I would argue the RP2040/2350 fills that niche. Cheap, available, easy to program, flexible peripherals, fast enough for many projects, good documentation, and good community support.
RPi's toolchain situation is awful for beginners/hobbyists. CMake and non-manifest-versioned toolchains are a huge barrier to entry. I'd love to use the hardware but have given up multiple times because I'd rather spend my time writing code than wrestling with toolchain setup. And they won't support platformio which could make things massively easier for beginners to set up.
I've never used their toolchain, I use Rust on the RP2040 and it's a breeze to set up.
But yeah there's also CircuitPython where you literally drag and drop a firmware blob onto the volume that shows up when plugging in an RP2040 board, and then you're just editing a Python-esque script to do stuff. Not sure what could be easier when it comes to starting with embedded stuff. You can even use the Arduino IDE with RP2040 boards if you like.
I'm using the RP2040s with FreeRTOS for a hobby project. I think the Pico probe is a much better debugging story than buying a Blackmagic (or if you got the dough, a Segger), to debug the "modern" Arduinos. I have one of the Atmel programmers for the Uno R3/2560/Mega boards and that's nice.
But for people getting started, the ability to just plug in an Uno R3 and stack a motor controller shield on it, is pretty attractive. I like the Cytron break out boards for the Picos, but I still think the path from opening the box to working thing is still easiest with Arduino.
Once you know what you're doing, (and maybe that's when you realize you need a debugger), you move on to something else. And with the Pico I can spend the $800 on an O-scope instead of the Segger.
Even better. The LFE5U-12F is just a 25F in terms of resources you can full utilize it with nextpnr. I expect lattice didn't find it economical to have a truly separate production process for it.
I, too, remember when Obama has the FCC commissioner threaten to revoke broadcast licenses for the coverage of his tan suit.
This type of both-sides-ism is dumb, especially here when one side is using the power of the federal government to get dissenting voices taken off the air.
I see this "high-ranking elected officials" vs. "A few anonymous nobodies on Reddit and Twitter (now Bluesky I guess)" type of false equivalence all the time.
In the 2019 through at least 2022, Government agencies were "recommending" and "cautioning" social media companies on topics such as COVID and stories about laptops.
2. There is an important difference between a bureaucrat calling up someone at Facebook at arguing a position about policy and the chair of the FCC threatening to remove broadcast licenses. Notable, Supreme Court has even weighed in on the former and found it well within the rights of the government to do.
I included the earlier dates to capture the various government agencies comments on Hunter Biden's laptop, which I doubt that you can claim Trump was directing.
As for point 2, I am not aware of any of the government directed censorship going reaching the Supreme Court.
>On July 20, White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield appeared on MSNBC. Host Mika Brzezinski asked Bedingfield about Biden's efforts to counter vaccine misinformation; apparently dissatisfied with Bedingfield's response that Biden would continue to "call it out," Brzezinski raised the specter of amending Section 230—the federal statute that shields tech platforms from liability—in order to punish social media companies explicitly.
>In April 2021, White House advisers met with Twitter content moderators. The moderators believed the meeting had gone well, but noted in a private Slack discussion that they had fielded "one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn't been kicked off from the platform."
Is there a difference between the White House stating they are looking at Section 230 and asking why this one guy has not been banned?
False speech does not have the same Constitutional protections as true speech. That's why, for example, you can be prosecuted for defamation, fraud, or false advertising.
However, the Constitution also sometimes protects intentionally false speech such as parody and comedy.
US banks literally collapsed the world financial system in 2008. You don't deserve humble regulation after that. They got, and they deserved, the Dodd-Frank Act, which has now been significantly rolled back.
