This reminds me of Intel and Samsung's brief forays into the microcontroller world (Edison and Artik, if anyone's wondering what to Google). Maybe Qualcomm is in it for the long haul though. IoT is going to grow, and Intel and Samsung just lost focus.
Qualcomm to acquire Arduino
391–400 of 553 posts
Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino
#392Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino
#393The 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 wonder if even inside the hobbyist space, Arduino got obsoleted by the Raspberry Pi and its clones/compatible devices. Basically, if you already got the skills to work with "bare" microcontrollers, you won't need all the simplification and handholding that Arduino provides and you can just buy the individual chips and fully utilize the tiny form factor and low power requirements. If you want to learn programming mi…
I feel like the raspberry pi pico is more of a competitor to the arduino than the raspberry pi - there's quite a few applications where having a whole linux operating system is a hindrance compared to running on bare metal, especially anything that needs real time control of signals. (Although you can get around this on the pi by connecting peripherals via USB/serial/i2c which themselves might use MCUs).
Then again, one of the more accessible (IMO) ways of using pi picos is with the arduino environment, or its cousin platformio. I do think that even if in some ways the arduino abstractions can be limiting in some ways, in practice it's often a big timesaver for more casual (and not so casual) applications. It gives you easy access to a large ecosystem of libraries across a lot of hardware platforms.
Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino
#394This 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…
s/1000/10,000,000/
Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino
#395Additionally, 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…
That is quite some board! Arduino has certainly progressed, I'm still playing around with R3 boards and ATMega chips. Other than the form factor, this looks like not only a completely different class of product, but a completely different hobby or business.
ATmega micros are still incredibly useful and the Arduino ecosystem (especially the open source libraries, thanks Rob Tillaart!) makes it so easy to whip up a firmware. I really hope no matter what happens Arduino doesn't go off the rails.
Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino
#396is is just me or every open source hardware product is always get acquire left and rigth????
Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino
#397This 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…
10k? Sorry, pal! We're in QualcommLand, and you need to be at least 100k units tall to ride this ride! But if you are a small developer, there are options for you! Have you tried to: eat shit? And die? So that you don't insult our PRECIOUS FUCKING TIME by IMPLYING that a MERE 10K would be ENOUGH for THE GREAT QUALCOMM to ACTUALLY CARE? The optimist in me wants to believe that this acquisition is a sign of Qualcomm ac…
afaik, Raspberry Pis move around 7M units annually.
Based on their first announced product (https://www.arduino.cc/product-uno-q), I think Qualcomm is trying to get into that space, and they bought Arduino for the brand name.
You're right that Qualcomm isn't in the business of small business. But maybe they expect that the market is big enough that it's worth their while to pay a subsidiary (Arduino) to do it.
Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino
#398Are 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.
Google bought Android, but did not kill it. Same with YouTube. But, I admit, there are a lot more examples of the other way...
> Google bought Android, but did not kill it.
True, but they are currently in the process of further locking hobbyists out of it.
Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue is that their corporate culture does not support it. Arduino will be too small to matter. This is the same issue as with Coral, the Google TPU. They are not refreshed as they are too small. They are too small cause they are not updated or supported widely. People need mainline kernel support and regular refreshes to reliably build projects based on it. This will require some level of building their BSPs in…
This was very much my experience going through an acquisition like that. I was working at a company that served big customers. We bought a smaller company, with one of the goals being to expand to serving smaller customers. What actually happened was that our management very quickly started telling the people who came along with the acquisition that they were doing everything wrong. The salespeople were selling wrong…
Here's how I like to think about it. Tech salesmen (especially enterprise software salesmen) are just like car salesmen. Now which commission would you like to receive: mattel matchbox car or BMW? This makes sense, because it's often the same sales effort per-sale for each possibility.
Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino
#400This news is making me much sadder than maybe it should.
Arduino is what pulled me into electronics. I have such fond memories of those old chonkers blinking LEDs. It felt like magic.
Unless they've had a major staffing and leadership shakeup, there is a zero percent chance Qualcomm is going to suddenly become some kind of open, sharing, culture. The company DNA is patent troll.
The recent joint ventures are a perfect example. I got so excited by those newish super powerful penta-whatever Qualcomm chips from Arduino a few years ago.
Then learned the chips were unobtainable outside the Arduino modules.
Complete garbage move by a garbage company.