Qualcomm to acquire Arduino(qualcomm.com) |
Qualcomm to acquire Arduino(qualcomm.com) |
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
Hopefully we get something along with this to integrate into custom designs?
I recently tried it out, with an STM32 board, but found out that the USB communication buffer is overwritten when data comes in too quickly. This is quite disappointing because the relevant communication protocol is perfectly capable of stalling transfers. Some internet searching revealed that many people are complaining about this. And the proposed solution of increasing the buffer size is of course not really a solution.
Someone should fix this. I know Arduino is marketed as hobbyist, and I can live with not being able to squeeze the juice out of my hardware to the fullest, but I was surprised to see that apparently they don't take correctness seriously.
But reading through the news, it seems to be fine?
> Arduino will preserve its open approach and community spirit while unlocking a full‑stack platform for modern development—with Arduino UNO Q as the first step.
> The new Arduino UNO Q is a next-generation single board computer featuring a “dual brain” architecture—a Linux Debian-capable microprocessor and a real-time microcontroller—to bridge high-performance computing with real-time control.
Looks like they want to use the brand to push out their own stuffs, which seems to be reasonable. As long as they don't touch the education/OSS part I guess it will benefit both.
Given the current market for Qualcomm, it honestly wouldn't surprise me if in a few years they drop that education and OSS platform in favour of a paid approach. Recent Slack news doing the same has tainted my confidence.
33 Million audrino users, you can guarantee they want a piece of their wallets.
Arduino is over. In reality, as soon as they took VC funding, it was over.
Am I the only one who can't figure out the word?
Did you mean four characters? Or are you including a null-terminator? Extra 'e' if you're British?
:P thought someone is going to ask but great that people on HN figured it out already
I'm not sure whether to be happy or not to be fair. Main issues with Arduino while I was there was the leadership lack of vision and the unwillingness to support projects coming from the engineers. It was a company kinda coasting and unsure where to go.
If they replace leadership with people that have an clear vision and focus this might be good.
My greatest hope is that people with stocks don't get screwed over though, they used to distribute them quite "easily" at a certain point to avoid raising salaries.
Arduino is what pulled me into electronics. I have such fond memories of those old chonkers blinking LEDs. It felt like magic.
Unless they've had a major staffing and leadership shakeup, there is a zero percent chance Qualcomm is going to suddenly become some kind of open, sharing, culture. The company DNA is patent troll.
The recent joint ventures are a perfect example. I got so excited by those newish super powerful penta-whatever Qualcomm chips from Arduino a few years ago.
Then learned the chips were unobtainable outside the Arduino modules.
Complete garbage move by a garbage company.
Arduino refers to a company as well as a hardware and software platform. It doesn't only mean an ATMega based board. You can have an ESP32 based Arduino board.
Arduino boards aren't designed for high performance or very high speed signal integrity.They are designed to be easy to use by non technical people.
I see people saying stuff like the ESP IDF and FreeRTOS are easy enough to use for most people. First, Arduino on ESP32 is built on the FreeRTOS based IDF, so people who would rather use FreeRTOS don't exactly know what they are talking about. Second, anyone who thinks FreeRTOS is easy enough to use for Arduino's core audience is delulu.
Use the proper tool for the job. Arduino is for beginners, non-technical people, and for projects with undemanding requirements. Stop pretending that it's a half baked solution for engineers; that completely misses the point of Arduino.
And Qualcomm itself is not in the business of making mass market MCUs. Does Qualcomm want to be?
They can, they already have the kind of dies they could put into those. But they would be competing against the likes of ST, and they wouldn't have the wide ass margins they're used to.
They would also have to be writing public documentation, and dealing with hobbyists and small developers. And the impression I got from dealing with Qualcomm? They'd rather douse themselves in gasoline and set themselves on fire than acknowledge that small developers exist.
