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Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

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Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#311

Post by danhor »

babl-yc wrote: post #178
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

> 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.

This group is has been moving to circuitpython, which is much less performant, but even easier to use. The more serious cross-platform development environments, like Zephyr, have also become much better.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#312

Post by bfrog »

Uno Q... zero docs available for this dragonwing part from qualcomm, I'd say I'm shocked but... par for the course.

I wonder how this will effect Arduino moving forward.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#313

Post by bfrog »

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…

dragonwing docs are where?

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#314

Post by theon144 »

estimator7292 wrote: post #283
ricw wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Broad support for many different chips is precisely why Arduino is so bad. It has to check pin numbers against a gigantic table for every gpio call. You want chip-specific libraries. When the software is designed for the hardware everything works better. The native AVR and esp-IDF frameworks are very good. There's also micropython and circuit python. I've heard good things, but I don't partake in Python. Personally I…

I feel like this has to be a toolchain issue, there's no reason the pin number -> register table couldn't be resolved at compile time, similar with conditionally compiling certain things based on the CPU features.

I'm not saying it's not a real or an easy problem, just that I wonder if it truly is the reason Arduino is "bad"

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#315

Post by nunobrito »

creshal wrote: post #270
spookie wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's a bad idea to rely on Microsoft in some manner

VS Code has enough momentum by now that Microsoft couldn't kill it even if it wanted to. And a lot of the arduino-side work would involve creating/tweaking LSPs to their ideosyncrasies and making IDE-agnostic compilers... all of which is IDE agnostic and makes Arduino more useful to all users. And, worst case, they could take it all to IntelliJ or other IDE vendors and quickly spin out an Arduino-branded IDE that isn…

I'm a java developer coming from a world where the IDE is tightly integrated with the language.

For me, VS code always felt like a "jack of all trades and master of none". C/C++ are strongly typed languages, they aren't different from Java in that regard and yet it is so time consuming to navigate code, see if the syntax is correct and so forth. Really annoying to only know if the code is compiling correctly after pressing the compile button and wait about 30 seconds.

These are things that in the Java world nobody really thinks about because the IDE does a lot of the heavy effort in the background, yet in VS code or C++ it really feels like going back to 2005. For Javascript gets even worse on VS code whenever one is not using NPM. Needs reload the browser to check the console and see if things are working as expected. Good luck trying to find functions somewhere in the codebase without manual text search.

It is not my intention to shade any of those languages nor IDE, I just honestly wish that the IDE for those languages was as powerful as the ones in Java and C#. Arduino had the opportunity to do that since they are tightly committed to C/C++ and control everything on the build process but their goal was always more focused on education level than a more professional development. Let's see if with Qualcomm this is now changing into a tighter IDE+language integration.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#316

Post by theon144 »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #66
oxxoxoxooo wrote: post #37

If you ever wondered, how Arduino came about: The Untold History of Arduino ( https://arduinohistory.github.io/ ).

Arduino has always been a naked cash grab disguised as a "hacker-friendly nonprofit." The gross margin on their boards is >90%, and yeah, the software is mostly a ripoff of wiring.

I have troubles calling something a "cash grab" when it's been arguably the single most influential project in the hacker/maker/DIY electronics space.

I don't doubt the boards could've been sold cheaper, but they clearly were doing something right given how much it changed the hobbyist landscape

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#317

Post by skybrian »

ssl-3 wrote: post #129
skybrian wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you like the Arduino programming environment (and I do), there seems to be little reason to use Arduino hardware unless it’s for compatibility with other hardware you have? For example, there is a very nice unofficial port of Arduino for the Raspberry Pi Pico. There are also many fine Arduino-compatible single-board computers from Adafruit. The Arduino board form factor seems big and clunky in comparison. I d…

There's a wealth of easy projects that a person can get started with using an Arduino. Without any opportunities for getting bogged down in anything extra at all, they can follow a simple recipe and quickly begin to blink an LED at the rate of their choosing. The Arduino was developed to be a teaching tool, and it allows for a person to take little baby steps. (Whether this placement is good or bad for Arduino as a b…

Blinking an LED is what you do for "hello world" on every microcontroller board I've tried. The Arduino IDE supports boards from many different manufacturers.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#318

Post by cyberax »

geerlingguy wrote: post #21
c0balt wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This board has onboard EMMC, wifi/ble and can run a full Linux. That is more of an rp 4/5 with an rp2xxx tagged on the side. It comes with their own arduino IDE installed too It is kinda disappointing but I can see why Qualcomm wants to use the brand.

I'm speaking in a broader sense, comparing the variety of other Arduino boards like the Uno R3/R4. That wasn't too clear in the OP, sorry! The concern I have with the $44 Q is it has 2GB of RAM and 16GB eMMC, and a processor that's probably between a Pi 3 and Pi 4 in terms of speed and IO (though 4nm, so probably much more efficient). For $45 I can buy a Pi 5 with it's own built-in GPIO, PCIe, and a much faster SoC,…

There are some advantages to Arduino. Like This _is_ possible with Linux, but not at all trivial and likely impossible with general-purpose distros.

Interrupt handling and (on RP2040) dedicated multicore code is also nice.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#319

Post by beachy »

mikepurvis wrote: post #163
Moral_ wrote: post #135

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 and will hopefully push different types of chips into the Arduino product lines.

Seems like a similar play to what Broadcom did with Raspberry Pi— create a new entity/brand that could resell their chips on hobby boards and be stewards of a "community" support framework but largely without distracting the company from its enterprise customers or risk cannibalizing those relationships. That said, interesting that Qualcomm would buy twenty years of Arduino legacy for this rather than launching somet…

> interesting that Qualcomm would buy twenty years of Arduino legacy for this rather than launching something new in the space

I wouldn't minimise the effect of people just googling around and finding the name Arduino all over the place. It would be very hard for an entirely new platform to get critical mass while esp32 is not standing still.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#320

Post by hadlock »

potatolicious wrote: post #159
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.

Yeah I'm kind of puzzled by what Qualcomm is getting out of this. Arduino has so little presence in production devices and is largely an enthusiast and hobbyist product. To be clear, this is good! Having well-supported high-quality enthusiast products is awesome. But it just doesn't... seem to overlap with the bulk of Qualcomm's business, which is large-scale silicon sales to consumer and industrial clients.

The earlier up the product development stream you can place your product, the bigger share you'll have down the road. There's the saying about planning for 1 year, rice, 20 years, trees, 100 years schools. Windows is the leader because most kids grow up using windows in elementary school and blindly continue on. If you own arduino, maybe they start on ardunio, continue on to qualcomm products, and they're already trained in the qualcomm ecosystem before they've started engineering school. Adobe famously was very lax on closing Photoshop cracks in the early 2000s and trained up an entire generation on their product with great success.
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