Is there a particular reason for using Arduinos?

[tangomar]

Guys,

is it that it is easy to use?
For the ODBuino there are a bunch of u-controllers that have uart and can, usb all together and ARM cpus.

For example:
http://www.st.com/stonline/products/...e/ds/15060.pdf

I guess there are many more by TI, Freescale...

[dcb]

Arduinos major strengths are:

1. The packaging. You unzip it (and install a usb driver in windows), load an example program from the menu, hit upload, and you've programmed your first microcontroller. They have removed a large number of roadblocks.

2. The arduino.cc user community. It is by and large a friendly and helpful lot. The folks at avrfreaks.net are also quite helpful and there is a huge amount of online knowledge and experimenting going on that you can search for an example of almost anything.

3. I think the diy crowd benefits from a pdip package. We don't all have 20 year old eyes. This makes it especially suitable for the guy or gal who wants to build one themselves. Inexpensive, simple, reliable, customizable, a terrific fit for the diyer.

The main goal of the obduino 1.0 offering is fuel consumption feedback, pure and simple, anything else is gravy .

Those ARM chips do look like a bargain though, I will keep them in mind for another offering.