@cardo: I don't understand what argument you're trying to make, I said Arduino is ****ty and you're saying it's ****ty too, so we agree. I was saying there are much better boards out there now.
Sorry, I replied without having seen your other reply. I agree that Arduino is nice for home projects and prototyping in certain situations (NASA uses them for prototyping and proof of concept, for example) but never for industrial applications. And the same goes for a raspberry pi sort of board too unless you take the time and expense of proving it.
I don't understand the 'art student' bit either, the primary users of these boards are from technical fields. People are doing very advanced things with these (not necessarily Arduinos, hobby boards in general).
From Arduino's website:
Arduino was born at the Ivrea Interaction Design Institute as an easy tool for fast prototyping, aimed at students without a background in electronics and programming.
You can look about the motivations behind it and projects and you'll see the creators give quite a lot of enphasis on art students being able to create things based in electronics. That's where the art student comes from.
And yes, even with Arduinos are doing advanced things... I have one connected to the internet querying Transport for London about when is the next bus arriving near my door. Sure, most of the smarts is in a server somewhere, but it's still pretty amazing what an 8 bit processor is doing.
But I would never even consider having one of those in an industrial facility controlling a process.
Regarding RPi, you would use it or a PC instead of a PLC for things that a PLC can't do, like FFTing analog signals, or running a database, or higher precision math. FYI, RPis are on plant floors right now.
Siemens, one of the largest and most popular industrial automation companies on the face of the planet, came out with this:
http://w3.siemens.com/mcms/pc-based-automation/en/industrial-iot/pages/default.aspx a Linux IoT gateway compatible with the Arduino's pinout. What does that tell you?
The RPi's on the plant floor aren't replacing the PLC... they are replacing a computer running windows or linux. The problem with that sort of thing is that someone will have to support it and that may be where companies won't get behind it.
Intel, the largest processor manufacturer in the planet launched development boards aimed at the developer community... they killed them off one or two weeks ago, what does that tell you?
Siemens makes anything through which electrons go through... they are taking a punt with this. It may pay off, or it may not... and for sure they have that into account.
Also, there are a lot of people jumping on the IoT bandwagon... but I'm not so sure that it's not more than a fad. Time will tell, I guess.