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Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

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Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#401

Post by arjvik »

cyberax wrote: post #318
geerlingguy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm speaking in a broader sense, comparing the variety of other Arduino boards like the Uno R3/R4. That wasn't too clear in the OP, sorry! The concern I have with the $44 Q is it has 2GB of RAM and 16GB eMMC, and a processor that's probably between a Pi 3 and Pi 4 in terms of speed and IO (though 4nm, so probably much more efficient). For $45 I can buy a Pi 5 with it's own built-in GPIO, PCIe, and a much faster SoC,…

There are some advantages to Arduino. Like This _is_ possible with Linux, but not at all trivial and likely impossible with general-purpose distros. Interrupt handling and (on RP2040) dedicated multicore code is also nice.

Curious - how does one achieve this in Linux?

I assume initramfs-only with special purpose pid0 and only the modules needed statically compiled into the kernel?

What else would it take?

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#402

Post by arjvik »

wyldfire wrote: post #104
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 guess I'm replying to you with your own video? But it seems interesting and relevant [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfKX616-nsE

Almost a “do you know who I am?” moment :)

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#403

Post by Romario77 »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #386
jajuuka wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Qualcomm bought them to destroy them. I think they see Arduino as a gateway. Instead of hoping students will learn ARM it's more reasonable to leverage Arduino's simple nature to act as an on-ramp for more low level developers. I wouldn't be surprised if Arduino IDE saw a revamp to better support jumping the gap between the Arduino to Snapdragon. ST and TI do the same thing with their boards too and it'…

People are making so much of this when it seems so much simpler. Qualcomm likes buying high-margin businesses, and Arduino is a high-margin business. Gross margin on their boards is over 90% (hence why you can buy a Chinese clone of a $30 board for $3) and this trend shows no signs of slowing down. The TI equivalent of the $30 Arduino Uno is $5, and it's a true gateway product.

clone relies on hardware being designed and software written - this takes a lot of money, so you can't just count the final price of parts as the price.

Arduino is open sourced in hard and software which allows this cheap cloning to exist. It also helps a lot with software and docs, which makes it cheaper for them.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#404

Post by vdfs »

rossdavidh wrote: post #362
EasyMark wrote: post #347

Are they buying it up to kill it or phase it out? Seems like corporations never do anything like this to the "good" of the community, it's always bad. I'd love to be pointed at exceptions where a megacorp bought some small relatively benevolent project and then didn't squeeze all the profit out of it and leave it for dead.

Google bought Android, but did not kill it. Same with YouTube. But, I admit, there are a lot more examples of the other way...

https://killedbygoogle.com

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#406

Post by pclmulqdq »

Romario77 wrote: post #403
pclmulqdq wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are making so much of this when it seems so much simpler. Qualcomm likes buying high-margin businesses, and Arduino is a high-margin business. Gross margin on their boards is over 90% (hence why you can buy a Chinese clone of a $30 board for $3) and this trend shows no signs of slowing down. The TI equivalent of the $30 Arduino Uno is $5, and it's a true gateway product.

clone relies on hardware being designed and software written - this takes a lot of money, so you can't just count the final price of parts as the price. Arduino is open sourced in hard and software which allows this cheap cloning to exist. It also helps a lot with software and docs, which makes it cheaper for them.

A competent engineer designing a devkit as simple as an arduino needs about 1 day of work. Give it a week to include debugging. Amortize that cost over a million units and engineering time comes out to less than one cent per board.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#407

Post by protocolture »

cuttothechase wrote: post #190

The title says - "Qualcomm to Acquire Arduino—Accelerating Developers’ Access to its Leading Edge Computing and AI" Didn't have it on my bingo card that running AI on a microcontroller is what people are salivating for! Not sure if the strategy is to cram AI into every little shoe box out there and keeping fingers crossed for the stock price to trend upwards!?

IIRC some of the ESP boards are "AI Optimised" but its like, facial and license plate recognition, not necessarily LLM stuff.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#408

Post by freeopinion »

jajuuka wrote: post #358
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 don't think Qualcomm bought them to destroy them. I think they see Arduino as a gateway. Instead of hoping students will learn ARM it's more reasonable to leverage Arduino's simple nature to act as an on-ramp for more low level developers. I wouldn't be surprised if Arduino IDE saw a revamp to better support jumping the gap between the Arduino to Snapdragon. ST and TI do the same thing with their boards too and it'…

Some years back when bluepills ran $2, Arduinos seemed to have no point. Today, you can buy an ESP32 dev board with wifi for $6. Or an Arduino Uno Wifi for $55.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#409

Post by vayup »

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…

There is a whole lot of commerical products built out of what we consider hobby projects (Adruino, Raspberry Pi). Eg: digital displays, industrial equipment controllers etc. All of this is clubbed under the nebulous IoT moniker.

My take: Qualcomm hopes to leverage Adriano adoption to expand their IoT share, and also to grow Adruino's footprint to include more smart IoT devices using Qualcomm's chipsets (Eg: Robotics)

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#410

Post by petsfed »

xg15 wrote: post #276
MountDoom wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This is true up until it really REALLY isn't.

The main strength of microcontroller-based hobby boards (I hesitate to say "bare-metal", but something like that) is that tuning them for long operation on a small pouch cell is pretty straightforward. There is no such easy path to prolong battery life on a Raspberry Pi (not including the RPI Pico). After that, with microcontrollers, you have direct visibility into most interrupts you may need to use. You do not have that in the standard Raspbian linux distro.

They are foundationally different items, and it does not take a tremendously complicated project to reach the boundary between them. Need a robust wifi stack or to run a camera? You need something with at least an RTOS (like an ESP), or an actual operating system. Need to service a rapidly spinning rotary encoder without missing clicks or blocking other operations? You need a microcontroller.

Its certainly true that you can make a Raspberry Pi do everything an arduino can (and mostly vice versa), but in terms of what's accessible to a early-intermediate hobbyist, they are different tools for different tasks.

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