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Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

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Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#341

Post by amelius »

I hope this will make Arduino more suitable as a quick & easy dev tool for professional products.

I recently tried it out, with an STM32 board, but found out that the USB communication buffer is overwritten when data comes in too quickly. This is quite disappointing because the relevant communication protocol is perfectly capable of stalling transfers. Some internet searching revealed that many people are complaining about this. And the proposed solution of increasing the buffer size is of course not really a solution.

Someone should fix this. I know Arduino is marketed as hobbyist, and I can live with not being able to squeeze the juice out of my hardware to the fullest, but I was surprised to see that apparently they don't take correctness seriously.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#342

Post by RyJones »

me, 13 years ago, a contractor at Qualcomm: how will QCE compete against Arduino?

the then-CEO in a rare f2f in Seattle: oh that's a toy

me, today: God speed, you crazy diamonds; I'm glad you cashed out, you are doomed.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#343

Post by wallaBBB »

Moral_ wrote: post #135
magtux wrote: post #83

This is a recipe for disaster. Arduino is great for education/tinkering. Qualcomm won't sell you anything even if you are ready to commit to buying 1000s. I tried to source some Qualcomm chips for a startup @ 10k qty and was told there would be no information or support. Qualcomm can have a much bigger market if they simply open up some product lines for distribution like MediaTek do. China has a way more vibrant, in…

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.

Qualcomm has bought plenty of companies that serviced small customers, and what happed is exactly what the person you’re replying to described. You can’t even get a quote many times.

What I expect short term is what happened to Eagle in the PCB space when Autodesk bought it (best thing that happened to kicad).

Longterm Arduino goes into the periphery of the maker market, similarly to beaglebone.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#344

Post by sofixa »

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.

Even the low cost Xiaomi and OnePlus models get you a few years (6 for the former, IIRC 4 for the latter) of Android support.

As for bloatware, any mobile OS comes with stuff included. I've used both a Xiaomi and a OnePlus device and neither felt too bad, bloat wise.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#345

Post by phoronixrly »

ACCount37 wrote: post #251
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…

I checked: there are board schematics for Uno Q there - but no datasheets or SDK or manuals or any documentation whatsoever for the QRB2210 SoC itself. Yep, it's Qualcomm alright.

Genuine Qualcomm! And u/geerlingguy already has a youtube video up promoting the new SoCs...

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#346

Post by joshvm »

fidotron wrote: post #264
joshvm wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> the Pi Pico W is decent Have you tried it? It's simply not in the same league of battle tested as the ESP one is, and I will happily agree almost everything else about the RP based ecosystem is superior.

Yes, I've use them for ESPHome and other small jobs like lighting controllers, but not for production. They're cheaper than most Arduino or hobbyist breakout boards like Feather. I can't comment on battle-tested, but I've also bought some pretty shoddy ESP breakouts in the past and I've had trouble with unstable WiFi performance when I've meshed them. The PIOs are cool, and better documented than Beaglebone/TI (maybe that's improved). Toolchain is also decent.

I would probably go Atmega otherwise. It's rare I need something in the gap between 8-bit and a dedicated Raspberry Pi. And I'll take some rough edges to support a local company (though for transparency I do hold some stock in RPI).

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#347

Post by EasyMark »

Are they buying it up to kill it or phase it out? Seems like corporations never do anything like this to the "good" of the community, it's always bad. I'd love to be pointed at exceptions where a megacorp bought some small relatively benevolent project and then didn't squeeze all the profit out of it and leave it for dead.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#348

Post by ChuckMcM »

I'm a bit baffled by this. For those of you who were paying attention there was a big controversy when Arduino split with Arduino and filed a lawsuit[1]. That made it hard to get hardware and resulted in a bunch of open source folks who had been contributing to redouble their efforts to insure that all of the copyrights and licenses were FOSS so that this couldn't happen again.

And that makes me wonder what Qualcomm "bought." Was it the trademark? The form factor? Presumably this won't affect things that leveraged the infrastructure like platform.io ? Was there money involved? Who got it and how much?

Part of me wonders if this is in response to Qualcomm being unable to acquire the Raspberry Pi foundation, and given their focus on the new 'Q' and "Linux-Debian"[2] its not much different than a Raspberry Pi[3]. So many questions and "We heard you liked AI so we put some AI in your AI" kinds messaging?

This is really baffling to me.

[1] Arduino, LLC v. Arduino S.R.L. et al -- https://dockets.justia.com/docket/massachusetts/madce/1:2015...

[2] I always chuckle at distro specific Linux as a 'thing.'

[3] "Hey look we have this computer that runs Linux and has a connector on the board so you can plug I/O devices into the top of it! Isn't that neat and unique?"

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#349

Post by 15155 »

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.

- Silicon Labs

- Texas Instruments (soon.)

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#350

Post by IshKebab »

palmotea wrote: post #206
estimator7292 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trouble is, this kind of trivial throwaway application is all that Arduino is really good for. Because the framework is designed to support thousands of chips, it supports none of them well. Any arduino code you write is easily 5x more terse than any of the native libraries, but it's also 10x slower. If you don't care, you don't care. But if you do care, Arduino is the least appropriate way to make a microcontroller…

> Besides that, IMO hiding hardware details from the developer is the worst thing about Arduino. The hardware details matter and it's far too easy to get footgunned by some implementation detail hidden from you. Wasn't Arduino not for developers, but for hobbyists? People who aren't super technical but want to do something neat with basic microcontroller functionality? You're complaint kinda seems like saying "BASIC…

IMO Mbed was just as easy for hobbyists but had a far better designed API that could support professional work as well. Arduino is just badly designed.

Unfortunately the Mbed guys stuck to their crap web-based IDE for waaaay too long, and when they finally realised it couldn't cut it, they pivoted to Yotto, which was a terrible Python based build too. When that failed they finally made Mbed Studio which was based on Theia (same as Arduino is now) but by then it was too late.

I think they also lacked an obvious "start with this" board like the Arduino Duo.

I think if they have blessed one of the Neutrino boards (which were incredibly cheap and powerful compared to Arduino) with their branding, and switched to Theia like 5 years earlier they might have had a chance.

Real shame because it really was a far superior software system.

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