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Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

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Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#381

Post by bluGill »

EasyMark wrote: post #347

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.

I would guess they want to keep it - there are a lot of company advanced engineering projects run on Arduino and when those prove useful (most don't) the company starts looking for how to make it production. Thus having Arduino as a push to their chips is a useful in to more companies.

Of course companies change directions all the time. I wouldn't surprise me if the people who bought Arduino believe the above vision, but there are other political factions that will try to kill it.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#382

Post by elictronic »

EasyMark wrote: post #347

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.

Killing Arduino doesn't serve their interests based how many as-like boards there are. This is more akin to Microsoft's acquisition of Minecraft. Quick and easy way to get people in the door through recognition and a large user base.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#383

Post by bgnn »

webdevver wrote: post #10
murillians wrote: post #5

I only feel dread when I see a Qualcomm story on HN anymore.

genuinely, what is the survival story for qualcomm entering the next decade? - completely missed out on AI - phones become commodity, push for complete vertical integration from apple, google - squeezed by chinese soc vendors from 'below' (mediatek, unisoc) they're cooked, right? there's no way out, surely.

just a correction: Mediatek is Taiwanese.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#384

Post by pclmulqdq »

theon144 wrote: post #316
pclmulqdq wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Great businesses can still be cash grabs. In fact, many of them are. Very few of those dress themselves up as a nonprofit (aside from Arduino and OpenAI).

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#385

Post by jjrh »

EasyMark wrote: post #347

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.

Not sure why they would intentionally kill it, it's a good brand to drive people towards your chips.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#386

Post by pclmulqdq »

jajuuka wrote: post #358
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 don't think Qualcomm bought them to destroy them. I think they see Arduino as a gateway. Instead of hoping students will learn ARM it's more reasonable to leverage Arduino's simple nature to act as an on-ramp for more low level developers. I wouldn't be surprised if Arduino IDE saw a revamp to better support jumping the gap between the Arduino to Snapdragon. ST and TI do the same thing with their boards too and it'…

People are making so much of this when it seems so much simpler. Qualcomm likes buying high-margin businesses, and Arduino is a high-margin business. Gross margin on their boards is over 90% (hence why you can buy a Chinese clone of a $30 board for $3) and this trend shows no signs of slowing down. The TI equivalent of the $30 Arduino Uno is $5, and it's a true gateway product.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#387

Post by bluGill »

petra wrote: post #257
MountDoom wrote: post #200

The problem is that there just isn't a whole lot of money to be made in providing hobby hardware for enthusiasts. Every time a big player gets involved, they think they can change this. A decade ago, Intel tried that back in the day with Galileo / Edison, and tellingly, they came up with the same "ideas": IoT / AI. If you're doing cheap IoT trinkets, you're never going to pay extra for a brand. You're going to buy th…

I agree. The Arduino brand isn't for professionals. But let's say tomorrow they come together with bundle/partnerships to create a new, great dev environment, very easy, that a mechanical engineer can prototype a great robot for a niche use case,and continue to use that chip and code, with some changes in V1 production ? Is there value to the Arduino brand and community than ?

Arduino is used by many professionals. It is cheap enough that you can buy it on your corporate cards and you boss won't ask many questions. As such many products start with an Ardunio based demo, and if/when the demo is a success it moves to a real company project with a real budget.

The question though is does this add value for the owners of Arduino? All too often when a project moves from the demo to real engineering (making a demo something you can sell is typically about ten times harder than the demo) you select all new hardware.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#388

Post by pclmulqdq »

MountDoom wrote: post #200

The problem is that there just isn't a whole lot of money to be made in providing hobby hardware for enthusiasts. Every time a big player gets involved, they think they can change this. A decade ago, Intel tried that back in the day with Galileo / Edison, and tellingly, they came up with the same "ideas": IoT / AI. If you're doing cheap IoT trinkets, you're never going to pay extra for a brand. You're going to buy th…

> If you're doing cheap IoT trinkets, you're never going to pay extra for a brand.

Except for the Arduino brand. Arduino boards have margins that traditional hardware vendors can only dream of achieving. The only thing carrying that profit margin is the Arduino brand. The software stack is not tied to their hardware, but they make tons of money on hardware.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#389

Post by ssl-3 »

chpatrick wrote: post #242
ssl-3 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Various ESP dev boards, Arduino, Pi Pico -- any of these are good places to get started from on the road towards doing useful things with microcontrollers, I think. Arduino is just a familiar name with a long (~20 year!) history. There's a plethora of pre-existing projects that a person with no prior programming or electronics experience can implement easily to get their feet wet. Some manner of ESP32 (or STM or MSP…

You can use the exact same Arduino environment with ESP32 for a fraction of the price. A D1 mini dev board with wifi costs $5 (!) on AliExpress.

Yes. That's one way. It works fine if a person knows enough to find that board on AliExpress and buy it and is able to gather the resources to get themselves started with it. (I, myself, typically use cheap no-name dev boards...but I've been around the block a few times.)

Another other way is a ~$100 Arduino starter kit. It includes a printed instruction book and enough useful parts to sit down and begin doing stuff immediately. Anyone with a sufficiently-large pocketbook can buy it for themselves (or for someone else).

One of these things is like buying individual Lego bricks, or maybe lumber and fasteners from the hardware store, with a specific goal in mind. It's creative by necessity, and for those who know how to get where they're going then it's really quite lovely to have marketplaces like AliExpress and Ace Hardware available to satisfy our whims.

The other is more like a buying a packaged Lego kit or Meccano or an erector set that includes instructions for building several different things using the included parts. If a person (including a child) doesn't yet have any idea how to get started, then this can help them get the clues they need to go further with building other things.

---

I could buy a Chinese D1 mini dev board and a bag of assorted resistors, LEDs, transistors, and a breadboard and put it all in a nice box and give it to a kid, but I expect that they'll have a hard time figuring out what comes next. ["Now just draw the rest of the owl."]

Or, I could buy an packaged Arduino starter kit for a kid and have a reasonable expectation that they'll soon be telling me all about the neat -- if simple -- stuff they've done with it. They might not even realize the things they've learned along the way, but it'll stick with them well-enough if they want it to. And then they can move on to using VS Code with PlatformIO and start hammering out RP2040 PIO assembler when that time comes. If that's something they choose to be interested in, then they'll have a good foundation for the independent projects that may come later.

The whole is sometimes greater than the sum of its parts.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#390

Post by aynyc »

phoronixrly wrote: post #345
ACCount37 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I'm pretty it was sarcasm. Qualcomm is known for shitty docs.
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