I will show them on the example of a board with ATmega2560 chip.
Advantages:
Its really cheap - in price of naked microcontroller (near 10$), you get fully operational thing.
That boards uses same chip, working with standard Arduino IDE and scetches.
Actually, you can have several boards in price of one original, use them in various devices without fear of its damage.
And now a fly in the ointment:
The culled components are used for Chinese motherboards - this reduces reliability.
- Many chips work only on 12 megahertz versus 16 in the original (its not critical, but command execution in 1.(3) time longer).
- Most Chinese boards use another communication - CH340 (ATmega16U2 in Arduino) - it requires to setup additional driver.
- Onboard voltage regulator can burn out in 12V input voltage (original work well on it) - to shure use only 7-9 volts.
Use them or not - the choice is yours!
I have almost stopped using the Atmel chip line all together. I prefer to use the ESP8266 or the ESP32. Have you played with any or the dev boards from Espressif?
Hi and thank You for question!
Yes, i look at ESP because it have wifi onboard.
But its power consumption is not so applicable for autonomous devices.
I get less than 0.5 miliampere for active working p328d chip (Arduino Uno give 30mA) and prefer use BT or paired RF-433MHz/NRF24L01 module to connect foreign sensor with base.
This solution provides significantly lower power consumption.
And i forgot - several months ago i read that some freshly released ESP have trouble with saving program in it.