Live data from Hacker News

Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

qualcomm.com

201–210 of 553 posts

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's hard about programming an ESP32? I plug the USB in and its the same as an Arudino, can even use Arduino IDE, but I prefer VS Code with the PlatformIo extension. You can even use the Arduino Library (#import And a ESP32C board with wifi/bluetooth is like $8 https://www.amazon.com/Seeed-Studio-XIAO-ESP32C3-Microcontro... (and thats from amazon, on alibaba its like couple bucks if that) As a side note, you can po…

It is basically the same thing, don't understand either why it would harder. The only thing is to add the ESP32 module on the addons since it doesn't come enabled by default. Arduino isn't good for projects with more than 5 source code files, it is an awful IDE beyond the basic things you can pack on a single source code file. Always had so many difficulties handling the IDE defects, basically it can crash when start…

agree. when arduino ide first came out it was great (for the times). and to be fair at that time vscode was not a thing. but it's a big ? why arduino did not just go all in on vscode once it was clear where the market leader in IDE was headed

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#202

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.

Realtime and offline would like a word.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. There are lots of use cases for on device AI inference. I run YOLO on an Nvidia Jetson powered Lenovo Think Edge, which processes incoming video at full frame rates on four channels with recognition and classification for a bespoke premises security system. No clouds involved other than the Nix package manager etc. Make sure your argument May carry more weight when you're talking about ultra low powe…

true, true, very true, but i observe you use a nvidia chip. which is perfectly logical. why would you use something that is worse in every single way, right? which is exactly what qcom offerings are...

Is power a single way?

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#204

If you ever wondered, how Arduino came about: The Untold History of Arduino ( https://arduinohistory.github.io/ ).

Arduino has always been a naked cash grab disguised as a "hacker-friendly nonprofit." The gross margin on their boards is >90%, and yeah, the software is mostly a ripoff of wiring.

The software was based on Processing. It was never a secret, just open source working as intended. It doesn't look the same any more.

A non-profit is still a business. Success is necessary for existence.

Think about the number of companies that have been created to make, or heavily specialize in Arduino clones and accessories without having to pay Arduino a cent because the designs were intentionally open-sourced. It doesn't sound like a naked cash grab to me.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#206
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…

> Besides that, IMO hiding hardware details from the developer is the worst thing about Arduino. The hardware details matter and it's far too easy to get footgunned by some implementation detail hidden from you.

Wasn't Arduino not for developers, but for hobbyists? People who aren't super technical but want to do something neat with basic microcontroller functionality?

You're complaint kinda seems like saying "BASIC isn't great language, it's got a lot of problems when used for enterprise applications." It's not really meant for that.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#208
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…

> I've used the ESP32 native tools and they are a lot more complex than Arduino.

How so? All of that is abstracted away from the users just like it is for Arduinos. In fact you can use the Arduino IDE to develop for most ESP32 chips.

If anything Arduino is holding back everyone with their horrible IDE. Their Board and Library managers are painfully slow and having no way to store configuration with your sketch means that you're taking a screenshot of a drop down menu if you have to make any changes.

Eventually people want to write their own libraries to make their code more manageable and the Arduino IDE makes it difficult for someone who knows what they're doing.

> But I used an Arduino, with 5V tolerant outputs, to light up Halloween costumes for years.

I have yet to encounter a piece of hardware that doesn't respect 3.3v as signal high. All of the neopixel variant's data pins work off 3.3v and most people have moved on to 12v and even 24v for larger projects while still raw dogging 3.3v on the data pin without issue.

Arduino's insistence on 5v logic levels is for maintaining backward compatibility which is honestly unnecessary.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#209
post #150
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…

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. Ard…

This is spot on. Arduino occupies a space that everyone else vacated a long time ago.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#210
Arduino offered tiny, inexpensive, easy-to-program computers and dominated the hobby space at first. This lasted for a few years, but then they started getting competition. The ESP8266 offered comparable performance at a fraction of the price, while the Raspberry Pi was about the same price as an Arduino but way better performance. Hard to compete when other companies are selling better hardware for a lower price.
Post reply on HN