The first Arduino I built cost me just $5. I assembled all the parts on a breadboard, and it worked perfectly with the Arduino IDE, just like the ESP32 does nowadays.
Is Qualcomm basically paying for the brand? I didn’t even realize Arduino was a brand at first.
I wonder if they will learn from Arduino or destroy it.
Oh, and likely there will be telemetry and user data acquisition in the arduino app so they'll probably also get some juicy user data to sell along the way.
They'll sell a few more chips while they're at it.
I'm glad there's nothing I need to do that an ESP32 or ESP8266 can't do.
Qualcomm may want to change that? But if Qualcomm's treatment of small developers remains the usual Qualcomm scorn, they'll get nowhere.
And that makes me wonder what Qualcomm "bought." Was it the trademark? The form factor? Presumably this won't affect things that leveraged the infrastructure like platform.io ? Was there money involved? Who got it and how much?
Part of me wonders if this is in response to Qualcomm being unable to acquire the Raspberry Pi foundation, and given their focus on the new 'Q' and "Linux-Debian"[2] its not much different than a Raspberry Pi[3]. So many questions and "We heard you liked AI so we put some AI in your AI" kinds messaging?
This is really baffling to me.
[1] Arduino, LLC v. Arduino S.R.L. et al -- https://dockets.justia.com/docket/massachusetts/madce/1:2015...
[2] I always chuckle at distro specific Linux as a 'thing.'
[3] "Hey look we have this computer that runs Linux and has a connector on the board so you can plug I/O devices into the top of it! Isn't that neat and unique?"
the then-CEO in a rare f2f in Seattle: oh that's a toy
me, today: God speed, you crazy diamonds; I'm glad you cashed out, you are doomed.
My favorite thing from Arduino was the UNO R3, highly versatile for "hardware" stuff at way back then.
I heard Espressif / ESP32 was its spiritual "successor".
I wonder how this will effect Arduino moving forward.
after more than a decade of releasing CPUs for Linux based Android they released Snapdragon X CPU with Windows only support, intentionally not providing Linux drivers, to chum up with M$.
it was one of the rare opportunities to break the AMD / Apple duopoly for PC CPUs/SoCs.
Are we going to get datasheets or are we getting Raspberry Pi 2: nodatasheet boogaloo and the community has to spend the next 5 years reverse engineering the fuckin thing while loading binary blobs.
That's an easy riddle to answer: Nothing sold by Arduino is particularly inexpensive. They've got room for profit margin. It's easier to make money when the things are several times more expensive than the competitors.
To pick an example: I can get a sketchy-feeling ESP32 board that was manufactured by some nameless entity and sold by a company that calls themselves "QQQMFXFDCX" or something. It'll probably generally work, but the pins will be in whatever order, labeled however, and I might have to spend some time documenting its unknown [mis]features. It will cost me a few dollars.
Or, I mean: I can get one from Arduino with their name on it (and with a ublox-branded module) in their Nano form-factor for ~$20. It will work fine. The pins will be [mostly] in numeric order, and labeled on both sides of the board. It will cost me about $20.
There's a lot more potential profit margin in a $20 sale than there is in a $3 sale.
(Do they add enough value to make me want to spend $20 instead of $3? Not necessarily, but I'm pretty cheap.)
Found some licensing info here: https://support.arduino.cc/hc/en-us/articles/4415094490770-L...
Arduino Megas? $110 official, $12 on Ali. Extra $10 gets you a RAMPS 1.4 board for full 3d printer platform. Yeah, a whoile Marlin-capable 3d printer board for $20. Id argue that THIS is what caused the 3d printer boom.
Arduino nano? Officially? Who knows. I bought them in bulk $1.40 and were pin compatible, and breadboardable.
And this was all true back in 2012 and up. Even their "Motor Shield" official driver was a pile of crap. Used an LM298 iirc. I would just go buy an a4988 stepper driver for a whole $.99 and run steppers.
