What you can do, and what you can’t do with an Arduino board
An Arduino board is composed of a microcontroller, some LEDs, a reset button, and many pins that you can use for input/output operations.
With so many pins available, you can easily read data from sensors, or control different motors and actuators. That is what makes Arduino great for learning robotics. It’s kind of an all-in-one tool to interface all the hardware you need to control.
But don’t think about artificial intelligence, 3D visualization and other heavy algorithms. Microcontrollers are not powerful enough, and it is not the purpose of using an Arduino board. Arduino is mostly used to do input/output operations, and small computations.
Don’t worry though, you can still do amazing stuff with just an Arduino board and a few motors and sensors ! There are more than enough resources to learn robotics with Arduino.
And then, if you want to learn deeper robotics concepts and add an intelligence layer to make your system more clever, you can just control your Arduino board from another computer (like a Raspberry Pi board), there are many easy ways to do that.
What is the Raspberry Pi?
The Raspberry Pi has produced a quiet revolution over the past 7 years. At the simplest, it is a tiny, low-cost computer the size of a credit card which was designed for educational purposes. But, it’s so much more than that.
The Raspberry Pi is basically a single, credit-card sized computer. It has an ARM/Broadcom SoC (System on Chip) with a GPU, RAM and both wireless and wired connectivity options.
In one way it’s that simple: Raspberry Pi is just a tiny computer.
But, in another way, it’s not that simple at all. Raspberry Pi is a highly-flexible platform that gives you the power to build whatever you want to build.