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Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

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Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#141

Post by ricw »

estimator7292 wrote: post #138

Shame to see Arduino go, but honestly how relevant are they anymore? The Arduino framework is one of the worst ways possible to write firmware for any slightly serious use, and their hardware is... quaint in the era of Espressif and the Cambrian explosion of devboards with any number of highly advanced features. Arduino was a great way to get into microcontrollers back when the only alternative was vendors' native li…

Curious what the better frameworks are these days? Are they tied to specific hardware like arduino was? And what language do they use?

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#142

Post by void-pointer »

sschueller wrote: post #134
pcdoodle wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ESP32 is a dumpster fire IMO. I prefer to get things done quickly over cheap.

How so? I have a product that you can buy that runs on an ESP32S3[1]. They work very well and you can even do OTA updates. Even my competitor uses an ESP32 :) [1] https://www.stationdisplay.com/

Did you need to go through CE certification to get your product on the market?

I have some ESP-based hardware ideas of my own (which include custom PCBs) but the CE certification is prohibitively expensive..

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#143

Post by phoehne »

ndiddy wrote: post #128
phoehne wrote: post #6

You can make a low volume product by buying a bunch of Arduinos as your controller. You just stick them in the device. There's no license issue. While I haven't exhaustively looked, one vendor's kit I did look at explicitly stated their boards were not licensed for that kind of commercial use. Qualcomm could very well make their boards for development, test, and evaluation purposes only. And that would be my worry. I…

> You can make a low volume product by buying a bunch of Arduinos as your controller. You just stick them in the device. There's no license issue. Note that the Arduino libraries are LGPL licensed. Unless you have a commercial agreement with Arduino, you have to distribute your firmware to your customers as object files so it can be linked to updated/modified versions of the Arduino libraries. This means that I would…

That's not my reading of https://support.arduino.cc/hc/en-us/articles/4415094490770-L.... The LGPL is usually a requirement to publish your modifications to the LGPL licensed code, but not necessarily your binary blobs. And for some low-volume Arduino based products, the software isn't the valuable part of the project, anyway.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#144

Post by mikepurvis »

estimator7292 wrote: post #131
phoehne wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Trouble is, this kind of trivial throwaway application is all that Arduino is really good for. Because the framework is designed to support thousands of chips, it supports none of them well. Any arduino code you write is easily 5x more terse than any of the native libraries, but it's also 10x slower. If you don't care, you don't care. But if you do care, Arduino is the least appropriate way to make a microcontroller…

The pin mapping shenanigans are another annoying footgun with Arduino. Even in native development you're dealing with a physical pin number and the logical assignment (PA5, PA6, etc), but now Arduino maps that all again to an Arduino board pin number, and it's all shuffled to ensure the peripherals are in the right place to enable I2C, ADC, and PWM pins to function as expected.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#145

Post by snitty »

estimator7292 wrote: post #131
phoehne wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Trouble is, this kind of trivial throwaway application is all that Arduino is really good for. Because the framework is designed to support thousands of chips, it supports none of them well. Any arduino code you write is easily 5x more terse than any of the native libraries, but it's also 10x slower. If you don't care, you don't care. But if you do care, Arduino is the least appropriate way to make a microcontroller…

And yet there is clearly a market for easy-to-program MCUs for hobby and educational purposes.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#146

Post by ferguess_k »

mtlynch wrote: post #130
ferguess_k wrote: post #85

My first instinct to this piece of news is a five-char word starting with 'S'. But reading through the news, it seems to be fine? > Arduino will preserve its open approach and community spirit while unlocking a full‑stack platform for modern development—with Arduino UNO Q as the first step. > The new Arduino UNO Q is a next-generation single board computer featuring a “dual brain” architecture—a Linux Debian-capable…

> My first instinct to this piece of news is a five-char word starting with 'S'. Am I the only one who can't figure out the word? Did you mean four characters? Or are you including a null-terminator? Extra 'e' if you're British?

Yes! Including a null-terminator '\0'

:P thought someone is going to ask but great that people on HN figured it out already

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#147

Post by ferguess_k »

bilekas wrote: post #100
ferguess_k wrote: post #85

My first instinct to this piece of news is a five-char word starting with 'S'. But reading through the news, it seems to be fine? > Arduino will preserve its open approach and community spirit while unlocking a full‑stack platform for modern development—with Arduino UNO Q as the first step. > The new Arduino UNO Q is a next-generation single board computer featuring a “dual brain” architecture—a Linux Debian-capable…

> Looks like they want to use the brand to push out their own stuffs, which seems to be reasonable. As long as they don't touch the education/OSS part I guess it will benefit both. Given the current market for Qualcomm, it honestly wouldn't surprise me if in a few years they drop that education and OSS platform in favour of a paid approach. Recent Slack news doing the same has tainted my confidence. 33 Million audrin…

OK that makes sense, but I guess educational arduino stuffs doesn't have a deep moat, so it was already copied else where and can be done further.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#150

Post by crote »

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…

On the other hand, their competitors haven't been sleeping either.

Companies like Adafruit and Sparkfun sell dozens of tailor-made dev board variants, and their I2C module system allows you to mix & match a whole bunch of peripherals.

The code? A handful of lines of Python, which you can drag&drop onto it like it's a flash drive. Or use a browser-based IDE if you want one-click library install and serial logging.

Arduino's IDE was groundbreaking in 2010, but these days there are easier (and cheaper!) alternatives for beginning hobbyists, and better alternatives for power users.

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