Electron wrote:
<snip the girlfriend stuff as I don't have your experience <g> >

> Or, a different example may be that with a ready-to-use system you gain
> immediately but lose as an investment, with your own system you make more
> efforts at the begin but then you fly.

As a (now retired) "pro" I have four different Arduinos on the shelf in
front of me. Alongside is a small stack consisting of a homebrew PCB
with Atmega 1284 with similar (homemade) Ethernet shield, a Nokia 3310
display/joystick board and a RTC/SD card data logging board. This has
been monitoring the house central heating, water and temperature
humidity since July.

I have used the Arduinos previously as a quick "proof of concept" for
clients e.g. monitoring the power consumption of a remote site over GSM.
After that the real design starts - but without the client have to pay
and wait for PCB design/debugging, component purchase/delivery etc
before the real start of the project.
I think this is where their usefulness lies to the "pro".

George Smith
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