Ask HN: Raspberry Pi or something new to start hacking hardware?

The funny thing is for my application, wanting to use a small box for midi sequencing, even though machines like the bananapi or the odroid have much more firepower the guys who develop their system images always leave all the midi stuff out, which the raspberry pi gives you full midi hardware support, even though the banana pi or odroid are like 4 boxes put together.

IMHO the Raspberry Pi brings a lot of processing power - depending on what you'll do, that might be more than enough. It brings a lot of addon-boards, tutorials and a good community, so it might be a good starting point.

Depends what you want to do but for hardware many people would recommend Arduino.

http://www.arduino.cc