Oh, that&#x27;s a nicer one than the others I found. I see that sort of thing as being useful in situations where the PC is required anyway, like a lot of automated lab setups. You need the PC for data acquisition and analysis, and it&#x27;s nice if you can control the rest of the equipment from the same program. I&#x27;ve used Measurement Computing&#x27;s digital IO and data acquisition boards for that sort of thing.<p>Having a separate microcontroller has its uses too, of course. Like you said, it certainly packages smaller. Plus, you can get much more reliable timing. I&#x27;m currently helping a friend with an antenna rotator project, and that requires some brains right at the motor&#x2F;encoder unit. For that I&#x27;ve written some software to reliably send control data packets back and forth, which is necessary but adds quite a bit of complexity.