They made the ecosystem, but they haven't properly stewarded or oversaw it. And now that Qualcomm is now owner, eh, fuck it. Stick with clones or ESP. (And for those who've had the displeasure of dealing with Qualcomm, yeah, just dont.)
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..)
It uses Simcomm modules...
I am very very skeptical of this being a good thing for Arduino and their community.
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.
Alternatives like the Pi RP2040/2350 and Espressif's vast selection of boards can fill the gaps, but Arduino was what got me and many people I know into microcontrollers, so I have a special fondness for them!
ST and TI do the same thing with their boards too and it's not a bad strategy.
Yep, it's Qualcomm alright.
Exactly. For the people who did not follow a structured educational program on embedded programming, starting with an SMT microcontroller was very hard.
Arduino made this fun and easy with their language & IDE combo. Typing some code and seeing the lights on the board reacting is a hell of a drug.
Once you mastered the IDE, you could either program other microcontrollers in the same IDE, or at some point you hit the limits and started digging into the vendor-specific toolchains.
If I started again today, I would again start with an Arduino.
Arduino really isn't great with naming, a Uno can be an AVR or ARM based board, now either 3V3 or 5V based and also a SBC rather than just a MCU.
It is kinda disappointing but I can see why Qualcomm wants to use the brand.
More specifically, I can see it trying to compete with things like those funny Chinese boards built around SoCs like SG2000. Those embed a Linux capable core, a small NPU, a camera interface with ISP and video codecs, and a secondary RTOS core for realtime control. Basically built for drones and simple robots. The caveat of those boards being: the documentations sucks, the SDK is wack, you get 3 example scripts and are entirely on your own outside that.
Qualcomm could be trying to branch into drones/robotics/etc with this move.
The concern I have with the $44 Q is it has 2GB of RAM and 16GB eMMC, and a processor that's probably between a Pi 3 and Pi 4 in terms of speed and IO (though 4nm, so probably much more efficient).
For $45 I can buy a Pi 5 with it's own built-in GPIO, PCIe, and a much faster SoC, though it lacks a few niceties like the Q form factor, the more efficient SoC, a realtime microcontroller, and a USB-C port with display out capabilities (I really wish Pi had that...).
They're trying to bring Arduino back from the dead.
I think their slides say Debian, but didn't mention what binary blobs one needs to have for enabling various functionality the SoC provides / how much their kernel deviates from mainline kernel ...
Edit: I see you already have a video out about the acquisition that looks a lot like an ad as well...
If you're doing cheap IoT trinkets, you're never going to pay extra for a brand. You're going to buy the cheapest wifi / BT chipset out there and make do with that.
And if you're doing serious AI, you basically go for a real computer with real computing power, and in that segment, the Arduino brand means nothing.
I suspect there was an internal deck saying how this acquisition is going to give them foothold in the hobby community, but if they wanted that, there's a million better ways. Starting with making documentation, SDKs, and toolchains accessible and easy to use. There's a reason why you see Microchip, STM, RPi, and Espressif chips in every other DIY project.
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.
Of course companies change directions all the time. I wouldn't surprise me if the people who bought Arduino believe the above vision, but there are other political factions that will try to kill it.
It is a nightmare when such an acquisition happen.
If you're looking to make Uno Q SBC a gateway to more companies building on Qualcomm SoCs, please also release:
- Affordable HQ camera modules, with drivers, tuned ISP support for the board
- Low volume SoC purchases on Mouser/Digikey so we can move from evaluation board to prototypes
- Reference schematics
- High quality documentation and maintained Yocto layers for embedded linux development
- Ability to use SoC features like AI acceleration / ISP without huge headaches
Arduino was a great way to get into microcontrollers back when the only alternative was vendors' native libraries in straight undocumented C and wiggling CPU registers manually. But that's not really a niche anymore, there's plenty of other, better designed, frameworks and libraries. Arduino has always been the worst, slowest framework available.
