Arduino raises $22M Series B round

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As I see it (from largely an outsider perspective), there are two difficulties with embedded software: 1) a large sensitivity to performance, to the point where higher level languages are difficult to justify the overhead. And 2) it is generally difficult to write software for embedded systems because the peripherals are all over the place. There is no “one framework to rule them all”, so you need to relearn how to do basic tasks for every new system you use.

I feel like 1 is getting to be much less of a blocker for a huge variety of applications. Most hobbyists don’t even bother with the dedicated built in “spi” pins, they just do spi bit banging on whatever pins they want to use because they don’t have a performance reason to worry about it.

2 is still an issue, and is largely what arduino was trying to solve (for hobbyists at least), by creating a standardized set of tools and libraries.

From that perspective, there is still a lot of work to be done. Modern languages can offer a huge amount of zero cost abstractions for things like HALs, if you can make it easy enough to write the underlying translation layers so you can actually run on the combinatoric explosion of different software options out there. If arduino can make that kind of thing possible, I would assume they could make inroads into the professional world.

I have a very hard time imagining the Arduino language going away soon, even if anything happened to the company (I don't know anything about the business world, no idea what's going on with them, seems like they're making some cool new stuff).

The community will maintain it. Pretty sure the more interesting implementations aren't even by Arduino (doesn't Espressif do theirs themselves?).

I wouldn't be surprised if long term, we started seeing an Arduino competitor in Rust, the hobby space is the perfect place to start something like that, but for now, I would think Arduino is safe...

Also, you already know C++. Maybe not C, but that's OK, because everything a hobbyist needs to pay attention to is C++. Arduino is just some libraries on top of C++. A really nice and portable set of libraries, with a really cool and easy build process, but not the only set of libraries.

PlatformIO is pretty nice.

But there is something easier than Arduino. ESPHome. It's a YAML declarative kind of thing. Not as general as Arduino but for what it does, it's amazing.

Vastly easier, clearer, and just generally nicer than just writing code, especially when it comes with so many nice features like logging, a web server, and an amazingly reliable LAN API you can call from Python.

They even have OTA updates.

Right now it's got a few missing things, like light sleep, but I suspect it's going to cover a lot of Arduino use cases.

They have a web dashboard written in Python you run from the CLI.

The business of VCs is to take risk. VCs _know_ that 8 out of 10 of their investment will return zero, zitch, nada. They just expect one of of 10 to make it even -- and another one to make it 20x.

So that doesn't mean that Arduino is on anything great: it just means it has been able to convince VCs that there's _some probability_ that they will make it big.

But the probability of doing something big is still very low...

( In fact a VC once told me that, 3 months after investing - i.e. a few board meetings max - he already knows if the company will succeed or not. And in 8 out of 10, he will just do the figuration until failure - at best, buy for cents on the dollar)

That's my point, when taking a loan you know upfront the cost, but when raising money you can't know what it really takes