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Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

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Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#541

Post by MisterTea »

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…

> I suspect there was an internal deck saying how this acquisition is going to give them foothold in the hobby community,

No. This is to give them a foothold in the "IoT hammer" manufacturing business. They looked at how the Raspberry Pi went from cheap hobby computer running Linux to low effort rapid prototyping embedded platform that can run a full web stack. They want to be part of a full dev pipeline from prototype to product.

The real target audience are people building things who don't care how it works as long as it works. So expect 99.9% of these projects to use some sort of Python or JS thing running in a container on the Linux while the microcontroller runs a few lines of c to manipulate IO pin state from the Linux thing. Just like all those abandoned Spin scooters in Seattle that had raspberry Pi's in them. That is the market they are after, not the person who builds a one-off Arduino fish feeder.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#542

Post by farixco »

mrheosuper wrote: post #451
mastazi wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This has 100% been my experience, even with in-person shopping.

You ask for an Arduino, and the follow up question is: 'genuine or generic?'.

I don't think the Arduino trademark is that valuable, it's already well underway genericization.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#543

Post by pclmulqdq »

noobermin wrote: post #468
pclmulqdq wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you have a good income stream but you want more money now? Arduino is a lifestyle business (a good lifestyle, don't get me wrong) much more than a growth business. It's easy to price what the income stream is worth.

I don't know if you realise it or not but the point you're making is self-contradictory. If they make great margins, that's why qualcomm would want to buy them, but not why they'd want to sell and have to share it. I guess it makes sense if you're saying arduino are suckers

They're not suckers, they're just getting older and want to retire (as far as I can tell, this may actually be their motivation), so $10 million today sounds a lot better than $1 million every year for the next 15 years.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#544

Post by mrheosuper »

the__alchemist wrote: post #292
fidotron wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Nordic etc. are resistant to telling people "if you want to use Wifi you must use FreeRTOS" or equivalent, so they push the two IC solution instead just so their Wifi stack is partitioned physically from the rest of your system. It just pushes more integration headaches downstream to the customer, in addition to being inherently costlier. Espressif had the core right idea there, even if it's not the right dec…

I think they do this though... but it's Zephyr instead of FreeRTOS. What I want is a Wi-Fi radio that just works like a normal part. No RTOS requirement. No framework or software libs required. Read the datasheet and go. For some context: This is how LoRa radios work, and this is how Esp-Hosted (Official firmware from Espressif that turns the ESP into a radio IC "coprocessor") works.

To have a maintainable Firmware, with TCP/IP stack, you still need some sort of RTOS anyway.

Wireless/network stack is hard.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#545

Post by schappim »

korhojoa wrote: post #502
schappim wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This was cool but the software support from intel was terrible.

Early versions crashed when I was demoing blinking an LED.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#546

Post by Arch-TK »

neltnerb wrote: post #537
Arch-TK wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The teensy is so weird though. At least back when I played with them. They put a secondary chip which let's you flash over USB but they cover the debug pins and the only way to get serial over the USB port is to have a whole USB stack as part of your application. As a development board I would rather go with one of those STM32 backed boards and a knock off STLink, you need the STLink to flash, if you want DFU you can…

Could you clarify what you mean about getting serial over the USB port in the context of debug pins? I've been using Teensy devices for over a decade and have always had it just recognize the device as if it were a USB to serial adapter and I can talk to it as what I'd call "serial over the USB port". But that obviously doesn't involve what I think software people usually mean when they're talking about firmware debu…

It wasn't specifically in the context of debug pins.

On a "normal" arduino, an FTDI chip on the board handles the job of exposing a serial adapter to your computer over USB. The atmel chip on the other side of the FTDI chip runs your code and getting serial out from your firmware is a short codepath which directly uses the UART peripheral.

On a teensy, there is still a secondary chip, but its just a small microcontroller running PJRC code. This microcontroller talks over the debug pins of the main chip, and those pins aren't broken out (at least back when I last used a teensy). Despite covering the debug pins, this chip only handles flashing and offers no other functionality. Since there is no USB serial adapter, for hobbyists trying to use it for running code with an arduino HAL, the HAL has to ship an entire USB driver just for you to get serial over USB. And this itself means you can't use the USB for other purposes.

For advanced users, this makes debugging much harder, and god forbid you need to debug your USB driver.

It's kind of just a bunch of weird tradeoffs which maybe don't matter too much if you are just trying to run arduino sketches on it but it was annoying for me when I was trying to develop bare metal firmware for it in C.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#548

Post by relaxing »

angry_octet wrote: post #462

Lady Ada is not impressed: https://blog.adafruit.com/2025/10/07/qualcomms-latest-ai-pla... One of their key points is that the AI component is completely tied to the Qualcomm stack, the opposite of Open. Essentially the Arduino brand will live on as a marketing layer over Qualcomm hardware, which you will still need an NDA and significant volume to gain access to.

That post is written by Mr. Lady Ada, Philip Torrone (nevertheless an authority matters of open source hardware.)

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#549

Post by ktosobcy »

zild3d wrote: post #511
ktosobcy wrote: post #509

meh... probably unpopular opinion but we should ban companies from growing to big and acquiring other companies above certain valuation... ffs

the downstream effect of that is less startups

Hmm... maybe not less, but IMHO majority of the startups now focus on "discrupting the market" and colleting enough VC money that they could survive to be bought up by the bigger player.

The whole landscape is put on the head - instead of promoting creating something new that could survive on its own and be useful and provitable for the creator we are now in the market of creating a fodder for the BigCorp

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#550

Post by gh02t »

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.

Its relevant, however, that the Bluepill and ESP8266 cores for Arduino were originally independent reimplementations by third party hobbyists, not made by Arduino. And Espressif themselves have always developed the ESP32 Arduino library implementation. They weren't completely freeloading off Arduino's work, and Arduino (the company and the ecosystem) heavily benefit from contributors of all sorts. Particularly in the case of Arduino and Espressif, they have been successful together.
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