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Why we won't be selling Genuino or Arduino any more

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Re: Why we won't be selling Genuino or Arduino any more

#211

Post by seanp2k2 »

manyxcxi wrote: post #69
nathancahill wrote: post #28

Serious question: what are people building with these boards? The recurring projects I've seen are controlling lights, doors/locks and monitoring water in plants. I don't find these particularly compelling, am I missing something? How is this the next big thing?

Because they're much friendlier to get started for the novice, most of the widespread examples seem extremely trivial to someone with experience. Now- I'm DEFINITELY not an expert, probably barely mediocre with the EE fundamentals, but I did take a lot of EE and some robotics at Uni to get my degree in Computer Engineering. I am nothing more than a hobbyist but some of my cooler projects have been: - Autonomous 4WD r…

Adalight is also cool and one of the very few projects where instead of being able to just do it on a basic stamp instead, it actually benefits from moving up to a Teensy for faster refresh rates. Adalight is TL;DR picture-sensitive ambient monitor / TV / projector backlighting. The colors around the monitor change based on what's on the screen. It's a neat effect that was standard on some Phillips TVs: https://learn.adafruit.com/adalight-diy-ambient-tv-lighting/...

http://davenewson.com/posts/2013/ambilight-with-teensy-2.htm...

Also works with e.g. XBMC. I'm hoping to get mine working with my FireTV.

Re: Why we won't be selling Genuino or Arduino any more

#212

Post by pjc50 »

nfriedly wrote: post #130
soapdog wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not true to all countries and regions. For example, in Brazil a raspberry pi 3 will cost a bit more than USD 100 which is a lot of money for many people and prevent it from being acquired by low and middle income classes which are arguably among the ones that would most benefit from access to this ecosystem. Arduino/Genuinos on the other hand are easily available on our version of eBay and can be purchased as…

Yikes! Is that because the main distributors (RS/Allied Electronics/Newark) charge more to ship it to Brazil, or do they just not ship there at all and make you purchase through more expensive re-sellers? (Or is it something else like tariffs?)

Brazil has extremely high import taxes on all electronics.

Re: Why we won't be selling Genuino or Arduino any more

#213

Post by triplesec »

It appears that greed and control issues were present right from the beginning of the Arduino project, given the experiences of Wiring's developer, Hernando Barragan, upon whose work it seems most of Arduino was branded, without recognition or recompense. I therefore would have very little sympathy for Arduino LLC.

http://arduinohistory.github.io/ and HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11212021

Re: Why we won't be selling Genuino or Arduino any more

#214

Post by platz »

nathancahill wrote: post #28

Serious question: what are people building with these boards? The recurring projects I've seen are controlling lights, doors/locks and monitoring water in plants. I don't find these particularly compelling, am I missing something? How is this the next big thing?

Would you have a similar reaction to non-techincal folks learning a bit of web dev in order to set up another 'cookie-cutter' blog for themselves?

Re: Why we won't be selling Genuino or Arduino any more

#215

Post by screature2 »

timlyo wrote: post #81
manyxcxi wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they're much friendlier to get started for the novice, most of the widespread examples seem extremely trivial to someone with experience. Now- I'm DEFINITELY not an expert, probably barely mediocre with the EE fundamentals, but I did take a lot of EE and some robotics at Uni to get my degree in Computer Engineering. I am nothing more than a hobbyist but some of my cooler projects have been: - Autonomous 4WD r…

>A USB nerf gun that shoots at the developer who broke the Jenkins build Anywhere I can read any more about this?

Here's another similar Jenkins/USB/NerfDart gitblame launcher project...

https://github.com/codedance/Retaliation

Re: Why we won't be selling Genuino or Arduino any more

#216

Post by gol706 »

soapdog wrote: post #196
nfriedly wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yikes! Is that because the main distributors (RS/Allied Electronics/Newark) charge more to ship it to Brazil, or do they just not ship there at all and make you purchase through more expensive re-sellers? (Or is it something else like tariffs?)

Taxes and greediness play a strong role in Brazil. For example, I just imported 10 Tessels to start a class on IoT. So they charged 98% taxes, (60% import taxes + 20% icms + 18% of administrative fee from UPS).

