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Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

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Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#231

Post by zem »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #103
jsheard wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's vertical integration is formidable but Google are still really struggling with their execution, their Tensor SOCs are consistently years behind Snapdragon in performance and efficiency even after their switch to TSMC this generation. Qualcomm is probably safe at the high end of the Android market for a while yet.

The gap between Google’s and Apple’s SoCs is insane. Current Pixels bench at around a third of what current iPhones do. Not that performance matters to all users, but with how much Pixels cost you have to ask yourself what it is you’re paying for. Even if you don’t care for Apple, for a little more you can get a competitor for a Snapdragon.

as a pixel owner, i'm unfortunately paying for the operating system more than anything else. most other android phones are infested with unremovable bloatware and lack of update guarantees, and iOS is crippled by apple. I used maemo when I could, and now that I can't pixels are pretty much my only option for a decent phone.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#232

Post by joshvm »

fidotron wrote: post #28
tylergetsay wrote: post #20

Espressif has been eating their lunch, the boards are way more capable and much cheaper. Why would anyone pick an Uno over an ESP32?

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.

Built-in no, but the Pi Pico W is decent and inexpensive if the form factor isn't an issue. The RP2040/RP2350 are nice chips to work with and documentation is good. I can live with an external module, and it's certified too.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#233

Post by cosmic_cheese »

zem wrote: post #231
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The gap between Google’s and Apple’s SoCs is insane. Current Pixels bench at around a third of what current iPhones do. Not that performance matters to all users, but with how much Pixels cost you have to ask yourself what it is you’re paying for. Even if you don’t care for Apple, for a little more you can get a competitor for a Snapdragon.

as a pixel owner, i'm unfortunately paying for the operating system more than anything else. most other android phones are infested with unremovable bloatware and lack of update guarantees, and iOS is crippled by apple. I used maemo when I could, and now that I can't pixels are pretty much my only option for a decent phone.

I have an Xperia as a secondary phone and test device which comes with relatively clean Android. Sony is wavering on the NA market unfortunately so I may not be able to replace it with another Sony when the time comes.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#234

Post by calibas »

giobox wrote: post #225
calibas wrote: post #210

Arduino 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.

> while the Raspberry Pi was about the same price as an Arduino but way better performance If you are cross shopping a full single board computer (Pi) with a microcontroller (arduino/esp32 etc) for a project, it's almost always a sign you don't know what you are doing. With the exception of the recent Pi Pico, non of the raspberry pis are Arduino/microcontroller competitors - they are typically full blown linux compu…

True from an industry perspective, but they're very much competitors in the hobby market.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#235

Post by limagnolia »

q3k wrote: post #25
josephcsible wrote: post #18

Earlier 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?

One way they could do this is grant you a patent license only for some kinds of use. (and eg. make sure their products are useless without some patent license for some software driver or algorithm)

Patents are exhausted on first sale. If you sell me a board that uses your patent, I can do anything I want with that board. At least that is my understanding, IANAL and all...

However, if they are distributing SDKs or something separately from the hardware, that software could have its own license that forbids commercial use.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#236

Post by ACCount37 »

yalogin wrote: post #122

Can someone explain why Arsuino is attractive to Qualcomm? I mean is it a gateway drug to Qualcomm chips?

Currently, no. But currently, the only gateway drug to Qualcomm chips is being a large enough company that your company can beat Qualcomm into submission.

Qualcomm may want to change that? But if Qualcomm's treatment of small developers remains the usual Qualcomm scorn, they'll get nowhere.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#237

Post by [deleted] »

giobox wrote: post #225
calibas wrote: post #210

Arduino 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.

> while the Raspberry Pi was about the same price as an Arduino but way better performance If you are cross shopping a full single board computer (Pi) with a microcontroller (arduino/esp32 etc) for a project, it's almost always a sign you don't know what you are doing. With the exception of the recent Pi Pico, non of the raspberry pis are Arduino/microcontroller competitors - they are typically full blown linux compu…

[deleted]

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#238

Post by ssl-3 »

oytis wrote: post #108
b00ty4breakfast wrote: post #69

call me cynical but I can't imagine this ending very well. Even if qualcomm does nothing to alter the operations at Arduino, what happens if they go belly-up in a decade?

IDK, what kind of innovation we need from Arduino now? Arduino IDE exists and is open source. Arduino Uno exists and is open source. Arduino cores, both from Arduino itself and third-party exist and are open source. Not sure how they made money recently, I hope they are up to something good with Qualcomm.

> Not sure how they made money recently,

That's an easy riddle to answer: Nothing sold by Arduino is particularly inexpensive. They've got room for profit margin. It's easier to make money when the things are several times more expensive than the competitors.

To pick an example: I can get a sketchy-feeling ESP32 board that was manufactured by some nameless entity and sold by a company that calls themselves "QQQMFXFDCX" or something. It'll probably generally work, but the pins will be in whatever order, labeled however, and I might have to spend some time documenting its unknown [mis]features. It will cost me a few dollars.

Or, I mean: I can get one from Arduino with their name on it (and with a ublox-branded module) in their Nano form-factor for ~$20. It will work fine. The pins will be [mostly] in numeric order, and labeled on both sides of the board. It will cost me about $20.

There's a lot more potential profit margin in a $20 sale than there is in a $3 sale.

(Do they add enough value to make me want to spend $20 instead of $3? Not necessarily, but I'm pretty cheap.)

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#239

Post by MountDoom »

xg15 wrote: post #222
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 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 (or Rust). Or the pro tier, where there's way you're paying $20+ for a glorified breakout board.

Casual DIY always had a ton of inertia. It's also the reason why every other design for an analog guitar pedal or whatever is using components that are 50 years old: ancient designs are just copied-and-pasted forever. So I don't think Arduino is dead there, although other platforms are definitely eating some of their lunch.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#240

Post by atoav »

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.

I run a medialab at an university. ESP32 is great, but there are some downsides that are all not dealbreakers, but can in some cases lead me to recommend a classic Arduino-type device:

1. Lack of 5V tolerant pins. Beginners may or may not be aware of the possibility of destroying the device or the need to level-shift signals.

2. Tooling may not work out of the box. As of today the tooling step boils down to pasting a URL into a field in the preferences, but that is something you need to know. You need to select the right uploading options which are much more complex than with arduino type devices.

3. IMO less clear naming of different dev boards, thus also harder to find docs.

4. Examples may not work out of the box, simple Arduino examples may fail with hard to debug issues (for beginners) where they don't know whether it is a hardware issue, wrong board/uploader setup or a pinout issue (e.g. if the onboard LED pin differs).

These are all examples of issues students had when they used the ESP32 boards without my guidance, so not just my opinion or a theory. And as I said none of these are dealbreakers, but depending on the patience, stress levels, perceived skill etc. of the student this might make me recommend an Arduino over an ESP32.

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