The Untold History of Arduino • Hacker News Board

Re: The Untold History of Arduino

#31

Post by huuu » Sat, Mar 05, 2016, 7:13 AM UTC

ssalazar wrote: post #24

jcoffland wrote: post #18

The whole Arduino thing has always baffled me a bit. I've been programming 8-bit AVR chips since 2000. There have always been many different development board options. Even long before Wiring and Arduino. Sure many were more expensive but neither Wiring nor Arduino added much technically to the hardware itself. The real innovation of Arduino has always been the Wiring programming system. Personally I prefer the low-l…

Embedded systems engineers are very intentionally not the audience for Arduino. With Arduino you can go from zero EE/FW experience to blinky LEDs in an evening. This is a powerful tool for opening up hardware hacking to young people, artists, designers, and other non-technical professions. Very few of these people are going to read through a datasheet or figure out the difference between DDRB and PORTB.

This is absolutely the power of Arduino. I've got zero knowledge of chips but can buy an Arduino, a CNC shield and some stepper drivers. Press them together and suddenly I got a working CNC machine.

Re: The Untold History of Arduino

#32

Post by thawkins » Sat, Mar 05, 2016, 7:30 AM UTC

makomk wrote: post #7

reimertz wrote: post #4

How-to become a douchbag in 10 steps: 1. Be the supervisor for a thesis that will become a open-sourced project 2. Use this open sourced project in one of the classes you teach at University 3. work together with and ask for help from the creator of the open-sourced project 4. see the value of the open-sourced project 5. fork it 6. claim it as yours 7. get rich by selling it 8. write super douchy email to a previous…

This is part of the reason I just buy the cheapest Arduino-compatible clones possible and laugh at the idea that we should all buy genuine Arduino to support the people who put in the hard work - it's been fairly obvious for a long time that it was a Wiring rip-off through and through. Probably also why the official Arduino ports to non-AVR architectures are so incompetent compared to third-party ones; the AVR port w…

My favorite Peeve about the arduino boards, was the half pin center shift on one of the headers that makes it impossible to just plug in some perfboard with headers on it and make your own shields. Thus opening up the path to selling expensive shield hardware.

Re: The Untold History of Arduino

#33

Post by cellularmitosis » Sat, Mar 05, 2016, 7:46 AM UTC

analog31 wrote: post #22

Animats wrote: post #21

It's really just an Atmel AVR CPU, which you could buy on a development board before Arduino. Atmel has a tool chain for AVR CPUs, which is a version of GCC, so it's open source.[1] I've developed for such boards without any "Arduino" stuff. The Arduino project put a simplified IDE on the front of that. Their real innovation was social. They built a community around the thing and provided documentation that wasn't ad…

But doesn't PIC use GCC too? Disclaimer: I'm a long time PIC user, going all the way back to the PIC16C84. Long before anything like Arduino came out, I always found Microchip's documentation to be much easier to crack. Of course, I admit to a certain amount of mental inertia and familiarity with the platform as well.

Does it? The whole reason I chose AVR back in the day was the gcc port. http://www.ladyada.net/library/picvsavr.html

Re: The Untold History of Arduino

#34

Post by neltnerb » Sat, Mar 05, 2016, 7:46 AM UTC

analog31 wrote: post #22

Animats wrote: post #21

It's really just an Atmel AVR CPU, which you could buy on a development board before Arduino. Atmel has a tool chain for AVR CPUs, which is a version of GCC, so it's open source.[1] I've developed for such boards without any "Arduino" stuff. The Arduino project put a simplified IDE on the front of that. Their real innovation was social. They built a community around the thing and provided documentation that wasn't ad…

But doesn't PIC use GCC too? Disclaimer: I'm a long time PIC user, going all the way back to the PIC16C84. Long before anything like Arduino came out, I always found Microchip's documentation to be much easier to crack. Of course, I admit to a certain amount of mental inertia and familiarity with the platform as well.

I had to get a proprietary crippled third-party compiler to do anything on a PIC12 in C.

The PIC16 at the time at least definitely didn't have GCC support, I recall having to boot Windows to compile my code for it. Pretty sure that's still the case.

Re: The Untold History of Arduino

#35

Post by yuhong » Sat, Mar 05, 2016, 7:51 AM UTC

makomk wrote: post #7

reimertz wrote: post #4

How-to become a douchbag in 10 steps: 1. Be the supervisor for a thesis that will become a open-sourced project 2. Use this open sourced project in one of the classes you teach at University 3. work together with and ask for help from the creator of the open-sourced project 4. see the value of the open-sourced project 5. fork it 6. claim it as yours 7. get rich by selling it 8. write super douchy email to a previous…

This is part of the reason I just buy the cheapest Arduino-compatible clones possible and laugh at the idea that we should all buy genuine Arduino to support the people who put in the hard work - it's been fairly obvious for a long time that it was a Wiring rip-off through and through. Probably also why the official Arduino ports to non-AVR architectures are so incompetent compared to third-party ones; the AVR port w…

I think Altair and IBM PC both was at least original designs, but neither were they particularly good designs either. Unfortunately I think ANSI/ISO and other standard committees was probably poorly suited to setting standards in this area. The right way back then would probably be to design a reference system and release schematics and other design information.