Not an endorsement of this, but nothing that I have order directly from China has ever had an honest customs declaration on it. It's always a "gift" of "soap" or "lotion". I'm guessing if you charge 98% in taxes it's worth it to have customs agents who actually inspect things though.

Re: Why we won't be selling Genuino or Arduino any more

#217

Post by nameless912 »

nathancahill wrote: post #28

Serious question: what are people building with these boards? The recurring projects I've seen are controlling lights, doors/locks and monitoring water in plants. I don't find these particularly compelling, am I missing something? How is this the next big thing?

Well, the easy answer is the arduino is "easier" to get into than most other embedded development boards.

These days, though, that's becoming less and less true. You can pick up an ESP8266-based board complete with USB-serial built in and motherfucking Wi-Fi for 15 bucks from Adafruit, and it's identical to an Arduino code-wise (i.e. you can use nearly all the nice fuzzy constructs that the Arduino version of Processing provides), plus motherfucking Wi-Fi. I've been prototyping something with one the last couple of weeks, and it's great.

Compared to, for example, my senior design project in college, which predominantly involved writing shitty C code for ATMega-series microcontrollers, it's a breeze. I get C++, a huge standard library, consistent types, a Java-esque wrapper around std::string, and all the register ops to toggle or read pins and enable/disable features are completely abstracted away. It's like comparing writing an app server in Node.JS to writing it using Java EE. Obviously, equally possible in both languages, but one just feels so much nicer than the other.

Re: Why we won't be selling Genuino or Arduino any more

#218

Post by nameless912 »

brianobush wrote: post #153
snarfy wrote: post #116

The whole thing is a sham really when you consider the heritage from the Wiring/Processing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiring_(development_platform) Arduino is a commercial version of somebody else's academic work.

Yes, but in the end they did promote a cheap, easy to use platform something that the processing guys didn't quite achieve.

> Cheap

I wholeheartedly disagree. A TI launchpad dev board is sub-10 dollars in bulk, and an ESP8266 (which is almost incomprehensibly more powerful and has built-in WiFi) dev board is 15-ish. And both of those have nice friendly Arduino wrappers. There's really very little reason to buy vanilla Arduino anymore other than the somewhat larger community.

Re: Why we won't be selling Genuino or Arduino any more

#219

Post by Animats »

archimedespi wrote: post #82
SEJeff wrote: post #66

I really don't see the point of the arduinos when you can buy an esp8266 that is arduino compatible (you can use the arduino IDE and sketches). You can get the bare esp8266 chips for $1-$2 from aliexpress, or buy a tricked out one from adafruit (the huzzah) for $9. They have a full wifi stack, support micropython, etc. I think we're in a post-arduino age for microcontrollers. There are simply better options out there…

The reason someone serious about embedded development would want to buy Arduino boards is that they're convenient Atmel-architecture microcontroller boards. The ESP8266 may be "arduino compatible", but a large number of those Arduino libraries running on it had to be rewritten. If you want convenience and ISA/peripheral-register compatibility with existing low-level Arduino code, you're locked in to atmegas unless yo…

The next step up was the Arduino Due, which is a low-end ARM system supported by the Arduino toolchain. But it seems to have been retired. (Now I find this out. I built something on a Due because I needed more memory and CPU speed.)

Re: Why we won't be selling Genuino or Arduino any more

#220

Post by nameless912 »

Vexs wrote: post #4
antoniuschan99 wrote: post #3

So basically the Arduino the Software Company (IDE), and Arduino the hardware supplier broke ties? I use the ESP8266 which I do believe is an Arduino (Hardware) Killer. However, the Arduino IDE has amazing support for the ESP8266 among other hardware components. This isn't a bad thing, at least for consumers, since I feel like Arduino (the hardware) is a few cycles behind (eg. Particle, CHIP, bbc micro, pi zero, node…

I dunno about the ESP8266 being a Arduino killer- it doesn't handle analog very well last I checked. But as for details over what happened, check this [1]hackaday article. [1] http://hackaday.com/2015/02/25/arduino-v-arduino/

But I can buy an ADC that communicates over SPI for like 3 bucks. Then I have two chips, but then also I have a total of like 10 dollars worth of electronics, which is far more capable than a 25 dollar arduino.
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