Got a Pi controlling my Christmas decorations (Overkill? Yeah. But I wanted to easily push updates to the patterns so why not ssh into my decorations). Got one to play media from network (built in DLNA player on that tv isn't great) and runs livestreamer for me to get my Twitch fix. One is also the base for my home automation with a number of radios attached so I can control zigbee and 433mhz stuff. Heard of people use them as honey pots, Larry Pesce seems to have an addiction to them.

I was working on a project called TwitchPlaysKitten as I had a new kitten and thought it would be funny. A few Servos with cat toys attached to them connected to a Pi and a webcam and allow twitch chat to control the kitty toys. But Twitch shot me down talking something about Terms of Service and staff saying "you trust twitch chat with physical control of items in your home? Are you fucking nuts???" Screw you twitch, it was going to be glorious :-p.

Got plenty of ATMega's dotted around the house. Started with them with the Arduino and the ATMega168 and progressed from there. Used them in stuff like energy monitoring using Current Transformers, more Christmas decorations (My mom wanted some new lights for her tree and she has saw my decorations the year before and roped me into to knocking her up a set) based of a ATTiny. Also used them to repair failed electronics.

Programming AVRs can be done many ways. One of the go to methods is SPI programming and making your own programmer is cheap. You can make a SPI programmer from an Ardunio or use the SPI port on a raspberry pi and a modified version of AVRDude to use true SPI of the Pi instead of bit banging it and getting faster programming times.

Got a few esp's dotted around as I liked the built in wifi, slapped one in my cat flap so I can easily see if the cat is outside or just asleep under the bed upstairs, also lets me set timers and override the cat flap functionality from my phone/desktop without having to go over to the cat flap, clean the labelling around the manual dial to see with direction is which option (Sureflap Dual Scan cat flap - https://sureflap.com/en-gb/pet-doors/dualscan-microchip-cat-... it's based of a Pic16f iirc).

Which leads me onto Microchip. Fell in love with the PIC's some time around the PS1 era. It completely had noting to do with someone releasing code that allowed a PIC to convince the PS1 it was booting a valid game, honest guv... But mainly use Microchip for their other components until the rapidfire mods for the 360/PS3 kicked off.

I personally use AVR more often then PICs simply because I fell love using using gcc and avrdude and programming newer PIC's required getting a PicKit3 and at at the time there wasn't any clones of them and I was broke. Until then we could program them using a simple homemade serial or parallel programmer which suited my broke ass's budget. But I have to love Microchips sample program, they have a generous sample program where they will give hobbyists and students freebies (ATM it's 12 parts per month iirc).

Also having a love affair with Nordic Semi's NRF51's atm but that is mainly cause I wanted to teach myself ARM.

So what's the point of the wall of text? To say that I'll prob get a couple when they become readily available because I'm sure I will find or make a use for them, even if it's just to play with them to see if they could be useful in the future.

I can see your point where you say that for you they end up just living in a box gathering dust but some of us can just come up with ideas to use these. It's not for everyone but I'll happily "waste" an evening wiring some WS2812's to a ATMega32u4 and write some C and C# (my current goto language for hacking things together on Windows) just because I want to put some lights in my PC case and I wasn't happy with anything I found on the market - https://youtu.be/IhsALOwoszk (yeah, I know. I'm 33 going on 14...).

EDIT: Cleaned up some of the typos.