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Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

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Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#171

Post by andoando »

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…

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 power this with your IPhone's USB C which was surprisingly cool.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#172

Post by bschwindHN »

ricw wrote: post #141
estimator7292 wrote: post #138

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 li…

Curious what the better frameworks are these days? Are they tied to specific hardware like arduino was? And what language do they use?

FreeRTOS is pleasant to use.

I've recently been getting into Rust + Embassy + Probe-rs and in my opinion it's been the best embedded experience by far.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#174

Post by blastersyndrome »

My takeaway from this announcement is that are going to ruin Arduino's current IDE and replace it with... something called Arduino App Lab? They didn't go into specifics as to what this is, other than it will integrate AI, somehow.

The other thing they announced is that they are going to sell at least one of their SBCs under the Arduino brand. That's kind of cool, I guess.

This announcement was very difficult to read. The whole thing sounds like it was written by chatGPT and it and it really shows. It took them roughly four pages to announce these two things and nothing else. I can't help but feel there is some level of malice to this, like they are taking out of Microsoft's playbook of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish".

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#175

Post by cosmicgadget »

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…

From the presser:

> Entrepreneurs, businesses, tech professionals, students, educators, and hobbyists will be empowered to rapidly prototype and test new solutions, with a clear path to commercialization supported by Qualcomm Technologies’ advanced technologies and extensive partner ecosystem.

At the least the official line is to remedy this situation. Could be embrace/extend/extinguish but tech companies spend all kinds of money on getting students and smaller businesses into their monolithic ecosystems.

The data center AI race was won by nvidia, embedded AI might still be up for grabs and it helps to have developer adoption.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#176

Post by jovial_cavalier »

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…

I had the same knee-jerk reaction, but the optimist in me wants to say "isn't that the point of the acquisition?" Another comment linked to the Uno Q, which looks like a Qualcomm dev kit by Arduino. Perhaps Qualcomm is trying to get better at exactly the kind of thing you're talking about.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#177

Post by nunobrito »

andoando wrote: post #171
phoehne wrote: 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…

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 starting and every now and then will just refuse to upload the firmware. The other part are libraries, really difficult to setup all the needed libraries for larger code bases.

On that sense, Visual Code with PlatformIO went far beyond. Just open the project there and the libraries are taken care. The connection to boards is more robust. I'm not so sure how to feel with this sale to Qualcomm, it just feels that it is going there to die.

Quite the difference from the early days where Arduino had such energy and the tools would bring almost anyone into microntrollers with such ease.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#178

Post by babl-yc »

estimator7292 wrote: post #138

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 li…

There's still relevance in making it stupidly easy to make an LED blink and make basic apps on circuit boards. Education + weekend hardware hackers might look for something different in a framework than a professional.

But certainly for pro use cases the hardware specific frameworks are way more powerful (but also complex).

I wrote up a bit on Arduino vs ESP-IDF here https://bitclock.io/blog/esp-idf-vscode

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#179

Post by sharpshadow »

crote wrote: post #167
itopaloglu83 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think about the Arduino professional line? They have industrial PLC equipments and other high end boards etc.

Doesn't look bad, but the Arduino name is a serious drawback. It's a brand focusing on DIY tinkering, how are you going to sell that to your boss who only finds a bunch of shady hobbyist stuff when he Googles it? Besides, what's the market? The non-pro hardware is fine for prototypes, but you don't want a bowl of spaghetti in production, so porting it to the pro is pointless. If you want a generic compute board, why…

Military drones maybe? The trend is now on local AI features and they are practically throwaway.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#180

Post by kirito1337 »

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…

Arduino is dead, ESP is better.

They're trying to bring Arduino back from the dead.

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