Qualcomm to acquire Arduino • Hacker News Board

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#551

Post by shadowpho » Sun, Oct 12, 2025, 9:24 PM UTC

drzaiusx11 wrote: post #525

shadowpho wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To be frank, the Arduino ide was a fork of Processing's and the compiler suite was GCC. They 'simply' glued the pre-existing pieces together. I'm not saying that it's trivial to do that but it's also not exactly a herculean task. Even the bootloader was a fork of Hernando Barragán's pre-existing Wiring project.

>but it's also not exactly a herculean task.

To me it sounds like maybe 10 software engineers for a year. You gotta do a bootloader, test it out thoroughly, setup compiler to work, glue all the pieces together, write the missing pieces, test it all some more…

It’s expensive…

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#552

Post by 1718627440 » Tue, Oct 14, 2025, 8:39 AM UTC

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.

I have been modifying Arduino libraries for weeks, there is much more work in them than just a single day. Granted replacing the Arduino IDE with Autoconf took 3 days. (2 and a half of which were spend on analyzing what the IDE does.)

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#553

Post by Teknomadix » Sat, Oct 18, 2025, 2:59 PM UTC

webdevver wrote: post #32

Teknomadix wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. There are lots of use cases for on device AI inference. I run YOLO on an Nvidia Jetson powered Lenovo Think Edge, which processes incoming video at full frame rates on four channels with recognition and classification for a bespoke premises security system. No clouds involved other than the Nix package manager etc. Make sure your argument May carry more weight when you're talking about ultra low powe…

true, true, very true, but i observe you use a nvidia chip. which is perfectly logical. why would you use something that is worse in every single way, right? which is exactly what qcom offerings are...

Yolo has actually been shown to be run on 15-year-old Canon cameras. They in no way have the power of my Nvidia Jetson. But they can run the model just the same. No cloud necessary. These small devices, well maybe not being able to process four individual video channels at 60 frames per second will still have the capability of processing at lower frame rates and with less channels. Using much cheaper hardware, and using a whole lot last energy. So I don't think you're argument really holds up.