Ask HN: Raspberry Pi or something new to start hacking hardware?

[phatak-dev]

Hi HN,

I am new to the DIY hardware. Recently I played with friend's pi and really loved it. So I wanted to buy one for myself. But I see there are many alternatives have come out in last two years which are more powerful than the pi hardware. So it made me think is it buying pi is still good option or there is something better in market?

Thank you

[shams93]

The funny thing is for my application, wanting to use a small box for midi sequencing, even though machines like the bananapi or the odroid have much more firepower the guys who develop their system images always leave all the midi stuff out, which the raspberry pi gives you full midi hardware support, even though the banana pi or odroid are like 4 boxes put together.

[rebugger]

IMHO the Raspberry Pi brings a lot of processing power - depending on what you'll do, that might be more than enough. It brings a lot of addon-boards, tutorials and a good community, so it might be a good starting point.

[secfirstmd]

Depends what you want to do but for hardware many people would recommend Arduino.

http://www.arduino.cc