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Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

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Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#131

Post by estimator7292 »

phoehne wrote: post #55
chpatrick wrote: post #29

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…

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 go.

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.

But really, esp-IDF isn't that much more complex, nor are most of the other native frameworks. It's a bit more verbose, but esp-IDF provides helper libraries that replace almost everything Arduino provides, but in a way that is actually designed for the hardware and doesn't have to do things like lookup pin numbers in a giant table for each and every gpio call.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#132

Post by ACCount37 »

gimmeThaBeet wrote: post #123
ACCount37 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard that Qualcomm can be decent to work with - if you are in a company the size of Qualcomm, or can dangle "500000 units to ship" in front of them like a carrot. But "decent" is Qualcomm at its absolute best. And Qualcomm at its worst? I'd rather chew down broken glass than work with Qualcomm.

I can add a minimal anecdote. I got some support from a couple engineers on a telecom project, and it wasn't even that big of a thing, but they were more than decent to work with. I did say to one guy, "you guys are a lot cooler to work with than some of the stuff you see in the news" and matter-of-fact he was just like "oh, yeah that's legal" my vision of them is that the engineering side can be great to deal with w…

To get to the engineers, you need to get through the viper pit that is the sales first.

The only time I have seen this incredible feat accomplished was in a company large enough that they had a department dedicated to dealing with other large companies.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#133

Post by cruffle_duffle »

suyash wrote: post #56
the__alchemist wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Community inertia / maker content.

It used to be that but since Arduino and Pi have both gone full commercial, it's not longer viable. I teach kids coding and have been looking at alternatives like ESP or other boards that are much more cost effective and friendly for beginners.

Exactly. I dunno why you’d ever use anything but an esp for “maker stuff” at this point. They are cheaper, more capable, and have the same DX (largely, setting aside 3.3v vs 5v).

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#134

Post by sschueller »

pcdoodle wrote: post #67
vachina wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ain't fun spending $40 for a 'fun' project. ESP32 is like a dollar for WiFi and GPIOs. That's fun.

ESP32 is a dumpster fire IMO. I prefer to get things done quickly over cheap.

How so? I have a product that you can buy that runs on an ESP32S3[1]. They work very well and you can even do OTA updates. Even my competitor uses an ESP32 :)

[1] https://www.stationdisplay.com/

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#135

Post by Moral_ »

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…

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.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#136

Post by userbinator »

yaro330 wrote: post #99
greatgib wrote: post #88

Just wait for a few years and then you can forget everything about open or open source about Arduino. And maybe in 2030, you will only be able to run the Arduino IDE on Windows with a specific driver to ensure that you only flash a firmware to a DRM controlled authentic Arduino device. It is a nightmare when such an acquisition happen.

Qcom is one of the few SoC manufacturers in the Android space to do all their thing out in the open and properly honouring the GPL-v2 licences.

That's pretty useless when they won't release the documentation for their SoCs.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#137

Post by wibbily »

the__alchemist wrote: post #54
fidotron wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact we don't have viable western competition for Espressif is likely to become far more of a headache than all the angst about AI GPU production. Where can you get a half decent microcontroller with wifi integrated on it? Espressif. All the others are flat out bad in some very important dimension, which isn't to say the Espressif products are perfect, but they fit in the important ways.

Yea... ST, Nordic etc have been sleeping on the Wi-Fi, letting Espressif corner that market. They both now have standalone Wi-Fi ICs, but no MCUs still; and it took them a while to release the ICs.

It’s a shame. Nordic’s chips blow the ESPs out of the water in terms of power consumption. You can get an nRF bluetooth dongle to run for months/years off a coin cell, almost without trying. Getting an ESP32 to behave is much harder

IIRC their standalone wifi chip is pretty good even… just stick them together already c’mon.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#138

Post by estimator7292 »

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 libraries in straight undocumented C and wiggling CPU registers manually. But that's not really a niche anymore, there's plenty of other, better designed, frameworks and libraries. Arduino has always been the worst, slowest framework available.

Honestly it's high time to replace Arduino with something else that doesn't instill such awful habits in new engineers.

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