 Hi, so you want to learn robotics, electronics, coding? Well, I'm here to tell you that stay away from the Raspberry Pi or Arduino. That's the worst way for a beginner to start in my opinion. Make sure and please do note that this video pertains only to beginners who have zero experience of electronics, coding, robotics, making, and they want to venture out and learn about these things. I think that the Arduino and the Raspberry Pi are horrible. And here, let's start the Arduino, right? Well, first of all, to do any sort of programming on the Arduino, we need to know how to write code. And I'm not talking about simple code. We need to write, like, C Java style code with that sort of syntax. And the issue with this is that for something as simple as turning on a light, right? Just one LED. You want to turn on an LED, then turn it off, turn it on, turn it off, just like a blink program, like on, off, on, off. To do this, the code that you need looks something like this. That's very complicated just for simply turning on a light and turning it off. Now, of course, as you learn programming and get more comfortable, this will look easy to you. But as a beginner, something as simple as this can be really daunting, off-footing, and scary. So we're going to avoid that. Secondly, the Arduino, if you want to make any sort of project on it, you will need to understand basic, I mean, you need to understand basic wiring, basic electronics, right? How do I put things together? How do I attach this sensor? How do I attach this motor, this screen? I mean, basic things, right? Like even the LED I was talking about, sure, the Arduino Uno, which is the most popular Arduino out there, has one tiny little LED built-in, but it's just one LED you can't really do much, much more than like, you know, turn it on, turn it off. That's a very boring progression, right? So if you're going to do anything more interesting, you need to learn how to wire electronics, right? And lastly, why I think the Arduino is in great is that the built-in, I mean, the default IDE, IDE stands for Integrated Development Environment. I think the built-in IDE is actually quite bad. It's not very user-friendly. Things are kind of hidden away. They're not explained very well. And if you have any errors in your code, which as a beginner and even as experts, everyone does have errors in their code. Like, as in, like, they'll try compiling the code. They'll have a bug or two that they'll need to fix before it runs, right? So if you have, if you, especially as a beginner, right, if you get an error, the Arduino doesn't, isn't very clear with the error. Like, it'll give you the error, it'll tell you the line. But the error will be presented in a very technical, you know, scary sort of way, which is not very friendly to beginners and can actually really scare beginners away. So I recommend you stay out of the, you don't pick the Arduino. OK, next up, let's talk about the Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi is great as well. It's a great platform. It's very powerful. It's really cheap and it's a full-fledged computer. But it's, again, absolutely horrible for beginners, in my opinion. If you don't have any experience in robotics, coding, electronics or computers, right, the thing that the thing about the Raspberry Pi is it's definitely a step up from the Arduino. You can you can still do a lot of programming, similar sort of programming in Python, Siege or whatever you want, right? In fact, that's a bit of the flexibility. You can choose a wide range of a myriad of programming languages. But again, it's it can be a bit daunting because it's a full computer just to get the Raspberry Pi running. You need a micro SD card on that micro SD card. You need to erase that. You need to flash a full, you know, operating system, which is Linux in this case. And if you haven't used Linux, it can be a little scary, especially if since when we boot up this Linux system, it won't boot up into your normal graphical sort of interface and boot up into a very text sort of interface. Of course, you can go in and change this, but as a beginner, this looks a little bit scary and it can be off-putting. Furthermore, just to set up the Raspberry Pi, just to do anything on it, you will need a computer screen. You will need a keyboard and a mouse, right? And usually all these peripherals just add complexity. You need wireless wireless communication if you have a new Raspberry Pi, Wi-Fi is built in, which is great. But on older Raspberry Pi, there is no Wi-Fi. You have to use Ethernet or Wi-Fi adapter. You have to set that up and it just gets really complicated. Just to run a simple piece of code, it can take you an hour or two to set everything up just to turn on something simple like a light, right? Turning on a small LED, turning off a small LED. Again, the Raspberry Pi is incredibly powerful, but it's even much, much, much more complicated than an Arduino. And I know there will be some people who say, well, you can SSH into the Raspberry