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Arduino Goes Pro at CES 2020

blog.arduino.cc

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Re: Arduino Goes Pro at CES 2020

#131

Post by CamperBob2 »

jiofih wrote: post #118
CamperBob2 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN commenters love to talk about how Raspberry Pi and Arduino boards aren't suitable for use in production hardware. I recently had a chance to wander around one of the bigger EMS factories in the Bay Area, rubbernecking at everybody else's products in various stages of assembly. It's safe to say not many naysaying HN'ers have done that recently, or they would be saying something very different.

The comment I was replying to was talking about DEATHS being caused by failure, not environmental sensors. I have nothing against its use.

Agreed, and I'm not necessarily defending this practice, just saying that it is, in fact, being done.

One of the RasPi-based devices I saw being assembled was actually some kind of medical device that will presumably have to be FDA-certified. It was going into a very nice enclosure, with top-grade plastics and other materials, and they were building a (literal) ton of them. In principle I'm sure that can be done successfully, but I have to wonder if it'll really save the company that much time or money.

Re: Arduino Goes Pro at CES 2020

#132

Post by dragontamer »

wrycoder wrote: post #58
jws wrote: post #11

~$100 ARM M7 at 480MHz and ARM M4 at 240MHz 2MB SDRAM 16MB Flash USB, host and device WiFi Bluetooth 10/100 Ethernet MIPI DSI lcd panel DisplayPort over USB-C (graphics out) Integrated Li-Po charger 3x ADC 16 bit 2x DAC 12 bit, 1MHz 4x UART 22x Timers 2.95µA in standby mode That's obviously way too much to come out of the Arduino style pins. There are two 80 pin high density connectors on the back which have everythi…

The price seems very high for the category.

> The price seems very high for the category.

Does anyone else remember when a Keil C 8051 at 20MHz devkit would cost you several hundred dollars for the hardware, and then several hundred dollars for the compiler?

I remember... it was like... what? 10 years ago? Not actually very long ago...

Re: Arduino Goes Pro at CES 2020

#133

Post by jrockway »

I have pretty much given up on Arduino. They had me almost interested again when they announced the Pro IDE, but several months later they still haven't put the source code on Github: https://github.com/arduino/arduino-pro-ide

I am not interested in the Electron-based IDE, but they seem to be using the Clang language server, which is perfect for integrating with Emacs. I have been sitting here for months ready to hack on this stuff and make it work perfectly, but all I have to work with is the raw source files contained in the Electron bundle with no license, so I've basically given up. Once again, the Arduino team is doing Weird Stuff with software, and this whole Pro thing feels like "the joys of working with Broadcom, but we stick random Open Source logos on thing without actually being Open Source".

I have a lot of microcontroller projects I want to do, but without modern development tools, it's not worth it. They are so close... just let me hack on your source code, please. I'll do it for free and you can do whatever you want with the code. But they don't seem to want to play ball.

(Recently I have been playing with Tinygo, but I am still not motivated because "go doc", my favorite go tool, and gopls don't work... and I'm not quite sure that it's worth the effort to make work yet. My toy tinygo projects have gone pretty well, though, so maybe it is worth making their IDE support work, and forgetting Arduino ever existed. I feel like Circuit Python / Micropython is the path of least resistance right now.)

Re: Arduino Goes Pro at CES 2020

#134

Post by JeanMarcS »

Sorry, couldn’t read the post because of the GDPR cookies pop up that simulate a looooong time to opt out just to force you to click cancel and accept cookies.

Gave up after a minute. What a shame using those dark patterns (and sad because I wanted to read it)

Re: Arduino Goes Pro at CES 2020

#135

Post by gmiller123456 »

joemi wrote: post #126
gmiller123456 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why would anybody use an Arduino versus a five dollar Raspberry Pi Zero? 1. The $5 Raspberry Pi Zero isn't really $5. 2. The fact that the $5 advertised price isn't the real price, and the inventory games they play raises ethical problems for some people. 3. You can get an Arduino clone for less than $2 (for real, and in bulk). 4. The Pi and other SBCs have higher power requirements, so they can't reliably run off A…

But $5 is the real price of the Zero. Perhaps you’re thinking of the Zero W, which is $10? Or do you mean the $5 doesn’t include the power? If that’s what you mean, it should be noted that power doesn’t come with Arduinos either, and they both can be powered via USB. And to what unethical inventory games are you referring? That seems like a pretty serious accusation you’re making.

