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Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

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Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#151

Post by aleph_minus_one »

Moral_ wrote: post #135
magtux wrote: post #83

This is a recipe for disaster. Arduino is great for education/tinkering. Qualcomm won't sell you anything even if you are ready to commit to buying 1000s. I tried to source some Qualcomm chips for a startup @ 10k qty and was told there would be no information or support. Qualcomm can have a much bigger market if they simply open up some product lines for distribution like MediaTek do. China has a way more vibrant, in…

This is the exact reason why they bought Arduino... So now startups have a way to buy say 1,000 devices for prototyping. Qualcomm gets used to supporting smaller developers/startups/tinkerers and will hopefully push different types of chips into the Arduino product lines.

> This is the exact reason why they bought Arduino... So now startups have a way to buy say 1,000 devices for prototyping. Qualcomm gets used to supporting smaller developers/startups/tinkerers

For this, Qualcomm does not have to buy Arduino for a big amount of money: Qualcomm could simply offer this option on their own and save the acquisition cost.

Addendum: For the acquisition cost, Qualcomm could do a lot of marketing of their offering towards makers.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#152

Post by zoobab »

RobotToaster wrote: post #118
Workaccount2 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qualcomm is and will remain patent holding company. They have a crazy number patents for all manner of wireless communication, and they treat them like their golden geese.

So they're basically going to become a patent troll, like IBM?

They are a patent troll for a long time.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#153

Post by chrsw »

Moral_ wrote: post #135
magtux wrote: post #83

This is a recipe for disaster. Arduino is great for education/tinkering. Qualcomm won't sell you anything even if you are ready to commit to buying 1000s. I tried to source some Qualcomm chips for a startup @ 10k qty and was told there would be no information or support. Qualcomm can have a much bigger market if they simply open up some product lines for distribution like MediaTek do. China has a way more vibrant, in…

This is the exact reason why they bought Arduino... So now startups have a way to buy say 1,000 devices for prototyping. Qualcomm gets used to supporting smaller developers/startups/tinkerers and will hopefully push different types of chips into the Arduino product lines.

> Qualcomm gets used to supporting smaller developers/startups/tinkerers

I'll believe it when I see it

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#154

Post by piltdownman »

webdevver wrote: post #62
piltdownman wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Su…

>They just won a significant case in its licensing battle with Arm did you notice how ARMs stock jumped 5% after that ruling? that tells you everything you need to know. not to be reddity but reminds me of that scene from The Social Network, where Zuck's buddy couldn't udnerstand how the the record companies winning was actually a massive L. all the court proved was its total irrelevance to market forces, thats all.…

So why on earth did ARM sue to stop their release and force a clean-sheet redesign? Other than SoftBank being Softbank.

//ARM’s CEO wrote in a contemporaneous internal message that the Nuvia ALA “had left a route to blow a hole in [ARM’s] revenue plan” because “Qualcomm already ha[d] a v9 architecture license” under its own ALA. That observation led him to vent that “I’m struggling not to be pissed that we set up a route for Qualcomm to collapse the payments to Arm,” which “feels like in our chess game we left ourselves very exposed.”

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/delawar...

Re: Handheld gaming - The dedicated Xbox gaming handheld was cancelled because AMD required a minimum of 10 million units in its contract. With Steam Deck only selling ~5 million units and ASUS ROG/Lenovo Legion only selling 1-2 million MS didn't want to take the risk.

Reduce that BOM, go with ARM, and realise there's an incumbent leaving the market, and you have a compelling argument for Qualcomm. Particularly given the Nintendo Switch 2 sold 1.6M units in June, the highest launch month unit sales for video game hardware in US history

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#155

Post by Moral_ »

webdevver wrote: post #62
piltdownman wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Su…

>They just won a significant case in its licensing battle with Arm did you notice how ARMs stock jumped 5% after that ruling? that tells you everything you need to know. not to be reddity but reminds me of that scene from The Social Network, where Zuck's buddy couldn't udnerstand how the the record companies winning was actually a massive L. all the court proved was its total irrelevance to market forces, thats all.…

Quoting Arm stock prices is hilarious considering that there is only 10% float available to be traded and 95% of that 10% is owned by institutions already. That stock is so heavily manipulated so the big boys can make insane profits on options.

