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Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

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Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#291

Post by ndnsnddn »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #217
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #151

Earlier 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 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…

What a strange analogy O_o aircraft carriers (and all warships for that manner) well known for being exceptionally nimble for such huge craft

Evasive maneuvers are a thing

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#292

Post by the__alchemist »

fidotron wrote: post #286
wibbily wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think Nordic etc. are resistant to telling people "if you want to use Wifi you must use FreeRTOS" or equivalent, so they push the two IC solution instead just so their Wifi stack is partitioned physically from the rest of your system. It just pushes more integration headaches downstream to the customer, in addition to being inherently costlier. Espressif had the core right idea there, even if it's not the right dec…

I think they do this though... but it's Zephyr instead of FreeRTOS.

What I want is a Wi-Fi radio that just works like a normal part. No RTOS requirement. No framework or software libs required. Read the datasheet and go.

For some context: This is how LoRa radios work, and this is how Esp-Hosted (Official firmware from Espressif that turns the ESP into a radio IC "coprocessor") works.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#293

Post by benterix »

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…

I had the same opinion several years ago but today it's just as easy PLUS you have a bonus of WiFi and all this for a fraction of the price.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#294

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

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…

Does it have video output? Otherwise, yawn!

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#295

Post by cameldrv »

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.

ESP stuff is very cheap and works well, but the Arduino Uno is a great board/ecosystem for beginners and simple projects. Being 5V is more convenient for a lot of things, and having the pin headers already on the board that you can just start plugging things in with jumper wires is great.

The Arduino IDE is awesome for an extremely quick setup time. You can very easily download libraries and add them to your project, you don't have to create a blank source file, you just have to fill in setup() and loop(). The Arduino IDE makes it very easy to set up a new board and download code to it.

Much of this also applies to the Arduino IDE with and ESP32, but what I really appreciate about the whole Arduino ecosystem is if you want to do something really simple, like say, activate a servo when some sensor reaches a certain value, you literally only have to type 5-6 lines of code. You're not messing around with SDKs and Makefiles and git cloning repositories etc etc etc. You can get kits for $70 that have an Arduino clone, and a bunch of different sensors, servos, steppers, etc. It's absolutely fantastic for teaching basic programming and electronics.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#297

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

scottbez1 wrote: post #281
bschwindHN wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue the RP2040/2350 fills that niche. Cheap, available, easy to program, flexible peripherals, fast enough for many projects, good documentation, and good community support.

RPi's toolchain situation is awful for beginners/hobbyists. CMake and non-manifest-versioned toolchains are a huge barrier to entry. I'd love to use the hardware but have given up multiple times because I'd rather spend my time writing code than wrestling with toolchain setup. And they won't support platformio which could make things massively easier for beginners to set up.

While I've written Rpi Pico applications in C++, IMO CircuitPython/MicroPython is a far better environment for that processor.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#298

Post by phoehne »

bschwindHN wrote: post #164
snitty wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet there is clearly a market for easy-to-program MCUs for hobby and educational purposes.

I would argue the RP2040/2350 fills that niche. Cheap, available, easy to program, flexible peripherals, fast enough for many projects, good documentation, and good community support.

I'm using the RP2040s with FreeRTOS for a hobby project. I think the Pico probe is a much better debugging story than buying a Blackmagic (or if you got the dough, a Segger), to debug the "modern" Arduinos. I have one of the Atmel programmers for the Uno R3/2560/Mega boards and that's nice.

But for people getting started, the ability to just plug in an Uno R3 and stack a motor controller shield on it, is pretty attractive. I like the Cytron break out boards for the Picos, but I still think the path from opening the box to working thing is still easiest with Arduino.

Once you know what you're doing, (and maybe that's when you realize you need a debugger), you move on to something else. And with the Pico I can spend the $800 on an O-scope instead of the Segger.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#299

Post by e-khadem »

slipnslider wrote: post #262
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.

Am I only the only one who finds ESP better in almost every way? Once I discovered ESP8266 and 32, I basically haven't touched an Arduino board

The ADCs are almost useless. But yeah otherwise for most applications they are much better in every regard.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#300

Post by 0x457 »

the__alchemist wrote: post #46
nic547 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

STM32 MCUs are 3V3, not 5V right? Arduino really isn't great with naming, a Uno can be an AVR or ARM based board, now either 3V3 or 5V based and also a SBC rather than just a MCU.

Depends on the MCU, but generally STM32 is 1.7-3.6V

STM32 is 3v3 logic.
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