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Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

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Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#271

Post by warmwaffles »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #217
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mark…

> Qualcomm could simply offer this option on their own and save the acquisition cost. No they can't. That's like suggesting "the aircraft carrier could simply turn around." The cheap and simple way for a multi-billion-dollar secretive semiconductor manufacturing behemoth that doesn't know how to write a contract for less than a million dollars or to publish documents for the public is not to just change that. It's to…

> the aircraft carrier could simply turn around.

Pretty sure it can turn 180 degrees fairly quickly.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#272

Post by drzaiusx11 »

I moved to using Arduino compatibles due to the "two Arduino companies" drama a while back. I don't even recall how they resolved that dispute (or even if they did), but luckily I don't have to care as long as compatibles still work in the dev environment (or some fork thereof)

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#273

Post by agloe_dreams »

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 mean, if you have seen RasPi prices lately, I'm not so sure this is true. Seems like a really profitable biz..granted, I wouldn't pay their absurd prices for such underpowered hardware. Virtually nobody should buy their $200 CM5 product for example.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#274

Post by quitit »

xphos wrote: post #186
webdevver wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

genuinely, what is the survival story for qualcomm entering the next decade? - completely missed out on AI - phones become commodity, push for complete vertical integration from apple, google - squeezed by chinese soc vendors from 'below' (mediatek, unisoc) they're cooked, right? there's no way out, surely.

I think the AI bit is overblown. Why does every large company have to do everything in technology, AI is horribly over valued in the market right now. The other issues are much more important as those are threats to Qcom's current profit method mostly MediaTek squeezing the lower tier market. It's unclear if Qcoms going to be able to dominate upper tier where they own like 60% of market share if they don't also compe…

The honest answer is that they see AI interaction as being the next human to computer interface, one that will function much in the way that super-apps do today, with the benefit of accelerating the purchasing pathway.

In a way this mirrors how people opt for using apps even though a web version exists, because the apps are generally more performant.

I'd argue that ChatGPT is already there. The instant check out feature they've added, along with integrations was that crucial link between recommending and fulfilling a purchase. It turns ChatGPT into something that can very directly assist with typical "life stuff".

As examples: You're having a dinner party, it can set the menu, then buy the ingredients. At christmas, spend a few minutes talking about your kids and then it can make christmas gift suggestions and go and buy it for you, then do it again 12 months later.

Getting between the consumer and their purchases would be highly lucrative, it functionally replaces one of the core functions of advertising and retail.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#275

Post by nekusar »

mikepurvis wrote: post #144
estimator7292 wrote: post #131

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…

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.

Of course they did that. It's a HAL (hardware abstraction library).

That also means that simple projects are abstracted from the hardware. Means I can go across a dozen different CPU arch and board/pin layouts, and I change nothing in my source. I only change my target and it just works.

I did that when I went from a board operating at 16MHz/atmel to a STmicro running 50MHz. No change in my source. And that's really valuable in rapid prototyping.

Once I settled in on a board and everything, I could do it the "right way" aka the old waterfall-gile embedded approach and get things tweaked and optimized.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#276

Post by xg15 »

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…

> 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.

Exactly. But my point was that this demographic would today get a more powerful and more accessible platform for their projects by buying a Raspberry Pi.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#277

Post by DamonHD »

MountDoom wrote: post #265
DamonHD wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

But why? You can have the same chip for much less. The "toolchain" is just a bit of syntactic sugar around existing languages and tools, but more to the point, nothing stops you from using it with your own hardware. I'm not doubting you, just sincerely curious.

That design started ~10Y ago. If I was starting again I might pick something different.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#278

Post by e44858 »

josephcsible wrote: post #18
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…

> 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. Under what legal theory?

They could claim copyright infringement if you distribute their SDK in your firmware without their permission.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#279

Post by dimal »

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…

Whenever a VC backed company is acquired, the press release says "nothing will change, except for all these wonderful new things that the parent company will let us now do". A year later, things start to change. Two years later, the situation is unrecognizable. Qualcomm has no immediate financial incentive to support the education/OSS portion, and so they'll let it die. That's how these things always go.

Arduino is over. In reality, as soon as they took VC funding, it was over.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#280

Post by andoando »

atoav wrote: post #244
andoando wrote: post #171

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…

Well which board do you select then? ESP32 boardfiles do not come with the Arduino application per default. Sure, to you and me this may seem trivial, you paste the URL into the prefs, but there are people who will get stumped by this and with an Arduino there is one less step you can forget, not know about or do wrong. As someone who teaches those things at an University level I can assure you that does make a diffe…

I don't quite remember, but I don't think I installed anything extra for ESP32.

But PlatformIo with VSCode has it and was extremely easy to setup.

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