Re: new here

On Sun, 25 Aug 2024 21:29:30 -0400, avi.e.gross wrote:

If everyone will pardon my curiosity, who and what purposes are these
smaller environments for and do many people use them?
 
I mean the price of a typical minimal laptop is not a big deal today. So
are these for some sort of embedded uses?
 
I read about them ages ago but wonder ...

Typically they are used for I/O with the physical world. Some, like the
Arduino Nano Sense, have a number of sensors on the board including a 9
axis inertial, temperature, humidity, barometric, microphone, light
intensity, and color sensors. MIT chose this for their TinyML course
because it was one-stop shopping. Using TinyML, a really cut down version
of TensorFlow, gesture, wake word, image recognition, and other tasks were
move entirely to the edge device.

Others, like the Pico series, bring out the I/O pins but have little
onboard. Many pins are multi-purpose and are used for SPI or I2C
protocols, PWM, A/D measurements, and plain vanilla digital.

The Raspberry Pi series lives in both worlds. Particularly with the new Pi
5, it's usable as a desktop Linux system, if somewhat limited, while
bringing out the PIO pins.

It's really a different world than a typical laptop. Years (decades?) ago
you could subvert the parallel port controller to provide digital I/O but
who has seen a parallel port lately?

There are many families and devices available that are used for any number
of projects that need to interact with the real world. The earliest
variants were usually programmed in assembler since 2k of EPROM and 128
bytes of RAM was typical.  As they improved C was sued. Now there's enough
flash and SRAM to support MicroPython or CircuitPython and they are fast
enough for most purposes. There are specialized drivers but if you know
Python the bulk of the logic will be very familiar.

For example I have a desktop Python app that pulls weather data from
NOAA's web API.  The Pico W has Wifi, so if I wanted to compare NOAA's
temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure to the values I read from a
local sensor, the API requests and parsing the JSON reply would be almost
identical to the desktop code.  Conversely I could use the Pico W as a web
server to make its sensor reading available.