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Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

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Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#491

Post by jacquesm »

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.

The Raspberry Pi Pico blows the Arduino out of the water in terms of computational speed, available RAM and so on, and it costs a fraction. I don't remember using an Arduino since the Pi Pico came out. And if the Pico isn't enough there are the bigger family members waiting in the wings. For me Arduino is mostly over. And then there is Espressif as well, they make some neat boards.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#492

Post by nunobrito »

lovehashbrowns wrote: post #370
nunobrito wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is basically the same thing, don't understand either why it would harder. The only thing is to add the ESP32 module on the addons since it doesn't come enabled by default. Arduino isn't good for projects with more than 5 source code files, it is an awful IDE beyond the basic things you can pack on a single source code file. Always had so many difficulties handling the IDE defects, basically it can crash when start…

As a complete beginner to hardware stuff, I do find the Arduino Cloud thing to be pretty compelling. Being able to push out updates over the cloud is nice! Buuuut.. once I'm mostly done with a project, there's just no need at all for it anymore. The Arduino I'm using for a receipt printer is just sitting there and now the cloud bit doesn't do anything for me. And the problem I have is that ESP32s aren't much more dif…

Yeah, ESPnow is pretty good. I'm using it more than LoRa because all ESP32 come with it and is really cheap, whereas with LoRa is all the trouble with an additional module that costs 3x more than an ESP32.

That yellow display is pretty good. I've built a tiny operating system for it, it is an unbelievable hardware for the cost of the material.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#493

Post by jacquesm »

petre wrote: post #364
ACCount37 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's hoping. Qualcomm hardware would be fun to play with if it wasn't attached to, you know. The rest of Qualcomm.

And NDAs, licenses. The world has pretty much moved on to ESP32, RPi Pico and other boards post pandemic.

Indeed. I think the Arduino people on the sales side will be the ones coming off best in this deal.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#494

Post by pbandhoney »

chpatrick wrote: post #29

ESP stuff is so damn cheap and capable now I'm not sure what you would use Arduino for these days.

It's not the hardware but the ecosystem, libraries and support which is available. Sure there are alternatives like platformio but when you're learning most of the stuff out there eg youtube use Arduino IDE and libs. And just try and get an LLM to produce code based on Espressif libraries not Arduino lols...

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#495

Post by askvictor »

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…

I think a key part of a gateway product is community. That is what Arduino has, and what RPi has. It can also exist separate to products (e.g. micropython)

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#496

Post by Aleklart »

synergy20 wrote: post #329

I wonder if another big gun will swallow raspberry pi someday. the embedded field is getting more exciting these days.

rpi is owned by broadcom since the begining the moment they stop selling them their closed source firmware’s cpu, be the end of rpi project anyway, rpi is just a PR stunt to push brand recognition among nerds, so they buy real business broadcom products for real profits

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#497

Post by RealityVoid »

shermantanktop wrote: post #488
RealityVoid wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you mean the HW alone... Still over a day. If you mean the software to go along it, a couple orders of magnitude more. Even the simplest peripherals can bite back if you are not careful and you don't test the edge cases. AVR's are indeed quite simple, but if you try to build stuff other people will use, things need to be polished. I actually do embedded engineering. I'm doing it right now! More on the SW side than…

The estimate isn’t right, but the direction is right— there just aren’t that many discrete components on these boards. The chips themselves contain capabilities that an embedded designer would otherwise need to design. I’m not sure there’s much further to go, since much of what isn’t on the chipset is power related.

I agree. The estimate I was contesting. Also, we somewhat were talking past each other because I see these boards as an ensemble, HW+SW. So I was thinking about the time to make both. I agree that the boards have few discrete components and the PCB's are relatively simple.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#498

Post by modo_mario »

noobermin wrote: post #480
sneak wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s unlikely that Qualcomm purchased them for their revenue or margins, which to Qualcomm’s scale are basically irrelevant.

So it sounds like again, this purchase makes no sense from anyone's perspective unless arduino are suckers.

Why are you so adamant that they must be suckers? Don't these kind of purchases happen all the time? Let's say you want at least ....10 years of fat profit worth for you to sell your business. Could be more since it's sustainable, has high margins, etc but let's pick the round number. Big company comes along and offers you 11 years of profit worth of money. You sell. They know it's going to take a bit longer for the purchase to pay for itself but they also want to transform the business a bit to funnel in developers to popularize their main products and take wind out of the sails of competitors which they project will bring in the equivalent of at least 3 years of your business's profit over time along with some other stuff....so they're happy to overpay for your business since it'll probably cover the lil bit of extra risk

In that case everyone's a winner...except maybe us as customers.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#499

Post by a_victorp »

olyjohn wrote: post #420
JohnFen wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Spot on!
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