This is pretty cool, but imo raspberrypi is making micro-controllers obsolete. Why would you bother with such a limited environment when you can have a full linux environment + GPIO for like $10 more.
In many cases, sure, however there are definitely cases where microcontrollers still make sense, i.e. real-time control, low power applications.
I work in embedded systems, and a lot of the reason you would choose a microcontroller is all of the peripherals that are also part of the chip. For example, if you are doing a project where you need to control motors, you can get a micro with a lot of built in high resolution timers , built in hardware for motor commutation, decoding of encoder signals, high speed analog inputs for feedback, etc. You would also typically AVOID having a linux environment, and opt for either a hand coded loop, or an RTOS which gives predictable, deterministic performance.
In my particular industry (robotics), we definitely do like to use a more powerful computer with linux or some other high level OS on it for a lot of the high level intelligence, so a lot of what you end up seeing is almost a 'distributed system on a board', where you have a more powerful processor providing the intelligence, which then issues commands to the less powerful microcontrollers which do things like control motor torque, sample sensors, etc...
This doesn't even get into things like power consumption...simply put you can have microcontroller based systems run for months on a single coin cell battery, which is going to be a hell of a lot harder to pull off on a RasPi / linux based system.
All that said, for a lot of projects where you just want to monitor a few simple sensors, or do a basic home automation type of project, a RasPi can be a great choice! (Even if my inner engineer is screaming 'your over complicating it!') But there is definitely still a huge need and use for micro-controllers as well.
Thanks for the details. Yeah that makes a lot of sense. I was looking at it from a home automation perspective. I have both a photon particle and a raspi. The raspi just opens so many more doors for me, but power consumption is not an issue since I always have it plugged in.
More fail safe (like Arduino is). Just plug the power in, instantly booting up and no worry to damage something if you just cut the power without shutting things down. And more energy efficient. You can't compare this Chirimen board to a Raspberry Pi, nor can you compare it to a Arduino. They are different. Maybe you can compare it to a Espruino board (but not really). They all will have their niche.
