Has any body here on game dev played with a Arduino.

I just got my first card, starter pack today.

I have played around with them as part of my job, and they are not fun to deal with out in the field.

My own opinion:

Under powered, unreliable and over priced.

Not sure if Arduino is meant for video games. They are better off used as a tool to hack some hardware together doing some hardware stuff.

I've tinkered with a bunch of different arduino-compatible devices.

From the original arduino, to newer smaller versions running on 32 bit arm at 96MHz (teensy3), and some multicopter control boards using arduino compatible hardware.

I think they are pretty awesome for what they are built for, which is to quickly hack together hardware projects that need a bit of control signals and/or a few sensors.

Specially the software and IDE really cuts time and complexity until you get something up and running. (and you are not limited to processing, its easy to extend with c/c++ code)

Definitely "underpowered" for games, at least the ones that run 8 bit AVRs, but they're not meant for games.

Never had any reliability problems, but have never had to use them professionally or in bad conditions. But any prototype hardware would have problems in those cases, regardless if you use arduino or not.

@Code Fox: what do you compare with when you think they are overpriced?

@Code Fox: what do you compare with when you think they are overpriced?

.

One project I was involved with had me changing out quite a few Arbuino based controller cards. ( I will not name companies involved )

I read one of the billing slips - $425 per unit.

I can not legally say exactly what they were used for, however I can say they burned out ALL the time. The company was "too cheap" to buy a real controller card which cost around $700 each.

I am kind of curious as to how they are overpriced for small orders. I can get a better price/performance ratio and unit cost on other gear from different companies, but it means buying a pallet or more of the things, which tends to push the total cost a few orders of magnitude over what a handful of Arduino units for rapid concept prototyping would be. If you're going to produce a million units for sale, then yeah, you go with something more suited to a production based task, but in the field that they're designed for? Well I can't think of any system that is as cheap and easily accessible without having to run through the hassle and setup a business account with a supplier.

?I've used the things in a number of projects, but really haven't done much with them in the last while, and I can't say that I've ever had issues with reliability of the units themselves. Did have dodgy power supplies once, but that wasn't an issue besides the one board we kind of blew up. (There was also the issue with the drone we crashed... But that was totally our fault and not the fault of the chips.)

One project I was involved with had me changing out quite a few Arbuino based controller cards.

Ah I see, it was some arduino based product. The Arduino hardware was probably a small part of the cost then. Just an arduino itself costs about $20.

Also sounds like they had bad electrical design, again not really arduinos fault.

I almost did.

But then I wanted a Raspberry 2 instead since Arduino struck me as pretty expensive for a thingie that can basically monitor a temperature sensor (or similar) and flip a relais when some set of conditions is fulfilled. And you need shields (which cost extra) for everything, on top.

Raspberry is almost the same price and it's not just a microcontroller, but a "real" little computer. And then I saw that an Odroid XU4 is only 20€ more expensive, with twice the RAM and gigabit ethernet, and it has the power of a small desktop computer. Which is fucking awesome for something of that size with this power consumption. So that was like "Woooooah", and it's what I finally got. Indeed, since the Odroid is only 1/3 slower than my desktop for tasks like compiling C++, I'm thinking about getting another 5 or 6 of them and setting up a networked compile cluster...

Of course it's not nearly the same thing, I'm aware of that.

The good thing and the terrible thing about the Raspberry pi is that it isn't a microcontroller. It can do microcontroller like tasks, but getting it to act like one with the response time of an actual microcontroller is a tricky and annoying task in many cases, and not to mention how much more power a Pi needs to run. Different tools for different tasks.

getting it to act like one with the response time of an actual microcontroller is a tricky and annoying task in many cases

The near-zero power consumption is of course an argument. I hear you can run Arduino weeks with a small battery. Sure thing, that won't work with any of the other devices.

On the other hand, short of tasks like keeping a quadcopter in the air, are there really many tasks where the "microcontroller ability" is that important?

I'm not asking to troll, but I'm genuinely wondering what advantage one might gain (latency-wise, realtime-wise) from a 16MHz realtime processor compared to a 1.4GHz ARM processor. Wich, frankly, could introduce a delay of 875 cycles for whatever reason, and still be "as much realtime" as the microcontroller. But if RT is absolutely important, that's pretty easy to get under Linux anyway (just set the scheduler policy accordingly for your process). Or is there something that I'm missing?