When you actually try to buy one from the very few distributors permitted to sell them, you'll either end up paying $5-$7 in shipping, when it could be shipped for closer to $1 USPS. And you're only allowed to buy one. Or, if you walk in to a MicroCenter, the only distributor with a physical location you can walk in to and buy one, they're either out of stock, or again you're limited to just one, but you can buy more at a higher price.

Re: Arduino Goes Pro at CES 2020

#136

Post by liamdiprose »

mdszy wrote: post #125
mbanzi wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

atrocious ??, maybe on an 8 bit 8mhz device you can go faster if you write optimised assembly code but this is a 240Mhz+480Mhz device it's a different world....

Using more powerful hardware as an excuse to make shitty software is incredibly flawed.

Some friends of mine are entry-level developers that work alone on an Arduino/C++ codebase. Baremetal development and C++'s bad library support encourages them to write huge amounts of their own, very bad, code. They've taken a year to write the functional equivalent of a few hundred lines of Python and some packages.

Their codebase would improve immensely if they used a more powerful chip to run Linux and Python instead.

Re: Arduino Goes Pro at CES 2020

#137

Post by Zagitta »

In my opinion Arduino and "pro" does not belong in the same sentence.

I work as an embedded software engineer who's tasked with ripping all the terrible arduino code out of a fairly large codebase where I work and the arduino core libraries are the lowest quality code I've ever had the displeasure of working with.

It's full of awful decisions everywhere in the arduino core libraries such as defining min and max macros when they're writing C++ code which in turn results in STL includes blowing up if you attempt to use something simple and safe as std::array.

I could go on for days about all the terrible decisions that reeks to high heavens of always taking the path of least resistance...

Re: Arduino Goes Pro at CES 2020

#138

Post by floatboth »

swiley wrote: post #34
ibobev wrote: post #32

A little out of topic question, but I'm curious is it possible to program Raspberry Pi on low level without OS, just like Arduino and if not, why?

You can and people do but it’s important to note that that the raspberry pi CPU is a tiny part of the SOC and the Broadcom proprietary part that bootstraps it is completely closed.

It's been reverse engineered and some minimal firmware for the VideoCore part was made: https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware

Re: Arduino Goes Pro at CES 2020

#139

Post by mhh__ »

evv wrote: post #18
vb6sp6 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

javascript and python support seem like huge improvements

On one hand I think it's ridiculous to mention these languages for industrial applications. But I've also just spent the past year programming an automated mobile restaurant. We use a traditional PLC for everything safety or time-sensitive, but everything else is JavaScript. We're planning to use even more JS on the next-gen system. Details are in my profile if you want to help, or if you want to convince me otherwis…

Why JavaScript? Unless it's a training constraint, I just don't see anything about the language that directs people to write good code.

It just seems insane to me to use a language with such bizarre semantics.

Re: Arduino Goes Pro at CES 2020

#140

Post by zozbot234 »

dragontamer wrote: post #54
mdszy wrote: post #50

>The Portenta H7 is capable of running Arduino code, Python and JavaScript, making it accessible to an even broader audience of developers. "Here, now you can buy hardware that enables you to hire bootcamp-level devs to do your professional industrial work. That way you can pay non-professional wages for professional-level work!" Stop normalizing putting bloated, heavy languages on embedded platforms.

> Stop normalizing putting bloated, heavy languages on embedded platforms. Last time I checked, PICBasic was a thing, and spawned a generation of programmers. Comodore 64 Basic, and TI-83 Basic were also simplified programming environments. (TI-83 implemented jumps as a O(n) lookup throughout your code... jumping to later functions was more costly than jumping to earlier functions...). Its the simple programming envi…

Commodore and TI home computers were self-contained development platforms. Very different from an Arduino, which is basically dependent on getting binary code from some sort of host platform. Since you have to do that uploading step anyway, you might as well program the platform in a modern, compiled language.
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