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Why we won't be selling Genuino or Arduino any more

blog.pimoroni.com

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Re: Why we won't be selling Genuino or Arduino any more

#81

Post by timlyo »

manyxcxi wrote: post #69
nathancahill wrote: post #28

Serious question: what are people building with these boards? The recurring projects I've seen are controlling lights, doors/locks and monitoring water in plants. I don't find these particularly compelling, am I missing something? How is this the next big thing?

Because they're much friendlier to get started for the novice, most of the widespread examples seem extremely trivial to someone with experience. Now- I'm DEFINITELY not an expert, probably barely mediocre with the EE fundamentals, but I did take a lot of EE and some robotics at Uni to get my degree in Computer Engineering. I am nothing more than a hobbyist but some of my cooler projects have been: - Autonomous 4WD r…

>A USB nerf gun that shoots at the developer who broke the Jenkins build

Anywhere I can read any more about this?

Re: Why we won't be selling Genuino or Arduino any more

#82

Post by archimedespi »

SEJeff wrote: post #66

I really don't see the point of the arduinos when you can buy an esp8266 that is arduino compatible (you can use the arduino IDE and sketches). You can get the bare esp8266 chips for $1-$2 from aliexpress, or buy a tricked out one from adafruit (the huzzah) for $9. They have a full wifi stack, support micropython, etc. I think we're in a post-arduino age for microcontrollers. There are simply better options out there…

The reason someone serious about embedded development would want to buy Arduino boards is that they're convenient Atmel-architecture microcontroller boards. The ESP8266 may be "arduino compatible", but a large number of those Arduino libraries running on it had to be rewritten.

If you want convenience and ISA/peripheral-register compatibility with existing low-level Arduino code, you're locked in to atmegas unless you want to do some fun porting work ;)

Re: Why we won't be selling Genuino or Arduino any more

#83

Post by manyxcxi »

Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #67
FuNe wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"other MCs aside from the Arduino that are more interesting today" Can you give a few links? Thanks in advance.

The ESP8266 [0] is, in my mind, one of the most interesting things in the microcontroller world right now. It's cheap, small, easy to use, and connects to WiFi. If you go into real computers, the C.H.I.P.[1] is quite an interesting device. It's $9, which is price competitive with the ATMega644 chip (in single quantities), has WiFi, Bluetooth, and runs Linux. It's also got lots of GPIO, like the Raspberry Pi, so it ca…

I'm linking to the SparkFun ESP8266 breakout [0] because I found this to be so much easier to get my bearings with than the raw chips/breakouts I'd gotten from Alibaba. Granted, I got my hands on them very early and they were still reverse engineering the documentation on them, but using this dev board has saved me many hours. It's also quite inexpensive for one or two if you're just trying to play around.

[0] https://www.sparkfun.com/products/13231

Re: Why we won't be selling Genuino or Arduino any more

#84

Post by michaelt »

jklinger410 wrote: post #30

TLDR: Reseller is pissed that "Genuino" has to be sold as "Arduino" in the US and that they have separate SKUs. Also Genuino seems to have poor B2B/reseller support. Is this post really that petty or am I missing something?

The new requirements make providing a good customer experience much more difficult, because it passes the retailers the burden of explaining this bullshit no-one cares about to their customers.

For example, what if I visit the shop while logged out, put a Genuino into my basket, then log in and ask for delivery to a US address - should the website replace the Genuino in my basket with an Arduino? What if Arduinos are out of stock, while Genuinos are in stock?

What if it's a european shopping for an Arduino because that's what all the guides online say, and it looks like the retailer is ripping them off by replacing their order for a genuine Arduino with an off-brand clone? And it looks like they can get a "real" Arduino at half the price from AliExpress?

Re: Why we won't be selling Genuino or Arduino any more

#85

Post by dan1234 »

falcolas wrote: post #53
jklinger410 wrote: post #30

TLDR: Reseller is pissed that "Genuino" has to be sold as "Arduino" in the US and that they have separate SKUs. Also Genuino seems to have poor B2B/reseller support. Is this post really that petty or am I missing something?

I think you're missing the additional costs and logistics of separating out SKUs by country which are placed upon the reseller, simply for "branding" reasons.

