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Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

qualcomm.com

161–170 of 553 posts

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#161
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 gen…

Auto Rev is Snapdragon Digital Chassis based is it not? I presumed people were aware of the legacy Snapdragon stuff, but maybe not!

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#162
post #90
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

And a lot of dev boards you will use as a hobbyist even include level shifters on the board, so you will have a 5V pin.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#163
post #135
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.

Seems like a similar play to what Broadcom did with Raspberry Pi— create a new entity/brand that could resell their chips on hobby boards and be stewards of a "community" support framework but largely without distracting the company from its enterprise customers or risk cannibalizing those relationships.

That said, interesting that Qualcomm would buy twenty years of Arduino legacy for this rather than launching something new in the space.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#164
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would argue the RP2040/2350 fills that niche. Cheap, available, easy to program, flexible peripherals, fast enough for many projects, good documentation, and good community support.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#165
post #135
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 did not need to buy Arduino in order to do that.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 r…

Good luck getting anywhere close to Nintendo Switch sales with anything that's not Nintendo Switch.

Valve managing to land Steam Deck within 2 orders of magnitude from that? That was already an unlikely feat.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#167
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.

Doesn't look bad, but the Arduino name is a serious drawback. It's a brand focusing on DIY tinkering, how are you going to sell that to your boss who only finds a bunch of shady hobbyist stuff when he Googles it?

Besides, what's the market? The non-pro hardware is fine for prototypes, but you don't want a bowl of spaghetti in production, so porting it to the pro is pointless. If you want a generic compute board, why not a Raspberry Pi? If you want a PLC, why not go for a proper PLC?

There's perhaps a market for the shadow IT equivalent of electronics projects where an Arduino sketch is suddenly a load-bearing part of the company, but that's about it.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#169
post #55

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…

Page of code?

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#170

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…

What frameworks would you recommend for new people learning about embedded systems?
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