Honestly it's high time to replace Arduino with something else that doesn't instill such awful habits in new engineers.
China has a way more vibrant, innovative hardware industry simply because you can source everything made by Chinese firms.
An Arduino is better if you're doing something and want a quick, easy, simple to program controller. It started as a way for artists to add MCUs to the projects without having to become embedded programmers.
A non-profit is still a business. Success is necessary for existence.
Think about the number of companies that have been created to make, or heavily specialize in Arduino clones and accessories without having to pay Arduino a cent because the designs were intentionally open-sourced. It doesn't sound like a naked cash grab to me.
I don't doubt the boards could've been sold cheaper, but they clearly were doing something right given how much it changed the hobbyist landscape
Their support model is hellish and they provide very little information and documentation, so usually you’ll end up doing a lot of guessing and reverse engineering. They will tell you to sign a contract with one of their “design partners”, but even they can’t get answers for basic questions.
Seriously, if they want more small cap companies working with them they have to treat them better, I worked with them as a small company and as a larger company and in both cases their support was basically non existent even if we were buying chips from them for more than 10m$ a year.
Didn't have it on my bingo card that running AI on a microcontroller is what people are salivating for!
Not sure if the strategy is to cram AI into every little shoe box out there and keeping fingers crossed for the stock price to trend upwards!?
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.
My opinion is that they should productize ESP [1] (no, not that one) which will be super harmonious with their goals.
Arduino acquisition, IMO, is putting one foot into manufacturing automation/automotive/sensors field. They have done similar in the past, arriver was an ADAS compute thing.
Personally I don't believe they will take the execution risk and scale up on all of these things. They will probably wait for the right time and chop off a few of these things and focus on whatever looks like it's going to be a cash cow.
Finance wise, there will be near term margin pressure but long term (IMO) they will execute superbly on a portion of their bets.
The main problem is the clock is ticking, handsets becoming commodified leading to vertical integration, licensing losing value, etc. Apple modem agreement running out soon too, and 6G modems too will not be as high margin due to diminishing improvements in telecom tech, even operator uptake at this point is looking unlikely after the 5G... debacle.
Which explains the very diverse bets they have made.
Will be interesting to see what they execute in this limited timeframe.
absolutely unbelievably cooked. anyone pushing that nonsense, short with leverage.
low latency connectivity + goliath data centres will always beat on-device inference/training.
Arduino has neither technical (standards, form-factor, pinouts), nor mindshare among developers that can be useful for high-speed, modern and upcoming AI-on-the-edge applications.
It sounds like Qualcomm is making a belated move towards robotics, but acquiring these assets is only going to distract them from becoming a successful player.
The other thing they announced is that they are going to sell at least one of their SBCs under the Arduino brand. That's kind of cool, I guess.
This announcement was very difficult to read. The whole thing sounds like it was written by chatGPT and it and it really shows. It took them roughly four pages to announce these two things and nothing else. I can't help but feel there is some level of malice to this, like they are taking out of Microsoft's playbook of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish".
[0]: https://github.com/buserror/simavr/blob/master/examples/shar...
Qualcomm is one of the worst vendors out there to deal with if you're a small hardware developer - let alone the kind of hobbyist who wants to use Arduino boards.
In a perfect world? Qualcomm would use Arduino to bring some of their chipsets and devices to public, and have the Arduino team open them up to small developers. Essentially doing what Pi Foundation is doing for Broadcom - package their unpalatable ICs into something that people actually use.
But we're not in a perfect world. We're in the kind of world where Qualcomm exists in the first place.
The pessimist in me fully expects Qualcomm to make Arduino worse rather than Arduino to make Qualcomm better.
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.
With Arduino, the hardware is probably the least interesting/important part. The software side is more important, providing an easy-to-use IDE and a simplified API and platform abstraction layer to make it super-easy to get started. Then there's the documentation, sample code, and community.
