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I actually felt a little bad when I electrified my son's play kitchen to add lights and went for an Arduino Nano. That's a bunch of lights along with some programming (microwave timer and state machine, dimming when idle, undimming upon any input, PWM brightness control for the burners) running on a 16 MHz µC, which is most likely overkill for that. On the other hand it was cheap and programming it was accessible.

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The interesting thing is that the microcontroller in the Nano - Atmega328P - is really a massive overkill but for a wholy different reason: price.

Even back in 2015 the AVR based Atmega328P was more expensive than quite a few Cortex M0 based STM32 offerings (when comparing price for same quantities of course). And those MCUs had literaly by an order of magnitude bigger SRAM and the ARM core and STM32 peripheries vere obscenly more capable and I cannot stress this enough. Now the difference is even bigger and AVR based MCU are expensive almost-unobtanium for legacy designs.

Calling AVR MCUs cheap is my trigger since 2015 when I and my collegues were browsing Farnell eshop looking for a cheap MCUs for various gizmos we were working on.

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