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Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

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Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#451

Post by mrheosuper »

mastazi wrote: post #422
pclmulqdq wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lo…

>people who don't know anything about microcontrollers are not going to look online for Chinese Arduino clones.

But high chance they will look it up on Amazon/Ebay/whatever e-store and buy a clone without knowing.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#453

Post by wrigby »

antirez wrote: post #173

I'm not sure how it is possible to compete against the RP2040/RP2050 at this point: quality, great programming environment, awesome hardware specs, cheap.

Yeah, I just did a project at work with an RP2040 and was really impressed with the Pico SDK. It hits a sweet spot in between ST’s insanity and Arduino’s easy-but-not-powerful tradeoff.

No crazy code generation, going from 0 to blinky is quick, but also going from blinky to DMA’s and interrupts is also a breeze.

I will say that I think the hardware peripherals in STM32’s are miles ahead, and PIO’s don’t necessarily make up the difference.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#454

Post by qdotme »

What I was actually hoping for.. and so far turned out disappointed, is a half-decent LTE/4/5G module that can be Arduino compatible.

Just like ESP8266 (and later -32) variant opened up the IoT over WiFi, there is a potential industry-wide opportunity space for a decent, low-cost, always-online (just bring SIM) hobby board. Without awful vendor tooling. And ideally without "modem-to-something" bridge (which almost always means AT+ and vendor tooling..)

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#456

Post by Alupis »

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…

> A decade ago, Intel tried that back in the day with Galileo / Edison, and tellingly, they came up with the same "ideas": IoT / AI.

Intel's execution - as usual - was poor and lacking.

Both the Galileo and Edison were much more expensive than their Arduino counterparts, and their x86 cpu's were of little value within that space (especially at the time). Neither made it past 5 years without being killed - which is exactly what people feared. A stunning lack of long-term commitment from Intel to develop and grow a community, leaving anyone that actually built products based on their devices holding a useless bag.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#457

Post by noobermin »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #388
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.

If life is so sweet for them, why sell arduino?

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#458

Post by chimpontherun »

schappim wrote: post #356
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…

This reminds me of the Arduino Intel Galileo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Galileo

or Samsung Artik. Went nowhere in a hurry

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#459

Post by selimthegrim »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #233
zem wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have an Xperia as a secondary phone and test device which comes with relatively clean Android. Sony is wavering on the NA market unfortunately so I may not be able to replace it with another Sony when the time comes.

Does this mean you won’t even be able to buy new unlocked ones on Amazon?

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#460

Post by marsven_422 »

serbuvlad wrote: post #418
brucehoult wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hardwar…

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