Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

qualcomm.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 553 posts

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#421

Post by bschwindHN »

scottbez1 wrote: post #281
bschwindHN wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue the RP2040/2350 fills that niche. Cheap, available, easy to program, flexible peripherals, fast enough for many projects, good documentation, and good community support.

RPi's toolchain situation is awful for beginners/hobbyists. CMake and non-manifest-versioned toolchains are a huge barrier to entry. I'd love to use the hardware but have given up multiple times because I'd rather spend my time writing code than wrestling with toolchain setup. And they won't support platformio which could make things massively easier for beginners to set up.

I've never used their toolchain, I use Rust on the RP2040 and it's a breeze to set up.

But yeah there's also CircuitPython where you literally drag and drop a firmware blob onto the volume that shows up when plugging in an RP2040 board, and then you're just editing a Python-esque script to do stuff. Not sure what could be easier when it comes to starting with embedded stuff. You can even use the Arduino IDE with RP2040 boards if you like.

https://learn.adafruit.com/getting-started-with-raspberry-pi...

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#422

Post by mastazi »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #386
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'…

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.

You seem to equate gateway product = affordable but, IMHO, a gateway product is something that people who are not in the field are likely to stumble upon. I recently saw Arduino kits for kids at a small local bookstore, I can imagine someone thinking "hey this electronic thingy looks cool I'll buy one for my niece's birthday". On the flip side, people who don't know anything about microcontrollers are not going to look online for Chinese Arduino clones.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#423

Post by greatgib »

yaro330 wrote: post #414
userbinator wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

I don't know your definition of open, when I reach this page, the only thing that I can see is a signup form because a "qualcomid" is needed...

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#424

Post by shadowpho »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #406
Romario77 wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

clone relies on hardware being designed and software written - this takes a lot of money, so you can't just count the final price of parts as the price. Arduino is open sourced in hard and software which allows this cheap cloning to exist. It also helps a lot with software and docs, which makes it cheaper for them.

A competent engineer designing a devkit as simple as an arduino needs about 1 day of work. Give it a week to include debugging. Amortize that cost over a million units and engineering time comes out to less than one cent per board.

It’s not quite that easy, and besides the hard part is the SW. arduino spent years writing SW code and still does to make it easy to run, debug issues and provide support.

Also a million dev kits is unrealistic for vast majority of companies 5-20k is more the number I hard.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#426

Post by estimator7292 »

BenjiWiebe wrote: post #379
estimator7292 wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ba…

If by native AVR, you mean avr-libc, it's nothing at all like Arduino. Instead of analogRead, you need to write your own busy loop watching certain bits in a register (or ISR), you need to twiddle bits in several registers to set up the ADC the way you want it, etc. Serial.write? Nope, gotta read the docs, twiddle some bits again, and then you actually do get to use printf. Those two right there are big hurdles to so…

I think these things are entirely reasonable for a beginner to learn about. It teaches you about the machine, about the very real cost of a UART write. That saves you from inevitably spending hours and days to figure out that too many printf is what's making your program slow.

A beginner should be introduced to the processor, not C++ or python abstractions. Those abstractions are good and useful in the general sense, but you really should be aware of what your abstractions actually do to the physical processor.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#427

Post by bsoles »

nekusar wrote: post #275
mikepurvis wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pin mapping shenanigans are another annoying footgun with Arduino. Even in native development you're dealing with a physical pin number and the logical assignment (PA5, PA6, etc), but now Arduino maps that all again to an Arduino board pin number, and it's all shuffled to ensure the peripherals are in the right place to enable I2C, ADC, and PWM pins to function as expected.

Of course they did that. It's a HAL (hardware abstraction library). That also means that simple projects are abstracted from the hardware. Means I can go across a dozen different CPU arch and board/pin layouts, and I change nothing in my source. I only change my target and it just works. I did that when I went from a board operating at 16MHz/atmel to a STmicro running 50MHz. No change in my source. And that's really…

A lot of firmware people consider HAL libraries as harmful. In general, microcontroller companies as pretty terrible at software.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#428

Post by RealityVoid »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #406
Romario77 wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

clone relies on hardware being designed and software written - this takes a lot of money, so you can't just count the final price of parts as the price. Arduino is open sourced in hard and software which allows this cheap cloning to exist. It also helps a lot with software and docs, which makes it cheaper for them.

A competent engineer designing a devkit as simple as an arduino needs about 1 day of work. Give it a week to include debugging. Amortize that cost over a million units and engineering time comes out to less than one cent per board.

> A competent engineer designing a devkit as simple as an arduino needs about 1 day of work.

Hah! I like to underestimate scope as well, but this is really something else. Definitely a competent engineer could make something like this. But a couple of months maybe. You won't even read the documentation for the chip in a day.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#429

Post by fragmede »

greatgib wrote: post #423
yaro330 wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't know your definition of open, when I reach this page, the only thing that I can see is a signup form because a "qualcomid" is needed...

It doesn't seems unreasonable for them to want an email address before giving you PDFs of their stuff. They do want additional verification to get more detailed docs, but on the spectrum between available on the open Internet to all as a 1, vs only available on a hardwired line on a LAN on a military base at a 10, I'd give Qualcomm, I dunno, maybe 4?

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#430

Post by ACCount37 »

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.

It depends, really. Mostly on who does the project.

Some people hail from hacker town and will use whatever they have at hand. Some learned on vendor tooling, and would want it to be "proper", and would always try to use a vendor SDK with a vendor IDE. Some learned on vendor tooling and prefer not to use vendor tooling for "familiarity breeds contempt" reasons.

As a degenerate case: I've seen software for an ESP32 board that was prototyped entirely in Arduino IDE, and we almost shipped it that way. Because the prototype team cooked, and when the "make it an actual product team" tried to remake it in ESP-IDF, they ended up with less features and more bugs. They got it together eventually though.

Post reply on HN