ItвЂ™s the exact opposite case: IвЂ™d recommend a вЂњdifficultвЂќ but powerful environment and a simple chip. Pick an environment that maximally exposes the way the chip works, and pick a chip thatвЂ™s not so complicated that it completely overwhelms you. Sometimes small is beautifulД«ut my advice to the relative newbie who actually wants to learn the chip is the exact opposite. For these folks, an easy-to-use environment and a powerful chip is a great fit. All that abstraction is probably going to come with a performance cost, but thatвЂ™s what more powerful chips are for anyway. ThatвЂ™s what abstractions are for, after all - getting productive without having to understand the internals. And theyвЂ™re specified in the datasheet chapter that youвЂ™re going to have to read anyway to make sure youвЂ™re not missing anything important.ДЇor the вЂњget it doneвЂќ crowd, IвЂ™m totally happy recommending a simple-to-use environment that hides a lot of the details about how the chip works. Want to turn the USART peripheral on? You donвЂ™t need to instantiate an object of the right class and read up on an API, you just flip the right bits. After all, the engineers who design these microcontrollers, and the firms that sell them, live and die from building in the hardware functionality that the end-user (engineer) wants, so itвЂ™s all there waiting for you. His point being that he knows what the chip can do, and just wants to make it do its thing without any unnecessary layers of abstraction getting in the way. Or as an old friend of mine - an embedded assembly programmer - would say, вЂњwriting in Arduino is like knitting with boxing gloves on.вЂќ If you really want to understand whatвЂ™s going on with the chip, how the hardware works or at least what it does, and get beyond simply using other peopleвЂ™s libraries, I would claim that the Arduino environment is a speed bump.

This is well-trodden ground, and itвЂ™s very often plug-and-play.Д«ut the other 10% are in a tough position. And for these folks, I wouldnвЂ™t hesitate at all to recommend an Arduino variant - because the community support is excellent, and someone has written an add-on library for nearly every gizmo youвЂ™d want to attach. My guess is that people who answer вЂњget stuff doneвЂќ are the 90%. YouвЂ™re not going to lose your job by recommending Arduino, and itвЂ™s pretty hard to get the smoke out of one.Д«ut these days when someone new to microcontrollers asks what path they should take, IвЂ™ve started to answer back with a question: how interested are you in learning about microcontrollers themselves versus learning about making projects that happen to use them? ItвЂ™s like вЂњblue pill or red pillвЂќ: the answer to this question sets a path, and I wouldnвЂ™t recommend the same thing to people who answered differently.ДЇor people who just want to get stuff done, a library of easy-to-use firmware and a bunch of examples to crib learn from are paramount. And Arduino doesnвЂ™t necessarily mean AVR, but when it does, thatвЂ™s not a bad choice due to the relatively flexible current sourcing and sinking of the part. The Arduino recommendation is pretty easy to make, because thereвЂ™s a tremendous amount of newbie-friendly material available.

When beginners walk into this briar-patch by asking where to get started, it can be a little bewildering.

On the other hand, if the article involved a 32-bit processor or a single-board computer, the 8-bitters come out of the woodwork telling you that they could get the job done with an overclocked ATtiny85 running cycle-counted assembly. If the article featured an 8-bit microcontroller, an army of ARMies post that they would do it better, faster, stronger, and using less power on a 32-bit platform.

Whenever we write up a feature on a microcontroller or microcontroller project here on Hackaday, we inevitably get two diametrically opposed opinions in the comments.

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