Russ Hensel
New Member
You seem a little confused?, an Arduino is just a board containing an AVR, not a device of it's own.
Not confused, and not just a board containing an AVR. The Arduino is a whole ecosystem of hardware and software, pretty much all open source. It also has a very active user base and very extensive library support.
I suspect it is the single largest community of uC users in a single environment ( The PIC is broken up by all sorts of versions of the chip and different languages and compilers )
With any uC you have to add a clock, power supply.... There are many ways to do this and the Arduino makes it simple by making all these decisions for you. Board is pretty close to cost of parts so if you want to roll your own you need some good reason.