Come for the odd little microcontroller board. Stay for the community.
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.
Intel could've attracted the entire retrocomputing community if they realised that the peripherals around x86 and the PC ecosystem were what got them to where they were in the first place, and made Galileo/Edison actually PC-compatible, but they ended up making a SoC with a 486DX+ core and mostly-incompatible peripherals (one would think they should've learned their lesson with the 80186/88...) and somehow convinced Microsoft to make a special version of Windows(!) for it despite a complete lack of any video output capabilities.
"WTF were they thinking!?" is the most concise summary of that fiasco.
Basically, if you already got the skills to work with "bare" microcontrollers, you won't need all the simplification and handholding that Arduino provides and you can just buy the individual chips and fully utilize the tiny form factor and low power requirements.
If you want to learn programming microcontrollers, then locking yourself into Arduino's abstractions is probably counterproductive.
On the other hand, if you do want to just combine different ready-made modules, focus on programming and don't want to worry too much on the low-level stuff, you will probably use a raspberry pi or similar: The form factor is only slightly larger than an arduino, but you get a full-fledged PC instead of a microcontroller.
So I don't really see a niche there.
Not entirely. Arduino was always targeted at the "casual DIY" segment - artists, school robotics clubs, and other folks who wanted automation without a steep learning curve. This was a notch below the "serious hobbyist" tier where you could save a lot of money by just buying a bare-metal version of the same chip and write some code in C (or Rust). Or the pro tier, where there's way you're paying $20+ for a glorified breakout board.
Casual DIY always had a ton of inertia. It's also the reason why every other design for an analog guitar pedal or whatever is using components that are 50 years old: ancient designs are just copied-and-pasted forever. So I don't think Arduino is dead there, although other platforms are definitely eating some of their lunch.
The RPi Pico looks great for this, but that's pretty much an Arduino equivalent. You can even used the Arduino IDE with it.
Then again, one of the more accessible (IMO) ways of using pi picos is with the arduino environment, or its cousin platformio. I do think that even if in some ways the arduino abstractions can be limiting in some ways, in practice it's often a big timesaver for more casual (and not so casual) applications. It gives you easy access to a large ecosystem of libraries across a lot of hardware platforms.
I definitely see niches for both. Even if you've got some experience an Arduino uno or mega is just an atMEGA with good software support and IO headers.
We'd usually use an RPI and Arduino - connect our 'out of the box' modules to the pi, pi to arduino via uart serial, and wire arduino to the meat and potatoes. The RPI's IO was generally not as good in terms of latency but also if the wrong wire gets crossed suddenly we'd have a dead Pi but the Arduino would shrug it off.
Arduino isn't a pipeline from zero to professional embedded dev. It's a stepping stone, and a crucial one at that. I'd know. I'm an embedded firmware engineer. Got my first Arduino when I was 11.
Arduino's success comes from the legibility of their API and the simplicity of their tooling. It allows kids or a novice to get comfortable with core principles of the trade (GPIO, other basic peripherals, limited memory, etc) without the cognitive overhead of makefiles and JTAG adapters. You aren't getting "locked in" by anything, you're building skills that you'll need for the next step.
If all you're doing is twiddling some GPIOs, as is the case with most beginner/educational projects, RPi isn't teaching you any skills that translate to industry. So there's one niche: Arduino is a practical educational tool.
That simple tooling and API also make Arduino great for small side projects that don't demand a sophisticated uC. Once that project is finished, you can plop an ATMega328 onto a piece of perfboard with a crystal and a couple caps, and your Arduino is free to use on whatever your next project will be. Can't do that with a Pi.
Also, I'd much rather just plug an Arduino into my PC and throw some code on it, than clear off half my desk to make way for a monitor and keyboard for the Pi. Point Arduino.
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.
But let's say tomorrow they come together with bundle/partnerships to create a new, great dev environment, very easy, that a mechanical engineer can prototype a great robot for a niche use case,and continue to use that chip and code, with some changes in V1 production ?
