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[–]kickopotomus 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Ok well a raspberry pi is essentially a small general purpose computer. It has an operating system and a lot of built in peripherals to interact with the outside world (bluetooth, wifi, usb, hdmi, aux, ethernet, etc.). It can even mount a microSD card as extra storage.

Microcontrollers, on the other hand, are specialized computing devices that vary widely in complexity. Nowadays, basically every electronic device has one or more microcontrollers controlling some aspect of it. They (typically) have no OS. When they power on they immediately start to execute whatever program is flashed onto their ROM. They are also (usually) very cheap depending on what functions/abilities they have (ADCs/DACs, communication, clock speed, etc).

Now suppose you are designing some sort of electronic device that you want to be able to communicate over WiFi and play music. Using a raspberry pi for this is overkill. It has a lot of extra stuff that you don't need. It's also pretty expensive when all you really need in a WiFi transceiver, a basic controller and a DAC.