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Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

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Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#251

Post by ACCount37 »

geerlingguy wrote: post #3

Additionally, they're launching their first joint product, the $44 Uno Q SBC, which has a Dragonwing SoC and STM32 microcontroller on an Uno form factor board[1]. It seems like Arduino will keep their brand, maintain their existing product lines, and continue building devices using other vendor's chips (besides Qualcomm), etc... but as with all acquisitions—I wonder how long that state of affairs will last. Alternati…

I checked: there are board schematics for Uno Q there - but no datasheets or SDK or manuals or any documentation whatsoever for the QRB2210 SoC itself.

Yep, it's Qualcomm alright.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#252

Post by lastdong »

Arduino is an open-source platform — both its hardware and software are open to everyone, right?

The first Arduino I built cost me just $5. I assembled all the parts on a breadboard, and it worked perfectly with the Arduino IDE, just like the ESP32 does nowadays.

Is Qualcomm basically paying for the brand? I didn’t even realize Arduino was a brand at first.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#253

Post by DamonHD »

MountDoom wrote: post #239
xg15 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if even inside the hobbyist space, Arduino got obsoleted by the Raspberry Pi and its clones/compatible devices. Basically, if you already got the skills to work with "bare" microcontrollers, you won't need all the simplification and handholding that Arduino provides and you can just buy the individual chips and fully utilize the tiny form factor and low power requirements. If you want to learn programming mi…

> Arduino got obsoleted by the Raspberry Pi and its clones/compatible devices. Not entirely. Arduino was always targeted at the "casual DIY" segment - artists, school robotics clubs, and other folks who wanted automation without a steep learning curve. This was a notch below the "serious hobbyist" tier where you could save a lot of money by just buying a bare-metal version of the same chip and write some code in C (o…

I designed a consumer product based on a respun Uno, that has sold >500k units. The toolchain and hardware remains pretty capable, and can run super low power with care (~1 microamp most of the time).

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#254

Post by turtlesdown11 »

Moral_ wrote: post #155
webdevver wrote: post #62

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…

Thank goodness for that $4B a year. It will certainly keep the stock valued at a market cap of $182B.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#255

Post by ACCount37 »

giobox wrote: post #225
calibas wrote: post #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.

> while the Raspberry Pi was about the same price as an Arduino but way better performance If you are cross shopping a full single board computer (Pi) with a microcontroller (arduino/esp32 etc) for a project, it's almost always a sign you don't know what you are doing. With the exception of the recent Pi Pico, non of the raspberry pis are Arduino/microcontroller competitors - they are typically full blown linux compu…

Counterpoint: prototyping and low volume production runs. Hardware is cheap - development time is expensive.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#256

Post by cpldcpu »

geerlingguy wrote: post #3

Additionally, they're launching their first joint product, the $44 Uno Q SBC, which has a Dragonwing SoC and STM32 microcontroller on an Uno form factor board[1]. It seems like Arduino will keep their brand, maintain their existing product lines, and continue building devices using other vendor's chips (besides Qualcomm), etc... but as with all acquisitions—I wonder how long that state of affairs will last. Alternati…

At this point in time, the shield headers rather look like a trademark than a useful connecter.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#257

Post by petra »

MountDoom wrote: post #200

The problem is that there just isn't a whole lot of money to be made in providing hobby hardware for enthusiasts. Every time a big player gets involved, they think they can change this. A decade ago, Intel tried that back in the day with Galileo / Edison, and tellingly, they came up with the same "ideas": IoT / AI. If you're doing cheap IoT trinkets, you're never going to pay extra for a brand. You're going to buy th…

I agree. The Arduino brand isn't for professionals.

But let's say tomorrow they come together with bundle/partnerships to create a new, great dev environment, very easy, that a mechanical engineer can prototype a great robot for a niche use case,and continue to use that chip and code, with some changes in V1 production ?

Is there value to the Arduino brand and community than ?

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#258

Post by bangaladore »

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…

Yeah, I was going to say this is like the worst-case scenario for the average user.

One of the benefits of the main Arduino line is it was very simple to convert to your own design. Companies like Broadcom and Qualcomm won't sell (many of) their chips on normal distributer sites.

Same reason why Raspberry PIs kind of suck in my opinion. Great you've come up with a neat thing you want to build with it; you are forced to utilize either their compute modules which may not be sufficient for your task, or might be out of stock, or XYZ.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#259

Post by Pxtl »

giobox wrote: post #225
calibas wrote: post #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.

> while the Raspberry Pi was about the same price as an Arduino but way better performance If you are cross shopping a full single board computer (Pi) with a microcontroller (arduino/esp32 etc) for a project, it's almost always a sign you don't know what you are doing. With the exception of the recent Pi Pico, non of the raspberry pis are Arduino/microcontroller competitors - they are typically full blown linux compu…

Right but if you're a hobbyist, "cheap" isn't the priority. I mean, what's the harm of using a $40 SBC instead of a $10 one if you're going to be spending hundreds of dollars and dozens of man-hours on it?

The bigger concern is the overhead of the Linux OS in terms of interacting with it vs just flashing a microcontroller... but linux lets you run an SSH and FTP servers and wifi and a debugger on the thing easily.

So you get easier access to remotely playing with the programming of your gizmo, but you have the OS in the way of just talking to hardware in real-time. I haven't done projects like that since my undergrad, does it really make that much difference?

To me the big deal-breaker would probably be if the thing I was building was battery-powered.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#260

Post by geerlingguy »

ACCount37 wrote: post #251
geerlingguy wrote: post #3

Additionally, they're launching their first joint product, the $44 Uno Q SBC, which has a Dragonwing SoC and STM32 microcontroller on an Uno form factor board[1]. It seems like Arduino will keep their brand, maintain their existing product lines, and continue building devices using other vendor's chips (besides Qualcomm), etc... but as with all acquisitions—I wonder how long that state of affairs will last. Alternati…

I checked: there are board schematics for Uno Q there - but no datasheets or SDK or manuals or any documentation whatsoever for the QRB2210 SoC itself. Yep, it's Qualcomm alright.

Take it with a grain of salt, but the rep I've been in contact with said they'd be releasing more on the SoC...
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