Arduino is part of my life and has been for years now: I constantly use the homemade, Arduino-based appliances in my home the same way I use appliances other people made. But while I'm hooked on building out my world the way I like it, sometimes a project only needs a handful of pins, so I just ordered a few
ATtiny85 and
2313's to try my hand at [gulp] proper AVR programming. It's too bad that Arduino is going toward the high end with the Due instead of toward the low end with smaller, simpler circuits and chips, but I'm happy to
go elsewhere to learn. I could hot-wire the Arduino environment to program an ATtiny, but I'd like to try transitioning to a more fully-featured IDE for future development anyway, so programming an ATtiny will be a good sub-project.
Speaking of "the high end," the
$25 Raspberry Pi has been on my radar for some simple camera-based installed projects, and I'm even more excited after
hacking around with a $25 WiFi access point and OpenWrt... wow! Amazing how much power can be had for so cheap, and how many how-to's can help you along.
