this in, but I thought this was the best one. Feel free to move if it this is placed wrong, but let's jump to my question: "Should I buy an Arduino starter kit?" It will cost me €102 to get it to my house in Europe, it's quite a price when you have no income and when you are underage. Well that's not the thing holding me back to be completely honest with you, it's the capabilities. Not the capabilities of the device, but what I will be able to do with it. It's way easier for an adult to get everything they need for a project, not for me since here is money holding me back. Not that I'm poor, but because I of course need to save up my money like any other person would do of my age. What I mean is the following:

  • Will I be able to do what I want with it? I don't even know what I should do with it, I'm just interested in electronics and programming (I do web development and some Java now). Could this teach me stuff I would need later on in college/university since I plan to study Engineer Electronics or Engineer IT?
  • Should I buy it when I already have a Raspberry Pi? It is more limiting that a RPi, but I can for example write to small micro controllers.
  • Will I have time for it? I like to game and program, but when I have to do that and go to school? That will be a hard task sometimes, isn't it?

Those are kind of the main questions that are going on in my mind right now. I actually got one and only one idea for an Arduino project and that is the following:
I've got an alarm clock where I got everything from the insides, except for the switches on the side out of. Here is an imgur album so you can see when everything was still in there. But the main idea is that I would recreate the alarm clock with the 7 segment display from it, or I would use the 16x2 or 20x4 char LCD display I have or will have when I got the Arduino starter kit. It will do all of the basic stuff a normal alarm clock would do, but what extra functionality could I add to it with an Arduino? I don't really want to buy any expensive shields like a wifi shield or so, any ideas?

Will I be able to do what I want with it?

No. Then again no piece of electronics can ever do everything you want.

Should I buy it when I already have a Raspberry Pi?

Depends on what you want to do. the Pi is a Linux box with all the advantages and problems that brings. The Pi is very poor for real time programming where you need something happening within a second or two. The arduino is very good for this but is poor on things that need a lot of memory or processing speed.
Want to play with images, do it on a Pi not an arduino. Want to control motors, LEDs and read pots then get an Arduino.

Will I have time for it?

No, there is never enough time to do everything. You have to be selective. You do this, you don't do something else.

Grumpy_Mike:

Should I buy it when I already have a Raspberry Pi?

Depends on what you want to do. the Pi is a Linux box with all the advantages and problems that brings. The Pi is very poor for real time programming where you need something happening within a second or two. The arduino is very good for this but is poor on things that need a lot of memory or processing speed.
Want to play with images, do it on a Pi not an arduino. Want to control motors, LEDs and read pots then get an Arduino.

Could I use the Raspberry Pi as a remote control if I connect it to the Arduino in some way and to the internet via WiFi? How much power would it take to power the RPi when there is a WiFi dongle and the Arduino in the USB sockets?

You have to be more specific than that. Just controlling things through the Internet is something you can do with the Pi alone.

Grumpy_Mike:
You have to be more specific than that. Just controlling things through the Internet is something you can do with the Pi alone.

I mean for example that the Pi is a PHP webserver and when someone visits the website, a signal gets sent to the Arduino to do something. But I think I'll buy the starterkit, there are a lot of things I can do with it that you can't do with a Pi for example the analog in- and outputs are very useful. I can even make a analog to digital converter out of the Arduino.