I just wanted that someone mentioned these Arduino-likes in the comments. I suspect many of you have come across them though.
I've been using Teensy devices for over a decade and have always had it just recognize the device as if it were a USB to serial adapter and I can talk to it as what I'd call "serial over the USB port". But that obviously doesn't involve what I think software people usually mean when they're talking about firmware debug -- which usually entails stepping through execution, right?
I'm used to just printing debug statements to the Serial.println() function, I learned on the 8051 where the best bet was to toggle different pins when code lines are passed, so even Serial.println() was a huge step up.
But high chance they will look it up on Amazon/Ebay/whatever e-store and buy a clone without knowing.
You ask for an Arduino, and the follow up question is: 'genuine or generic?'.
I don't think the Arduino trademark is that valuable, it's already well underway genericization.
Arduino is open sourced in hard and software which allows this cheap cloning to exist. It also helps a lot with software and docs, which makes it cheaper for them.
Hah! I like to underestimate scope as well, but this is really something else. Definitely a competent engineer could make something like this. But a couple of months maybe. You won't even read the documentation for the chip in a day.
I have actually done embedded engineering in the past and I was being generous with "a day." Skimming a datasheet is a skill and it certainly will not take a day to get the information you need off of it.
Also a million dev kits is unrealistic for vast majority of companies 5-20k is more the number I hard.
