I am not asking which to get, I promise!
I got a Axon a few years ago, got into hobby robots then got eaten by grad school. Now I have a fair bit of experience in a lot of very high level languages like C# but want to get a project in my portfolio to show that I understand what a register and an interrupt are (and to freshen up on this stuff because it has been several years since my computer arch and assembly language class).
I was planning on making a simple UAV that could fly a path of GPS coordinates and saw that ArduPilot seems to already do this, very well, and is open source. So I am considering contributing to that instead of rolling my own from scratch but am a little confused about the Arduino programming language.
It looks like I can't go too wrong either way as they are both a lot better than C# where the garbage collector is following me around and I have to beat him with a stick to keep him from cleaning up when I don't want him to. But what would I be getting into if I tried to contribute to a Arduino based project? It looks like it is pretty much C++ whereas I am used to C when I was using the Axon. It seems like one of the big issues is with hardware and working with servos, but they have that taken care of. So are there any hidden pitfalls I need to look out for if I do this? Keeping in mind my goal is to have something to show potential employers I can do more than tab-complete code in Visual Studio.
Thanks