Pi, which means you don't need a monitor, a keyboard or a mouse. But SSH is even more complicated for a beginner and networking can be scary. So I think the Raspberry Pi should be a second step after the Arduino. Anyway, so I've been talking to you guys about why you shouldn't get the Raspberry Pi or why you shouldn't get the Arduino as a pure beginner. Well, what should you get instead? I think you should get the micro bit. The micro bit is a great platform. In fact, it's built for education, right? It's built for teaching people how to learn robotics, how to get into electronics, coding, and it's a fantastic program. First of all, it's small, right? It's tiny. It just weighs 8.5 grams. But the beautiful thing is it has tons of sensors built in. The Arduino, remember I talked about the Arduino? It has one small measly LED built in the Raspberry Pi. It has nothing built in in terms of sensors, right? If you want to, you start using any sort of sensors or output device. I mean, sure, you have USB ports, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, but those aren't like, you know, your traditional sort of sensors, like buttons or, you know, accelerometer, gyroscopes, simple sensors like that. The micro bit, on the other hand, has tons of sensors built in. Yes, it has Bluetooth, but it has two buttons. It has a full screen that's built in. It has, you know, an accelerometer that can detect motion. So like if you're moving up, down, which way this micro bit is tilted. If you're shaking your micro bit, it also has a temperature sensor built in and a couple of the smaller sensors. And another beautiful thing about the micro bit is that it's alligator clip friendly. This is not a big factor, but the Arduino and the Raspberry Pi use small headers while the micro bit uses big alligator clip friendly pins. And the good thing about these are that they're labeled and just because there's so few pins, right, that are easily accessible, it's a lot less confusing and a lot less scary compared to an Arduino or Raspberry Pi, which have 15, 20, 30, 40 pins, right, depending on the model you choose. Another really great point about the micro bit is that it can be programmed from a web browser, which means that unlike the Raspberry Pi, which is programmed mostly on the Raspberry Pi or the Arduino, which you need a computer to program, you can program the micro bit on your phone, on your tablet, on your laptop, anything or even a watch. If the watch runs a web operating, I mean, if we can run a browser and if it can, if it has Bluetooth, you can program the micro bit because all you need to program the micro bit is just a web browser that can that has an internet connection and Bluetooth because the micro bit can flash code over Bluetooth. Obviously, you can also connect it by a USB cable into your computer and flash code that way. And lastly, and I think the most important point is that the micro bit uses picture-based programming. This is what graphical programming looks like. And graphical programming is great because graphical programming helps you understand exactly what's going on. There's some sort of blocks such as, you know, like data blocks that can only fit inside data slots. There are conditionals or conditions, I mean, comparative blocks to compare in something that can only fit inside those. It's like a puzzle, right? You can fit some pieces and only into some other pieces. So there's less chance of messing up your puzzle. And the beautiful thing about make code is that if you click on the top corner, on the top middle, right next to the block, there's JavaScript. So you can see, as you're learning, because, of course, graphical programming is a stepping stone into real text-based programming, right? So you can click on any project that you make. You can click on the, you can click on JavaScript and you can see exactly why, you know, exactly what each block is doing and what, you know, the code looks like for it. And another beautiful thing is that a lot of first-time programmers want to learn Python. Well, the Microbit also supports Python. So you can, you know, program it in Python and play around and see how that works. So, yeah, the Microbit, all in all, is a much better option. In my opinion, for any beginner who has zero experience and wants an easy, trouble-free, you know, learning experience. And don't get me wrong, the Arduino and the Raspberry Pi are great. The first device, the first microcontroller that I ever got was an Arduino and I still have it to this day. I like it, but I still believe that the Microbit is a better platform to begin with. In fact, in TinkerSwap, when you teach kids, I've taught about 15 to 20 kids all on the Microbit and they seem to love it a lot more. And in fact, if you want a full-fledged course on the Microbit, then you can go ahead on tinkerswap.com and I've made a whole five and a half hour course with 45 lectures. You know, mastering electronics, programming on the Microbit. So, yeah, go check it out and I hope you see that. Thanks.