Is there value to the Arduino brand and community than ?
The question though is does this add value for the owners of Arduino? All too often when a project moves from the demo to real engineering (making a demo something you can sell is typically about ten times harder than the demo) you select all new hardware.
As a side note, I don't get why they can't find the NPV of actually lifetime cloud compute. Compute costs are decreasing rapidly, so a $5/yr perpetuity has a NPV of $185 assuming 2.7% inflation?
My take: Qualcomm hopes to leverage Adriano adoption to expand their IoT share, and also to grow Adruino's footprint to include more smart IoT devices using Qualcomm's chipsets (Eg: Robotics)
It's the opposite of that. Hobbyist/low volume maker gonna spend extra money to buy a familar tool, instead of going extra miles finding the cheapest available.
Even ESP32 is bad in term of perfomance/features and how much it cost.
What about cheap AI for toys and gadgets? Maybe the next Furby or some smart Toaster could run on their chips. AI is spreading, moving into casual corners outside of hobbyists and high professionals, maybe they aim to get a foothold there?
- completely missed out on AI
- phones become commodity, push for complete vertical integration from apple, google
- squeezed by chinese soc vendors from 'below' (mediatek, unisoc)
they're cooked, right? there's no way out, surely.
At the high-end they announced two new flagship processor platforms at its 2025 Snapdragon Summit. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 they claim to be the world’s fastest mobile SoC.
Outside of Snapdragon its basically 5G Telecoms atm - iPhone 17 Pro Max relies on Qualcomm's Snapdragon X80 Modem for 5G - 5G Edge solutions for RAN, presumably harnessing AI - Non-Terrestrial 5G Provisioning in their partnerships with Thales/Ericsson. - IoT and Wearables - presumably low power/footprint modems
If I were a company trying to ship V1 of our first product, I would hands down pick Qualcomm. MediaTek et al are great for when you know what you're doing with minimal handholding.
I absolutely hated working with them, but at least they were a vendor you could work with. Perhaps the cheaper vendors have upped their game here but I wouldn't know.
As you said there is competition from Mediatek, but who knows how long Mediatek has before the US government sanctions them to hell and beyond. Apple doesn't sell to third parties (no matter how much one might dream) and so does Google. Samsung I haven't ever seen used outside of their own phones and TVs.
The remainder is NVidia's Tegra lineup but other than automotive and the Nintendo Switch I haven't seen these in third party products either, I doubt they'll even take your calls if you are not coming in with millions of units sold of demand.
I hope they provide better Linux support for the next gen PC grade chips.
I can't begin to guess what motivated them to engage in an intentional culture clash of this magnitude.
Better? :)
I plug the USB in and its the same as an Arudino, can even use Arduino IDE, but I prefer VS Code with the PlatformIo extension. You can even use the Arduino Library (#import <Arduino.h>
And a ESP32C board with wifi/bluetooth is like $8 https://www.amazon.com/Seeed-Studio-XIAO-ESP32C3-Microcontro... (and thats from amazon, on alibaba its like couple bucks if that)
As a side note, you can power this with your IPhone's USB C which was surprisingly cool.
Besides that, IMO hiding hardware details from the developer is the worst thing about Arduino. The hardware details matter and it's far too easy to get footgunned by some implementation detail hidden from you.
But really, esp-IDF isn't that much more complex, nor are most of the other native frameworks. It's a bit more verbose, but esp-IDF provides helper libraries that replace almost everything Arduino provides, but in a way that is actually designed for the hardware and doesn't have to do things like lookup pin numbers in a giant table for each and every gpio call.
Companies like Adafruit and Sparkfun sell dozens of tailor-made dev board variants, and their I2C module system allows you to mix & match a whole bunch of peripherals.
