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Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

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Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#331

Post by als0 »

jabl wrote: post #91
piltdownman wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They just won a significant case in its licensing battle with Arm, securing rights to use Oryon cores in Snapdragon chips. Add in a decent x86 to ARM translation layer, and you have the basis of the next generation of handheld gaming. If Valve or someone paired with them for the next Steamdeck style project, they'd dominate. At the high-end they announced two new flagship processor platforms at its 2025 Snapdragon Su…

> They just won a significant case in its licensing battle with Arm, securing rights to use Oryon cores in Snapdragon chips. As an aside, wonder how this will impact Qualcomm's RISC-V plans? They were apparently working on some RISC-V cores, but I wonder whether that was just a play to put pressure on Arm, or are they still planning on bringing those out to market? (The "Arduino UNO Q" that they're launching now is b…

So they are using RISC-V already for some embedded cores. For application cores, they are participating in the RISC-V consortium to keep the pressure on ARM and also to be ready for the long game.

I do not expect to see Qualcomm made RISC-V application cores until Android or Windows is completely ported to it, which I think rules out the next several years.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#332

Post by schlauerfox »

spookie wrote: post #249
kbar13 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

agree. when arduino ide first came out it was great (for the times). and to be fair at that time vscode was not a thing. but it's a big ? why arduino did not just go all in on vscode once it was clear where the market leader in IDE was headed

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

VSCodium is a de-microsoft'd version available. Still missing some of the features that aren't licensed the same.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#333

Post by estimator7292 »

theon144 wrote: post #314
estimator7292 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

It could and some cores do. Many do not and you get a runtime lookup unless you explicitly call digitalWriteFast which is also supposed to resolve to a single inline instruction. It usually does not and instead emits a function call in assembly.

The gpio thing is really just my personal pet peeve. There are a lot of things like this though. For example, the arduino core will consume several milliseconds doing something in between calls to your main function. I2C and similar drivers are typically not well designed and either use too much memory or just operate not-quite-right.

Which brings up another point, the Arduino ecosystem is not at all unified. If you use a chip that is not popular enough to be mainlined, you have to go out and find an Arduino core that supports it and try to plug that into your compiler. Such cores frequently are not API compatible and have slightly different behaviors. It's all a big mess.

There are a lot of features that are compile time conditional based on CPU, but the actual implementation of this is horrible. I once had to modify someone else's custom Arduino core to tweak some low level behavior and despite the change being very minimal, it took three days to find all the places and all the conditionals that needed tweaking.

But really my main complaint is that Arduino is incredibly slow and hides far too much from you. Firmware developers should know about CPU registers and hardware features. This is very important for understanding the machine! A lack of awareness of the machine and what its doing is (IMO) one of the major factors in how awful modern programs are.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#334

Post by estimator7292 »

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

The native AVR libraries are really good. It's not quite as idiomatic as Arduino, but it's really not all that different.

Beginners can learn frameworks more complicated than Arduino and I think they should. Before Arduino, beginners were expected to write plain C or assembly, and the industry got along just fine. There were still countless hackers and weekend tinkerers. They just had to learn more, which is not a bad thing

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#335

Post by antonvs »

kcb wrote: post #127
geerlingguy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Shame to still see newly released products using a 13 year old core design. How has there been such little progress on low power ARM cores that it still makes sense to build a Cortex-A53 based soc on a modern node.

There’s been plenty of progress. There’ve been three newer generations since the A53: the A55, then the A510, then the A520.

But what you think of as an old core design is in fact a mature, well-understood, well-tested, widely-supported, cost-effective core design. It also has some features such as in-order execution which none of the newer chips have. From an engineering perspective, it still can make a lot of sense in the right applications today.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#336

Post by mrguyorama »

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…

https://www.reddit.com/r/WarshipPorn/comments/140oahc/japane...

You picked an unfortunate analogy.

More importantly, if Qualcomm management is just unable to do this, why would they suddenly be able to do this with a different brand under their umbrella?

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#337

Post by sschueller »

void-pointer wrote: post #142
sschueller wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? I have a product that you can buy that runs on an ESP32S3[1]. They work very well and you can even do OTA updates. Even my competitor uses an ESP32 :) [1] https://www.stationdisplay.com/

Did you need to go through CE certification to get your product on the market? I have some ESP-based hardware ideas of my own (which include custom PCBs) but the CE certification is prohibitively expensive..

Yes, regardless if you are using a pre-certified module/parts or not you need to CE certify your product as a whole. However if you use pre-certified modules the testing is cheaper/less complicated.

I do my certification testing in China by a reputable lab which is much cheaper than doing it here in Switzerland (at least 15k USD). At a minimum expect to spend 1000-2000 USD if all goes well.

There is a workaround for CE but it's a bit of a dirty trick. If you are not expecting to sell very many and your target audience are tinkerers then you can sell your device as a kit. There must be assembly that the end user has to do but they are then the ones "putting the device into the market" and they take on that responsivity of CE. That basically means they can't sell it unless they get a CE. Such an example is https://www.clockworkpi.com/ which sell their products a kits.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#338

Post by numpad0 »

the__alchemist wrote: post #292
fidotron wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I thought ESP32 does exactly the same as Nordic Softdevice model? It's just that people hardly notice, and it's perfectly fine.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#339

Post by phoehne »

poly2it wrote: post #157
extraduder_ire wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised cheap level shifters with the same pin pitch as various dev boards aren't common.

Do you know where you can get one?

Be a little careful on those. It depends on what you're doing. Some of them are not suited to be used with the high data rates for I2C, or I2C only at 100khz. I found out the hard way with some of the SparkFun level shifters, years back.

You need to do a little research. It will usually tell in the spec sheet. Which is why the Arduino is useful. You don't have to buy a level shifter. You don't have to read a level shifter spec sheet.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#340

Post by osigurdson »

j45 wrote: post #310
andoando wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not about whether it's hard for you. Lots of people don't program. More people don't know how to program than do know how to program. In that way, just because I can't imagine it being hard, doesn't mean I understand everything there is to understand. This creates a gap and opportunity for products to make technology more approachable for the majority, instead of the minority (programmers). Making things accessi…

>> Lots of people don't program.

Cathy Woods says we are all programmers now, so this shouldn't be a problem anymore.

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