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Arduino Goes Pro at CES 2020

blog.arduino.cc

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Re: Arduino Goes Pro at CES 2020

#171

Post by dragontamer »

Zagitta wrote: post #137

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 macro…

In my experience, Arduinos are really useful as ATMega328pb boards for beginners.

Once you're used to the development environment, you "take off the training wheels" and start to program in ATMega328pb directly. Or in this case, use an STM32 ARM 480MHz chip.

Re: Arduino Goes Pro at CES 2020

#172

Post by dwild »

contingencies wrote: post #159
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet Arduino has created an ecosystem of libraries, tutorials, blogs and communities that changed the industry. Now you can program dozens of chips with Arduino core, such as ESP8266/32, etc. If it wasn't for arduino, many project would never take off. At university I was taught to program microchip pic16 and oh boy was it painfull. Their software was low quality, errors were incomprehensible, etc. I think Arduino…

Agreed. Manufacturers that need volume won't touch $100 per item plus the supply chain reliability issues of Arduino distribution. Portenta is therefore, at best, only useful for a niche area of higher processing requirement small volume users. At small volume with assured availability right now you can plug together off the shelf microcontrollers and ethernet modules for $3-5 per node. That's 5% of the Portenta pric…

> At small volume with assured availability right now you can plug together off the shelf microcontrollers and ethernet modules for $3-5 per node.

Source? I'm looking for that right now and can't find any cheap microcontrollers that include an ethernet jack. The price I find make a Raspberry Pi a viable solution... which is quite sad.

Re: Arduino Goes Pro at CES 2020

#173

Post by geomark »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #163
brainzap wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does one write code for arduino?

Easiest way is to download their IDE (or use the web version) and code in C/C++. 32-bit ones also support Micropython and I think there have been ports of Node.js, but I haven't looked into those.

There are also block-based coding IDEs. I have taught physical computing to primary school kids using it.

Re: Arduino Goes Pro at CES 2020

#174

Post by mkeeter »

bsder wrote: post #160
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet Arduino has created an ecosystem of libraries, tutorials, blogs and communities that changed the industry. Now you can program dozens of chips with Arduino core, such as ESP8266/32, etc. If it wasn't for arduino, many project would never take off. At university I was taught to program microchip pic16 and oh boy was it painfull. Their software was low quality, errors were incomprehensible, etc. I think Arduino…

> And yet Arduino has created an ecosystem of libraries, tutorials, blogs and communities that changed the industry. Has it, really? I have difficulty finding projects that went from Arduino to major success. The only thing which (I think) has an Arduino that actually became a "success" is the Formlabs 3D SLS resin printer.

Nope, no Arduino involved! The original Form 1 and 1+ used an STM32F103. Some of the firmware used libmaple [1], which exposes an Arduino-ish API, but most of the code was low-level C and C++.

(I'm an electrical engineer at Formlabs, and was around through the Form 1+ product cycle)

[1] https://github.com/leaflabs/libmaple

Re: Arduino Goes Pro at CES 2020

#175

Post by mclightning »

bsder wrote: post #160
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet Arduino has created an ecosystem of libraries, tutorials, blogs and communities that changed the industry. Now you can program dozens of chips with Arduino core, such as ESP8266/32, etc. If it wasn't for arduino, many project would never take off. At university I was taught to program microchip pic16 and oh boy was it painfull. Their software was low quality, errors were incomprehensible, etc. I think Arduino…

> And yet Arduino has created an ecosystem of libraries, tutorials, blogs and communities that changed the industry. Has it, really? I have difficulty finding projects that went from Arduino to major success. The only thing which (I think) has an Arduino that actually became a "success" is the Formlabs 3D SLS resin printer.

I think the whole Reprap project, thus cheap 3d printed market was triggered by Arduino....

Re: Arduino Goes Pro at CES 2020

#176

Post by contingencies »

dwild wrote: post #172
contingencies wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Manufacturers that need volume won't touch $100 per item plus the supply chain reliability issues of Arduino distribution. Portenta is therefore, at best, only useful for a niche area of higher processing requirement small volume users. At small volume with assured availability right now you can plug together off the shelf microcontrollers and ethernet modules for $3-5 per node. That's 5% of the Portenta pric…

> At small volume with assured availability right now you can plug together off the shelf microcontrollers and ethernet modules for $3-5 per node. Source? I'm looking for that right now and can't find any cheap microcontrollers that include an ethernet jack. The price I find make a Raspberry Pi a viable solution... which is quite sad.