The code? A handful of lines of Python, which you can drag&drop onto it like it's a flash drive. Or use a browser-based IDE if you want one-click library install and serial logging.
Arduino's IDE was groundbreaking in 2010, but these days there are easier (and cheaper!) alternatives for beginning hobbyists, and better alternatives for power users.
I don’t even use the Ardiuino IDE anymore; I've switched to VS Code using PlatformIO.
It’s great that all these microcontroller boards and peripheral breakout boards can be programmed using the same basic API’s, but I don’t think it helps Arduino the company very much.
How so? All of that is abstracted away from the users just like it is for Arduinos. In fact you can use the Arduino IDE to develop for most ESP32 chips.
If anything Arduino is holding back everyone with their horrible IDE. Their Board and Library managers are painfully slow and having no way to store configuration with your sketch means that you're taking a screenshot of a drop down menu if you have to make any changes.
Eventually people want to write their own libraries to make their code more manageable and the Arduino IDE makes it difficult for someone who knows what they're doing.
> But I used an Arduino, with 5V tolerant outputs, to light up Halloween costumes for years.
I have yet to encounter a piece of hardware that doesn't respect 3.3v as signal high. All of the neopixel variant's data pins work off 3.3v and most people have moved on to 12v and even 24v for larger projects while still raw dogging 3.3v on the data pin without issue.
Arduino's insistence on 5v logic levels is for maintaining backward compatibility which is honestly unnecessary.
You no longer have to break your back going from zero to blinking an LED. I remember when I first got into espressif chips and it was a right pita back then. But no more!
Personally I'm a fan of PlatformIO because its not just because of the wide selection of platforms it supports and that it uses VSCode which is my IDE of choice.
The Arduino IDE is awesome for an extremely quick setup time. You can very easily download libraries and add them to your project, you don't have to create a blank source file, you just have to fill in setup() and loop(). The Arduino IDE makes it very easy to set up a new board and download code to it.
Much of this also applies to the Arduino IDE with and ESP32, but what I really appreciate about the whole Arduino ecosystem is if you want to do something really simple, like say, activate a servo when some sensor reaches a certain value, you literally only have to type 5-6 lines of code. You're not messing around with SDKs and Makefiles and git cloning repositories etc etc etc. You can get kits for $70 that have an Arduino clone, and a bunch of different sensors, servos, steppers, etc. It's absolutely fantastic for teaching basic programming and electronics.
Arduino is just a familiar name with a long (~20 year!) history. There's a plethora of pre-existing projects that a person with no prior programming or electronics experience can implement easily to get their feet wet.
Some manner of ESP32 (or STM or MSP or RP2...) may be a good choice for a project for someone with some experience, but if you put a reasonably-motivated person in a room with a computer and an Arduino starter kit then they'll successfully be building simple things in no time.
It remains a friendly place to start doing stuff, and that was always the primary intent.
Arduino has so little presence in production devices and is largely an enthusiast and hobbyist product. To be clear, this is good! Having well-supported high-quality enthusiast products is awesome.
But it just doesn't... seem to overlap with the bulk of Qualcomm's business, which is large-scale silicon sales to consumer and industrial clients.
Is it going to happen? I don't know. But ollama on an SBC is a sandbox I'd play in.
1. Lack of 5V tolerant pins. Beginners may or may not be aware of the possibility of destroying the device or the need to level-shift signals.
2. Tooling may not work out of the box. As of today the tooling step boils down to pasting a URL into a field in the preferences, but that is something you need to know. You need to select the right uploading options which are much more complex than with arduino type devices.
3. IMO less clear naming of different dev boards, thus also harder to find docs.
4. Examples may not work out of the box, simple Arduino examples may fail with hard to debug issues (for beginners) where they don't know whether it is a hardware issue, wrong board/uploader setup or a pinout issue (e.g. if the onboard LED pin differs).