On the other topic

>>Outside of Snapdragon its basically 5G Telecoms atm

>seems to be the only thing going for it.

Did you guys forget the $4B a year in auto rev that they generate, they essentially captured the entire auto market from Nvidia and NXP.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#156

Post by dfex »

itopaloglu83 wrote: post #81
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…

What do you think about the Arduino professional line? They have industrial PLC equipments and other high end boards etc.

Not the OP, but have had some experience with the Arduino Opta around this time twelve months ago (Oct 24) through a professional development course I took at my local university on industrial control systems programming.

While it's nice to have exposure to PLC programming at an Arduino price point, the IDE, and PLC firmware was VERY rough around the edges. It took lots of resets and fiddling to even get the units connected over their USB serial, and you'd come back the next day and you'd have to repeat the process. Lots of "hold your tongue the right way while pressing this button". The IDE was also very buggy (though it may have improved in the last 12 months), but once you got things going, it did the job.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#157

Post by poly2it »

extraduder_ire wrote: post #107
s1gsegv wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it’s worth, the original ESP32 is actually 5V tolerant, semi-officially acknowledged by Espressif. Good enough for hobby projects, anyway

I'm surprised cheap level shifters with the same pin pitch as various dev boards aren't common.

Do you know where you can get one?

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#158

Post by estimator7292 »

Moral_ wrote: post #135
magtux wrote: post #83

This is a recipe for disaster. Arduino is great for education/tinkering. Qualcomm won't sell you anything even if you are ready to commit to buying 1000s. I tried to source some Qualcomm chips for a startup @ 10k qty and was told there would be no information or support. Qualcomm can have a much bigger market if they simply open up some product lines for distribution like MediaTek do. China has a way more vibrant, in…

This is the exact reason why they bought Arduino... So now startups have a way to buy say 1,000 devices for prototyping. Qualcomm gets used to supporting smaller developers/startups/tinkerers and will hopefully push different types of chips into the Arduino product lines.

It's cheaper and easier to just spin your own boards at that point. Arduinos are not complex or special in any way. Even if you did need a ton of off the shelf boards, there are countless clones that will sell you as many as you want for next to nothing.

Plus the market you're implying exists is so small as to be utterly worthless to Qualcomm. They are in no way interested in individuals or small businesses

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#159

Post by potatolicious »

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.

Yeah I'm kind of puzzled by what Qualcomm is getting out of this.

Arduino has so little presence in production devices and is largely an enthusiast and hobbyist product. To be clear, this is good! Having well-supported high-quality enthusiast products is awesome.

But it just doesn't... seem to overlap with the bulk of Qualcomm's business, which is large-scale silicon sales to consumer and industrial clients.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#160

Post by ndiddy »

phoehne wrote: post #143
ndiddy wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

From that support article:

> Last but not least, you need to comply with article 4.d of the LGPL license which has specific and very technical requirements. Complying with such requirements, which derive from the LGPL being used in the Arduino core, is usually a matter of providing end users with some documentation and binary files.

Article 4d of the LGPL requires library users to either:

> 0) Convey the Minimal Corresponding Source under the terms of this License, and the Corresponding Application Code in a form suitable for, and under terms that permit, the user to recombine or relink the Application with a modified version of the Linked Version to produce a modified Combined Work, in the manner specified by section 6 of the GNU GPL for conveying Corresponding Source.

> 1) Use a suitable shared library mechanism for linking with the Library. A suitable mechanism is one that (a) uses at run time a copy of the Library already present on the user's computer system, and (b) will operate properly with a modified version of the Library that is interface-compatible with the Linked Version.

Because the Arduino code is statically linked to your application to create the firmware binary, you're required to use option 0 (distribute your application's object files so it can be relinked with the Arduino library).

> And for some low-volume Arduino based products, the software isn't the valuable part of the project, anyway

That's definitely true! That's why I said I wouldn't use Arduino for a shipping product unless you're fine with the firmware on the device being publicly available.

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