The Internet of Things – A Disaster
There is a battle between the old school people who want to do everything with microcontrollers and who measure RAM in Kilobytes, and the new generation who want to embed a full microprocessor + OS in everything.<p>When it comes to capabilities, the people arguing for entire OSs generally win. Go with Linux, get an HTTPS stack, get XML parsing, get JSON parsing, don't worry so much about RAM. And heck, the price different between a microprocessor and a microcontroller is minimal now days, a couple bucks in large quantity (especially if you have to outfit the microcontroller with more chips to add functionality).<p>The microcontroller people are right in one way though. Their products are simpler. Battery life will be better (it is easier to control power usage when you start with nothing and build up, then trying to minimize an entire OS down) and the code will be purpose built with less complexity to it.<p>The ESP8266, ESP32, and Arduino are one view of things, Raspberry Pi and "Things with Android Running On Them" are another.<p>Of course against all of this, the analog EEs laugh at us and continue to make things that just /work/.