Curious if anyone’s seen actual numbers on the acquisition
Qualcomm to acquire Arduino
211–220 of 553 posts
Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino
#212this is bad, qualcomm hides their documentation and its not accessible unless you pay and enter into a contract
Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino
#213Earlier 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 do you think about the Arduino professional line? They have industrial PLC equipments and other high end boards etc.
Deeply unserious. Arduino put little real thought into what features industrial users would actually find useful. I suspect the main market for their "professional" boards is hobbyists with money to burn.
Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ain't fun spending $40 for a 'fun' project. ESP32 is like a dollar for WiFi and GPIOs. That's fun.
That's like the cost of two burritos. Unless you're bricking these things on the daily why would $1 vs $40 be the deciding factor for a project that is tens of hours at a minimum?
I buy 10s them and throw them around the house. I have a couple on AAA batteries and with deep sleep + watchdog wake on WiFi they last months.
Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino
#215Arduino 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.
It's still one of the best boards if you want to do stuff on "bare metal". While I agree they missed a few product innovations, it's still a product that is in demand and gets used by industry for real products.
Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino
#216This 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.
The issue is that their corporate culture does not support it. Arduino will be too small to matter. This is the same issue as with Coral, the Google TPU. They are not refreshed as they are too small. They are too small cause they are not updated or supported widely.
People need mainline kernel support and regular refreshes to reliably build projects based on it. This will require some level of building their BSPs in open and providing APIs for people to take advantage of the QCOM specific features. A QCOM that won't talk to anyone without an NDA cannot adapt to this.
Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino
#217Earlier 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 and will hopefully push different types of chips into the Arduino product lines.
> 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 write a contract for millions of dollars to buy someone else that can already do that.
Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
As far as I can tell, if they even attempted that, all they could do is deny any kind of warranty claims from you and try and stop distributors selling you any more of their brand parts.
… which would kill your business, unless you are able to source an alternative part. So not entirely harmless.
Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino
#219Earlier 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…
(psa: Arduino IDE 1.x works flawlessly for tons of non-Arduino boards, including Pi Pico, ESP32 devkits, etc. Most Arduino users aren't even able to consider processor implementation specifics, never signed an NDA in life, and don't even know where generated binaries go, so those boards are almost "binary compatible" with each others, all in _very_ positive sense)
Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino
#220The 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 think it might be related to them charging say $100 instead of $5 for the device and providing "lifetime" (read: "indefinite") access to their IoT Cloud. Except there are no guarantees on the duration of that access.
As a side note, I don't get why they can't find the NPV of actually lifetime cloud compute. Compute costs are decreasing rapidly, so a $5/yr perpetuity has a NPV of $185 assuming 2.7% inflation?