Arduino is a microcontroller, so it won't help if you need complex tasks potentially involving standard hardware, like reading from an sd-card, or accessing ethernet/wifi. Is there a system-on-chip with the same amount of openness/documentation available ?
Electronic – Arduino-like system-on-chip
system-on-chip
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Best Answer
Well, an Ardunio can access ethernet and can read from an SD card.
That being said check out the BeagleBoard for a more powerful development board. The current version doesn't have ethernet on board but works fine with several USB ethernet/wifi adapters, the new beagleboard-xM has ethernet on board. They are both cortex-A8 based boards, with the xM being a bit faster and having more ram (600mhz vs 1ghz and 256MB vs 512MB). Theres are also some other differences. Both run linux among other operating system choices.