I’ve heard about this project called elegoo, which is supposed to be a new Arduino compatible board. I’ve always been curious about the difference between Arduino and elegoo, so I decided to dig deeper.

First of all, let me mention that both projects are open source and have a similar goal: making electronics accessible for everyone. But there are some fundamental differences between them.

The first thing that caught my attention is that the website of elegoo is hosted on Github Pages. While this may seem like an advantage at first glance, it actually makes things quite confusing because the source code and documentation are not hosted on the same server. As you know, Github Pages hosting is free as long as you don’t want any custom domains or HTTPS support (which is fine if you’re just starting out). However, it’s not ideal if you want to save money on hosting or manage your own domain name.

Another thing that struck me was that they don’t use Jekyll or Hugo for their website — instead they’re using a static site generator called Pelican which uses Markdown files as input and generates HTML pages automatically without any server-side scripting involved (this makes it much easier to deploy).

Last modified: November 16, 2022