It sounds like they were already buying both product variants and surely it shouldn’t be too hard to restrict certain SKUs to certain territories via a shipping rule in their ecommerce system?

Shame they didn’t breakdown how many sales they get from the US (wouldn’t expect it to be many considering they’re UK based).

Got them to the front page in any case…

Re: Why we won't be selling Genuino or Arduino any more

#86

Post by trampi »

timlyo wrote: post #81
manyxcxi wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they're much friendlier to get started for the novice, most of the widespread examples seem extremely trivial to someone with experience. Now- I'm DEFINITELY not an expert, probably barely mediocre with the EE fundamentals, but I did take a lot of EE and some robotics at Uni to get my degree in Computer Engineering. I am nothing more than a hobbyist but some of my cooler projects have been: - Autonomous 4WD r…

>A USB nerf gun that shoots at the developer who broke the Jenkins build Anywhere I can read any more about this?

I think it was on HN some time ago: https://github.com/codedance/Retaliation

Re: Why we won't be selling Genuino or Arduino any more

#87

Post by soapdog »

douche wrote: post #58
nfriedly wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used one to control a pair of candy machines for a Watson demo - there was a laptop with a microphone that did sentiment analysis on your speech, and then it told the Arduinos to give you either sweet or sour candy. The next version is probably going to have a Raspberry Pi replace both the laptop and the Arduinos, but they were a good starting point to get the project up and running.

RaspPis are startlingly cheap these days, and surprisingly capable. For less than a tank of gas, I just built a retro ROM console, and the new version 3 boards are beefy enough to run video through Kodi without missing a beat or play any old console games I've tried up through the PS1/N64 era.

That is not true to all countries and regions. For example, in Brazil a raspberry pi 3 will cost a bit more than USD 100 which is a lot of money for many people and prevent it from being acquired by low and middle income classes which are arguably among the ones that would most benefit from access to this ecosystem.

Arduino/Genuinos on the other hand are easily available on our version of eBay and can be purchased as low as USD 30 which is an order of magnitude difference between the prices, and yes, one is a real computer and the other a microcontroller but sometimes you get what you can afford.

this schism between arduino people is completely ignored here and we'll buy the cheapest chinese knockoff if it is available.

Re: Why we won't be selling Genuino or Arduino any more

#88

Post by zenogais »

nathancahill wrote: post #28

Serious question: what are people building with these boards? The recurring projects I've seen are controlling lights, doors/locks and monitoring water in plants. I don't find these particularly compelling, am I missing something? How is this the next big thing?

I worked on a government defense contract a few years back that used an Arduino to raise a 100-ft tower on a mobile command station.

Re: Why we won't be selling Genuino or Arduino any more

#89

Post by wangchow »

nathancahill wrote: post #28

Serious question: what are people building with these boards? The recurring projects I've seen are controlling lights, doors/locks and monitoring water in plants. I don't find these particularly compelling, am I missing something? How is this the next big thing?

How about a satellite built with Arduino:

https://www.diyspaceexploration.com/ardusat-your-personal-sa...

Re: Why we won't be selling Genuino or Arduino any more

#90

Post by manyxcxi »

timlyo wrote: post #81
manyxcxi wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they're much friendlier to get started for the novice, most of the widespread examples seem extremely trivial to someone with experience. Now- I'm DEFINITELY not an expert, probably barely mediocre with the EE fundamentals, but I did take a lot of EE and some robotics at Uni to get my degree in Computer Engineering. I am nothing more than a hobbyist but some of my cooler projects have been: - Autonomous 4WD r…

>A USB nerf gun that shoots at the developer who broke the Jenkins build Anywhere I can read any more about this?

I always mean to write up my projects but never do. The gist is really, through trial and error I was able to map developer's desks to coordinates and elevation angles to get to their seat and just made a flat file that had their username, X, Y, and Z values in it.

The main loop was just the standard socket server you'd find in a Ethernet module example and I wrote a Jenkins plugin that would connect on break and send the offending username over the socket.

There were at the time a number of examples showing how to control the USB launcher from Geekwire w/ an Arduino that I pretty much just copied.

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