On the board you also have many hardware pins, mostly digital and analog inputs/outputs. With those pins you can do many things: read data from sensor (digital, analog, SPI, I2C, UART, …), create a PWM, control a motor with a special driver, communicate with other boards and devices, etc.

First of all you need to understand the fundamental differences between the two boards. Even if they are similar and can be both embedded – thanks to their size, they are two completely different kinds of boards.

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On Raspberry Pi you can achieve real time constraints for some parts of your application though, for example using the RT-Preempt patch. But it’s definitely more complicated and less suited if you need real-time for handling hardware devices and pins.

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Let’s now try to see the major differences between Arduino vs Raspberry Pi boards, by focusing on the real use you’ll make of each.

Arduino is meant for low level control, when you directly need to “talk” to the hardware. For anything more high-level and more complex, you’ll need something else – a Raspberry Pi for example!

ROS, aka Robot Operating System, is a great set of tools which allows you to develop robotics projects fast. ROS on a Raspberry Pi is really a great fit because you can embed it directly in your robot.

However, on Raspberry Pi, with Raspbian or Ubuntu for example, the operating system is managing the resources for you. You don’t really have control over that and if you run multiple programs at the same time, you can’t be sure that you’ll achieve real-time constraints with one specific program.

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Here you’ll be free to do everything you want, just like on your own computer. Use different languages, language versions, frameworks, etc.

A Raspberry Pi board contains a microprocessor. This microprocessor has an ARM architecture and can run a complete OS (Raspbian, Ubuntu). Basically you can use the Raspberry Pi just like you would use your own computer (with some performance limits though).

On your Raspberry Pi, you can use any language feature (ex: std::thread in Cpp, the threading library in Python) to create any thread you want.

To program on Arduino you’ll need to install the Arduino IDE and upload the program to your board, from your own computer.

Only on Raspberry Pi you can really use the full features of Cpp. Using the std library, exceptions, “new” and “delete” keywords (with smart pointers) is possible with Raspberry Pi, not with Arduino.

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An Arduino board will be largely enough, and the development time will be much lower. All the hardware functionalities are already integrated into the Arduino library, you can use them out of the box. For Raspberry Pi you’d need to install new libraries and the process will take longer.

With zero experience, you might find it easier to program on an Arduino board first vs Raspberry Pi. All you have to do it install the Arduino IDE on your computer, write a basic program and upload it. For Raspberry Pi, you’ll have to flash an OS in a microSD card, install it, configure your environment, etc. And a complete Raspberry Pi setup will also be more expensive than with Arduino.

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To conclude: make sure you first analyze what you really need in your application, before even choosing which board to use.

The Arduino language is a subset of C/Cpp. If you want to use all the Cpp functionalities in your code (like C++14 or C++17), well that’s not possible.

For example, using a Raspberry Pi with ROS, and connect it to an Arduino board for direct hardware control + real-time, is a great idea! You can also use Serial communication between those 2 boards.

Well, if you haven’t used any Arduino or Raspberry Pi boards before, and if you’re totally new to hardware and software, here are a few tips.

If you prefer to learn software, go with Raspberry Pi. Only with this board you will be able to program with Python, “real” Cpp, and other languages. You will still be able to connect a few hardware components with the GPIO header.

On Arduino, you have much lower CPU resources (about 100 times less than Raspberry Pi), and the memory (SRAM) is really, really small (a few KB). But!.. It doesn’t mean that the Arduino is worse than Raspberry Pi for everything. As you have only one program running in a loop (using powerful C/C++ language), in a single thread, you can easily determine how long a certain task will take, and make sure it will never take longer than what you decided.

For now, as you can see, the main difference is about the control component: microprocessor vs microcontroller. Also, you saw that both boards have similar hardware functionalities, but there are still big differences there.

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If your application requires true multithreading, only Raspberry Pi can do that. I wrote “true” multithreading because on Arduino, you can still code your program in a certain way so you can achieve something close. To know more about that, check out how to fake multithreading on Arduino.

On Arduino you will be limited to one thread with one control loop. That’s certainly not enough if you need to create a motion planning algorithm, remotely control your robot from a keyboard, stream images from a camera, and connect your robot to a web API.

This is the case when you have both a complex software application and real time specs, or if there are some things you can’t do on the GPIO header from the Pi.

You can plug a screen on the HDMI port, a keyboard and a mouse on the USB ports. One of the most well-known example of a Desktop application running on Raspberry Pi is Minecraft. You can play Minecraft quite easily with your Pi!

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The Raspberry Pi also has some hardware specifics features that you don’t find in a personal computer. On the Pi you have a 40 GPIO headers. Those GPIOs allow you to read data from sensors, give commands to an actuator, or even communicate with other Raspberry Pi/Arduino boards.

You want to create a nice robotics, electronics or home automation application and you wonder: when to use Arduino vs Raspberry Pi ?

The performance is different in many ways. On Raspberry Pi, you have much bigger CPU, multiple cores, and much more RAM, so basically you can run much bigger programs.

An Arduino board contains a microcontroller. Depending on the Arduino type you can have a different microcontroller – same family (ATMega) for Arduino Uno, Mega and Nano. A microcontroller is very different from a microprocessor. On an Arduino microcontroller you don’t get to install an OS. All you have is a program running in a loop.

You can easily install ROS on your Raspberry Pi. ROS needs a real operating system to work, for example Ubuntu, thus you can’t install it on Arduino.

If your application is just about reading data from a few sensors (ex: temperature, pressure, infrared), processing them, and activate some basic outputs… Well you certainly don’t need a Raspberry Pi for that.