Re: The Untold History of Arduino

#36

Post by agumonkey » Sat, Mar 05, 2016, 7:56 AM UTC

voltagex_ wrote: post #29

agumonkey wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only half but I mirrored the whole domain because I want to read it all.

Wish there was a way to easily mirror it on Android - looks like good reading for a long flight.

The autofile subtree is 49.9MB, the whole site ~660.

Re: The Untold History of Arduino

#37

Post by ssalazar » Sat, Mar 05, 2016, 8:15 AM UTC

eggy wrote: post #26

ssalazar wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Embedded systems engineers are very intentionally not the audience for Arduino. With Arduino you can go from zero EE/FW experience to blinky LEDs in an evening. This is a powerful tool for opening up hardware hacking to young people, artists, designers, and other non-technical professions. Very few of these people are going to read through a datasheet or figure out the difference between DDRB and PORTB.

I agree, but is it then just the open source of it that drove Arduino over say, the Basic Stamp 1 by Parallax? I believe it was very accessible, affordable, and even the smallest Arduinos today are not much smaller albeit with more chips on them. I was using the Parallax Basic Stamp 1 in 1994, 10 years before he even wrote his thesis. It had a BASIC interpreter on ROM, PBasic, 5V regulator, EEPROM, oscillator, and 16…

Yeah the OP specifically called out open-ness as being a dealbreaker for the Javelin Stamp. I never used Basic Stamp, but from what I can figure, it didn't have ADCs by default, which is a huge deal. Even now people who are slapping an Arduino on top of Raspberry Pi because its the simplest way to get a few ADCs for sensor input. Cost also seems to have been an issue, and a big RS-232 port probably gave the impression of obsolescence.

Being readily available for Mac doesn't hurt for the design/art crowd either- Wikipedia suggests that Basic Stamp didnt have first-party Mac support? Also looking visually similar to Processing (both the IDE and the code style) eases the switchover for people who are new to coding. Ive heard Arduino described as "Processing for Hardware" which is a bit of a stretch in a technical sense, but perhaps exactly correct in a spiritual sense.

Re: The Untold History of Arduino

#38

Post by snom380 » Sat, Mar 05, 2016, 8:19 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #21

It's really just an Atmel AVR CPU, which you could buy on a development board before Arduino. Atmel has a tool chain for AVR CPUs, which is a version of GCC, so it's open source.[1] I've developed for such boards without any "Arduino" stuff. The Arduino project put a simplified IDE on the front of that. Their real innovation was social. They built a community around the thing and provided documentation that wasn't ad…

In addition to the easy to install, easy to use IDE, I'd say the real innovation was a standard, idiot-proof way of programming the AVR with a well known bootloader.

From back when I was working on AVRs at university (2003-2004), I remember there were a ton of programming settings to choose from, different ways to program it (SPI, parallel), and you could easily screw up something if you set the wrong fuses, used the wrong oscillator frequency etc. All of this complexity was taken away by Wiring / Arduino, so you could focus on your project without digging through datasheets.

So the simplified IDE and social aspect was only part of the story.

Re: The Untold History of Arduino

#39

Post by 13of40 » Sat, Mar 05, 2016, 8:54 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #21

It's really just an Atmel AVR CPU, which you could buy on a development board before Arduino. Atmel has a tool chain for AVR CPUs, which is a version of GCC, so it's open source.[1] I've developed for such boards without any "Arduino" stuff. The Arduino project put a simplified IDE on the front of that. Their real innovation was social. They built a community around the thing and provided documentation that wasn't ad…

It's really telling that the base mode Arduino is just an atmega328p on a breadboard, with literally nothing separating it from the real world but the odd, optional, resistor.

Re: The Untold History of Arduino

#40

Post by snom380 » Sat, Mar 05, 2016, 8:58 AM UTC

jcoffland wrote: post #18

The whole Arduino thing has always baffled me a bit. I've been programming 8-bit AVR chips since 2000. There have always been many different development board options. Even long before Wiring and Arduino. Sure many were more expensive but neither Wiring nor Arduino added much technically to the hardware itself. The real innovation of Arduino has always been the Wiring programming system. Personally I prefer the low-l…

Arduino/Wirings value is in what it _removed_ to give a standardised way of programming the microcontrollers.

So the "little more" part is the difference between some art student being able to create something cool vs. giving up after three days banging his head against a wall. But when you're an expert in a field it's hard to appreciate that.