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Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

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Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#41

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

KeplerBoy wrote: post #12
webdevver wrote: post #4

theyre going to push "AI on the edge" and "IoT" nonsense again absolutely unbelievably cooked. anyone pushing that nonsense, short with leverage. low latency connectivity + goliath data centres will always beat on-device inference/training.

privacy is a thing people care about.

> privacy is a thing people care about.

Sadly, it seems that privacy is something that HN readers care about, but precious few others.

Look at the success of Facebook. The covers have been off that stinker for years, yet people still regularly use it; often to the exclusion of more traditional media. I have quite a few friends that I don't get invited to their occasions, because they only advertise them on FB. They invite a bunch of randos they've never met, but not those of us, they see all the time.

To be fair, if I sit down, and describe exactly what the ramifications of the "always on, always open" Facebook presence means, people will usually suddenly value privacy, but it seems that no one actually ever does that, at a level most folks can understand.

Hysterical rantings (even when well-founded), by geeks, don't get through to most folks. It needs to be done in the vernacular, and via media they actually consume.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#42

Post by phoehne »

tylergetsay wrote: post #20

Espressif has been eating their lunch, the boards are way more capable and much cheaper. Why would anyone pick an Uno over an ESP32?

They're more fun. The programming is easier (although you can get an Arduino like experience on a ESP32). They have 5V options, which make some projects easier without having to add additional components. The ESP32 API (and the Pico for that matter) are better suited professional programmers.

An Arduino is better if you're doing something and want a quick, easy, simple to program controller. It started as a way for artists to add MCUs to the projects without having to become embedded programmers.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#44

Post by westpfelia »

webdevver wrote: post #4

theyre going to push "AI on the edge" and "IoT" nonsense again absolutely unbelievably cooked. anyone pushing that nonsense, short with leverage. low latency connectivity + goliath data centres will always beat on-device inference/training.

SOOOO buy Qualcomm. The second they start talking about AI-IOT stock is gonna sky rocket.

We live in a broken world.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#45

Post by ACCount37 »

Fucking hell.

Qualcomm is one of the worst vendors out there to deal with if you're a small hardware developer - let alone the kind of hobbyist who wants to use Arduino boards.

In a perfect world? Qualcomm would use Arduino to bring some of their chipsets and devices to public, and have the Arduino team open them up to small developers. Essentially doing what Pi Foundation is doing for Broadcom - package their unpalatable ICs into something that people actually use.

But we're not in a perfect world. We're in the kind of world where Qualcomm exists in the first place.

The pessimist in me fully expects Qualcomm to make Arduino worse rather than Arduino to make Qualcomm better.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#46

Post by the__alchemist »

nic547 wrote: post #26
geerlingguy wrote: post #3

Additionally, they're launching their first joint product, the $44 Uno Q SBC, which has a Dragonwing SoC and STM32 microcontroller on an Uno form factor board[1]. It seems like Arduino will keep their brand, maintain their existing product lines, and continue building devices using other vendor's chips (besides Qualcomm), etc... but as with all acquisitions—I wonder how long that state of affairs will last. Alternati…

STM32 MCUs are 3V3, not 5V right? Arduino really isn't great with naming, a Uno can be an AVR or ARM based board, now either 3V3 or 5V based and also a SBC rather than just a MCU.

Depends on the MCU, but generally STM32 is 1.7-3.6V

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#47

Post by monegator »

fidotron wrote: post #28
tylergetsay wrote: post #20

Espressif has been eating their lunch, the boards are way more capable and much cheaper. Why would anyone pick an Uno over an ESP32?

The fact we don't have viable western competition for Espressif is likely to become far more of a headache than all the angst about AI GPU production. Where can you get a half decent microcontroller with wifi integrated on it? Espressif. All the others are flat out bad in some very important dimension, which isn't to say the Espressif products are perfect, but they fit in the important ways.

MCHP has been slowly coming up with decent radio devices, finally. If you don't use the radio going bare metal is basically effortless, if you need to use the radio the dev Tools are actually improving, though they are still nowhere as good as IDF in hiding the ugliness.

Of course they are more expensive (not much more, really, compared to simillar specced ESPs) but they are western and the peripheral actually work as intended. In my projects with ESP32 i had to basically bitbang every peripheral that i needed to use beyond their simplest mode.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#48

Post by piltdownman »

webdevver wrote: post #10
murillians wrote: post #5

I only feel dread when I see a Qualcomm story on HN anymore.

genuinely, what is the survival story for qualcomm entering the next decade? - completely missed out on AI - phones become commodity, push for complete vertical integration from apple, google - squeezed by chinese soc vendors from 'below' (mediatek, unisoc) they're cooked, right? there's no way out, surely.

They just won a significant case in its licensing battle with Arm, securing rights to use Oryon cores in Snapdragon chips. Add in a decent x86 to ARM translation layer, and you have the basis of the next generation of handheld gaming. If Valve or someone paired with them for the next Steamdeck style project, they'd dominate.

At the high-end they announced two new flagship processor platforms at its 2025 Snapdragon Summit. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 they claim to be the world’s fastest mobile SoC.

Outside of Snapdragon its basically 5G Telecoms atm - iPhone 17 Pro Max relies on Qualcomm's Snapdragon X80 Modem for 5G - 5G Edge solutions for RAN, presumably harnessing AI - Non-Terrestrial 5G Provisioning in their partnerships with Thales/Ericsson. - IoT and Wearables - presumably low power/footprint modems

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#50

Post by xd1936 »

phoehne wrote: post #42
tylergetsay wrote: post #20

Espressif has been eating their lunch, the boards are way more capable and much cheaper. Why would anyone pick an Uno over an ESP32?

They're more fun. The programming is easier (although you can get an Arduino like experience on a ESP32). They have 5V options, which make some projects easier without having to add additional components. The ESP32 API (and the Pico for that matter) are better suited professional programmers. An Arduino is better if you're doing something and want a quick, easy, simple to program controller. It started as a way for a…

I've only ever used my ESP32s with the Arduino IDE. I don't think there's anything "easier" about using an Arduino board vs that experience.
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