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Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

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Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#71

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

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.

I've been out of the hardware game a minute but Qualcomm was a great partner for helping you ship products. Everything about them sucks, but they will actually send engineers to your office. They always took bug reports seriously and pretty much always delivered patches. Also they always had ample samples, both in terms of dev boards and software. I know of several products that basically shipped the sample code with minimal modifications.

If I were a company trying to ship V1 of our first product, I would hands down pick Qualcomm. MediaTek et al are great for when you know what you're doing with minimal handholding.

I absolutely hated working with them, but at least they were a vendor you could work with. Perhaps the cheaper vendors have upped their game here but I wouldn't know.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#72

Post by [deleted] »

webdevver wrote: post #40
jsheard wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's vertical integration is formidable but Google are still really struggling with their execution, their Tensor SOCs are consistently years behind Snapdragon in performance and efficiency even after their switch to TSMC this generation. Qualcomm is probably safe at the high end of the Android market for a while yet.

google is competing with a different offering. with a pixel you get google's ecosystem. apple is also not neccesarily top dog in performance (maybe they are - havne't checked lately), nobody buys an iphone because it ranks highly in benchmarks. thats some nerd nonsense that 0.1% of the audience seriously cares about. for google, pushing 3rd parties out of the supply chain gives them a ton of security and stability co…

[deleted]

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#73

Post by skybrian »

phoehne wrote: post #55
chpatrick wrote: post #29

ESP stuff is so damn cheap and capable now I'm not sure what you would use Arduino for these days.

Don't look at just the specs. You also need to look at the board design and programming environment. I've used the ESP32 native tools and they are a lot more complex than Arduino. But I'm an embedded firmware developer, so it's kind of what I expect. But I used an Arduino, with 5V tolerant outputs, to light up Halloween costumes for years. I do it in 1 page of code that's I write in their IDE. I don't have to set up…

Even if you like the Arduino programming environment (and I do), there seems to be little reason to use Arduino hardware unless it’s for compatibility with other hardware you have? For example, there is a very nice unofficial port of Arduino for the Raspberry Pi Pico. There are also many fine Arduino-compatible single-board computers from Adafruit. The Arduino board form factor seems big and clunky in comparison.

I don’t even use the Ardiuino IDE anymore; I've switched to VS Code using PlatformIO.

It’s great that all these microcontroller boards and peripheral breakout boards can be programmed using the same basic API’s, but I don’t think it helps Arduino the company very much.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#74

Post by geerlingguy »

chimpontherun wrote: post #53
geerlingguy wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think to Arduino, Uno just means 'Uno form factor, with shield pins in the same place'

Which is kind of sad, since the Uno pinout is horrible for high-speed signals

FYI the new Q has two 'high speed connectors' on the bottom side, for signals like CSI, HDMI, USB 3.1, etc.

Haven't seen any examples of bottom 'high speed' shields yet, though. They said there would be some made available.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#75

Post by leoedin »

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.

> low latency connectivity

That's not exactly easy. I doubt on-device training will become much of a thing. But on-device inference is desirable in all sorts of distributed use cases. We're still a long way off from reliable internet everywhere. Especially when you want to start pushing large quantities of sensor data down the pipe.

I can't even get reliable internet on my phone in the centre of London.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#76

Post by ACCount37 »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #71
webdevver wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've been out of the hardware game a minute but Qualcomm was a great partner for helping you ship products. Everything about them sucks, but they will actually send engineers to your office. They always took bug reports seriously and pretty much always delivered patches. Also they always had ample samples, both in terms of dev boards and software. I know of several products that basically shipped the sample code with…

I heard that Qualcomm can be decent to work with - if you are in a company the size of Qualcomm, or can dangle "500000 units to ship" in front of them like a carrot.

But "decent" is Qualcomm at its absolute best. And Qualcomm at its worst?

I'd rather chew down broken glass than work with Qualcomm.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#77

Post by brunosutic »

chpatrick wrote: post #29

ESP stuff is so damn cheap and capable now I'm not sure what you would use Arduino for these days.

I use it for learning and play with my kids. I load the program on the board then we wire the components together and get all excited about blinking LEDs or a LCD.

The lack of features (notably Wifi on our boards) and somewhat larger size are benefits for us.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#78

Post by defraudbah »

buserror wrote: post #13
vluft wrote: post #2

well, they'll be missed for sure.

No they won't. I've seen them coming a looooong way. I even re-baptised arduidiots [0] quite a while ago. Since the "branding" fiasco I've stayed well clear of them. [0]: https://github.com/buserror/simavr/blob/master/examples/shar...

you can't say no on this website, downvoted until you change it to `yes, they won't`
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