Why Cduino
To me the glory of microcontrollers is not the fact that they cost $1.00, its
the fact that they are simple enough that you can have a decent idea of
everything they are doing, and what they will be doing the next microsecond.
The arduino project does an amazing job of making a $5 microcontroller feel a
bit like a $50 PC10 platform, but in doing so they have lost a bit of the
simplicity. The culprit is not the arduino hardware but the software
language layers (wiring and C++) that are used to program the hardware.
The cduino project also tries to make it simpler to migrate from the arduino
to simpler hardware setups, in particular those that lack a USB serial
interface and bootloader. This may be interesting to users for whom cost
definitely is a factor.