= It is hard to do something useful with a devboard
{tag=Essays by Ciro Santilli}
In the 2010's/2020's, many people got excited about getting children in to <electronics> with cheap <devboards>, notably with <Raspberry Pi> and <Arduino>.
While there is some potential in that, <Ciro Santilli> always felt that this is very difficult to do, while also keeping his sacred principle of <backward design> in mind.
The reason for this is that "everyone" already has much more powerful computers at hand: their laptops/desktops and even <mobile phones> as of the 2020s. Except perhaps if you are thing specifically about poor countries.
Therefore, the advantage using such devboards for doing something that could useful must come from either:
* their low cost. This would be an important consideration if you were to mass produce your product, but that is not going to be the case for learners, at least initially.
* their portability, and closely linked their ability to act as sensors
* their ability to act as <actuators>, which is often missing from regular computers
* them having <hardware accelerators> that are not normally present in regular computers, e.g. <FPGAs> or <AI accelerators>. And then the demo project must demonstrate that the project is able to do something significantly faster/cheaper on the devboard than on a desktop computer.
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