Not included. Use external module, eg. ENC28J60 (dominant and open source drivers for ~all platforms) which is cheapest, SPI based and 10M limited. For higher throughput look at Wiznet modules or bigger MCUs with MII/RMII which gets much pricier - with low end MCUs you can't generate or process that much data anyway.

Re: Arduino Goes Pro at CES 2020

#177

Post by vineyardmike »

noodlesUK wrote: post #168
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use Visual Studio/VS Code with plugins like (free) VisualMicros or (paid) VisualGDB to build Arduino C++ in a much better environment.

Platformio is also a good choice.

Platformio is definitely what I’d recommend using. It’s been the best experience I’ve had so far

Re: Arduino Goes Pro at CES 2020

#178

Post by petra »

contingencies wrote: post #159
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet Arduino has created an ecosystem of libraries, tutorials, blogs and communities that changed the industry. Now you can program dozens of chips with Arduino core, such as ESP8266/32, etc. If it wasn't for arduino, many project would never take off. At university I was taught to program microchip pic16 and oh boy was it painfull. Their software was low quality, errors were incomprehensible, etc. I think Arduino…

Agreed. Manufacturers that need volume won't touch $100 per item plus the supply chain reliability issues of Arduino distribution. Portenta is therefore, at best, only useful for a niche area of higher processing requirement small volume users. At small volume with assured availability right now you can plug together off the shelf microcontrollers and ethernet modules for $3-5 per node. That's 5% of the Portenta pric…

>> The fact nobody else has bested them is a sad comment on industry.

I wouldn't say nobody has bested them.

The real professional Arduino is the Mbed, run by ARM.

It's for professionals, by professionals, and it shows in good quality.

But, you pay for the abstraction - it's inefficient with hardware resources.

Another alternative is modm.io.

It's a modern take on the hardware abstraction layer, claimed to be very efficient.

It may just be that with it's combination of high efficiency and portability, you would get the cheapest mcu for your project.

Re: Arduino Goes Pro at CES 2020

#179

Post by vineyardmike »

spookthesunset wrote: post #154
katmannthree wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with that, but writing code for industrial applications is fundamentally different from whipping up a backend for the hottest new Lyft for Parrots startup. If industrial equipment malfunctions, people can be killed or horribly maimed. Industrial equipment needs to do exactly what it was designed to do 24/7 for years or decades in horrible (EMI, temperature, etc) environments.

> If industrial equipment malfunctions, people can be killed or horribly maimed. In what way does C vs. python or javascript have any impact on this? If anything, C has way more ability to shoot yourself in the foot than python or javascript. Hell, what about a non memory-managed language like rust? Like somebody else says, this feels more like a cultural issue than an actual technical issue.

Because the debate is often not C Vs JS/Python, it’s [C, Js, Python] Vs [Ladder Logic, PLC-specific Langs] where PLC languages have time-guarantees in the language

Re: Arduino Goes Pro at CES 2020

#180

Post by contingencies »

petra wrote: post #178
contingencies wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Manufacturers that need volume won't touch $100 per item plus the supply chain reliability issues of Arduino distribution. Portenta is therefore, at best, only useful for a niche area of higher processing requirement small volume users. At small volume with assured availability right now you can plug together off the shelf microcontrollers and ethernet modules for $3-5 per node. That's 5% of the Portenta pric…

>> The fact nobody else has bested them is a sad comment on industry. I wouldn't say nobody has bested them. The real professional Arduino is the Mbed, run by ARM. It's for professionals, by professionals, and it shows in good quality. But, you pay for the abstraction - it's inefficient with hardware resources. Another alternative is modm.io. It's a modern take on the hardware abstraction layer, claimed to be very ef…

I must respectfully disagree based on research conducted within the last 2 weeks. Everyone claims their IDE is the business, in fact all the closed source ones are all crap, poorly documented and only allow you to easily taget a subset of platforms from a subset of development environments. For example, out of the box MBed Studio doesn't support many lower and mid range chips in the STM range. If you want to buy a high end chip with a MAC, it might be a great option (look at their hardware gallery[0] for an idea of what they're clearly targeting). It's apples and oranges. AFAIK most pro's apparently still use Keil, which is Windows only and expensive.

[0] https://os.mbed.com/platforms/

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