This is a great discussion! As a freshly minted Automation Engineer, I've noticed that the RPi is generally even less expensive than speccing out and building a purpose-build microcontroller solution, if the controller needs to do anything complicated like communicate using TCP/IP, or run a display....

I just recently got my EE and started working as an industrial engineer. This is a really interesting project. Recently, I was tasked with designing an inexpensive duplex pump controller. First, I looked at smaller PLC-based solutions, then looked deeper into microcontroller-based options. I saw som...