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Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

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Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#411

Post by dimatura »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #151
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.

> 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…

Seems like a corporate version of the "buy vs build" question. If it's true that the goal is to become more approachable to students and hobbyists (which personally I think would be a good idea) - then Qualcomm must've evaluated both options and decided "buy".

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#413

Post by kovac »

bluGill wrote: post #387
petra wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 enginee…

When professionals use Arduinos for such use cases, do they use the Arduino software platform or do they use the chio verndors' toolchains? Just curious how the professionals work with these things.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#414

Post by yaro330 »

userbinator wrote: post #136
yaro330 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qcom is one of the few SoC manufacturers in the Android space to do all their thing out in the open and properly honouring the GPL-v2 licences.

That's pretty useless when they won't release the documentation for their SoCs.

https://docs.qualcomm.com/ is pretty open.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#415

Post by riazrizvi »

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…

Maybe. New people means new perspective. Maybe they see value in an ecosystem of developers who are keen to spend their free time to drum up interesting content, based on their projects and applications. This grassroots interest is what drove Apple to displace Sun Microsystems as the de facto, UNIX system.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#416

Post by brucehoult »

freeopinion wrote: post #408
jajuuka wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

Some years back when bluepills ran $2, Arduinos seemed to have no point. Today, you can buy an ESP32 dev board with wifi for $6. Or an Arduino Uno Wifi for $55.

Note that both Bluepill and ESP32 can be programmed in the Arduino IDE, using the Arduino library, and the vast library of Arduino sketches and 3rd party libraries (as long as they don't use AVR assembly language.

So can the Pi Pico, the Milk-V Duo (one 64 bit Linux core, one 64 bit microcontroller core), and many others.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#418

Post by serbuvlad »

brucehoult wrote: post #416
freeopinion wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some years back when bluepills ran $2, Arduinos seemed to have no point. Today, you can buy an ESP32 dev board with wifi for $6. Or an Arduino Uno Wifi for $55.

Note that both Bluepill and ESP32 can be programmed in the Arduino IDE, using the Arduino library, and the vast library of Arduino sketches and 3rd party libraries (as long as they don't use AVR assembly language. So can the Pi Pico, the Milk-V Duo (one 64 bit Linux core, one 64 bit microcontroller core), and many others.

While that is true, both Espressif and the Pico have their own SDKs, and they're really well written too.

The Arduino SDK is the simplest to use, sure, but the Pico framework (I don't have experience with the Espressif one) is extremely good, and the Pico's PIO is a godsend. I used it to implement 3 wire SPI (data bidirectional on the same wire) at almost 'real-time', which is to say, at half the speed of the hardware SPI controller (half the speed because the interface clock is put up one cycle and down the next; this also gives enough time for data shuffling).

Why does the Arduino SDK necessitate a huge markup on Arduino boards, when $0 of every computer I buy to run Linux on goes to GCC?

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#419

Post by carlgreene »

kovac wrote: post #413
bluGill wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 enginee…

When professionals use Arduinos for such use cases, do they use the Arduino software platform or do they use the chio verndors' toolchains? Just curious how the professionals work with these things.

From what I've heard (primarily in the music hardware space) is that it depends. Some use Arduino's software and language while others use the lower level toolchains.

This is prototyping mostly so I'm not sure if any of the Arduino code actually gets shipped with production devices.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#420

Post by olyjohn »

JohnFen wrote: post #398
rossdavidh wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah it's not totally dead. But they definitely killed what made Android great. Now it might as well just be iOS. Same boring ass phones that do nothing well but install spyware apps, consume content and scroll through social media. Just more trash for the landfill.
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