These are all examples of issues students had when they used the ESP32 boards without my guidance, so not just my opinion or a theory. And as I said none of these are dealbreakers, but depending on the patience, stress levels, perceived skill etc. of the student this might make me recommend an Arduino over an ESP32.
The lack of features (notably Wifi on our boards) and somewhat larger size are benefits for us.
My hope and wish is Arduino sincerely remains accessible as it's always been and not solely drift into B2B or enterprise spaces.
There is a lot of chip building and delivery capacity being aligned this year.
It's like saying AMD Cpu is so much better, why do you need Linux.
But certainly for pro use cases the hardware specific frameworks are way more powerful (but also complex).
I wrote up a bit on Arduino vs ESP-IDF here https://bitclock.io/blog/esp-idf-vscode
Beginners can learn frameworks more complicated than Arduino and I think they should. Before Arduino, beginners were expected to write plain C or assembly, and the industry got along just fine. There were still countless hackers and weekend tinkerers. They just had to learn more, which is not a bad thing
This group is has been moving to circuitpython, which is much less performant, but even easier to use. The more serious cross-platform development environments, like Zephyr, have also become much better.
I've recently been getting into Rust + Embassy + Probe-rs and in my opinion it's been the best embedded experience by far.
You want chip-specific libraries. When the software is designed for the hardware everything works better.
The native AVR and esp-IDF frameworks are very good. There's also micropython and circuit python. I've heard good things, but I don't partake in Python.
Personally I think attempting to provide a cross-platform library for microcontrollers is an enormous mistake. This is not x86, you can't rely on any CPU feature existing, which results in awful branching code in places that in a sane framework is a single instruction updating a CPU register
People need mainline kernel support and regular refreshes to reliably build projects based on it. This will require some level of building their BSPs in open and providing APIs for people to take advantage of the QCOM specific features. A QCOM that won't talk to anyone without an NDA cannot adapt to this.
For this, Qualcomm does not have to buy Arduino for a big amount of money: Qualcomm could simply offer this option on their own and save the acquisition cost.
Addendum: For the acquisition cost, Qualcomm could do a lot of marketing of their offering towards makers.
That said, interesting that Qualcomm would buy twenty years of Arduino legacy for this rather than launching something new in the space.
What I expect short term is what happened to Eagle in the PCB space when Autodesk bought it (best thing that happened to kicad).
Longterm Arduino goes into the periphery of the maker market, similarly to beaglebone.
Plus the market you're implying exists is so small as to be utterly worthless to Qualcomm. They are in no way interested in individuals or small businesses
I'll believe it when I see it
> Entrepreneurs, businesses, tech professionals, students, educators, and hobbyists will be empowered to rapidly prototype and test new solutions, with a clear path to commercialization supported by Qualcomm Technologies’ advanced technologies and extensive partner ecosystem.
At the least the official line is to remedy this situation. Could be embrace/extend/extinguish but tech companies spend all kinds of money on getting students and smaller businesses into their monolithic ecosystems.
The data center AI race was won by nvidia, embedded AI might still be up for grabs and it helps to have developer adoption.
One of the benefits of the main Arduino line is it was very simple to convert to your own design. Companies like Broadcom and Qualcomm won't sell (many of) their chips on normal distributer sites.
Same reason why Raspberry PIs kind of suck in my opinion. Great you've come up with a neat thing you want to build with it; you are forced to utilize either their compute modules which may not be sufficient for your task, or might be out of stock, or XYZ.
Arduino has been trying out a new "pro" line for about a year now, making PLC-level devices to be used in automation but hopefully attracting developers by letting them use the same family of tools as the educational line.
But if you are a small developer, there are options for you! Have you tried to: eat shit? And die? So that you don't insult our PRECIOUS FUCKING TIME by IMPLYING that a MERE 10K would be ENOUGH for THE GREAT QUALCOMM to ACTUALLY CARE?
The optimist in me wants to believe that this acquisition is a sign of Qualcomm actually trying to be better than that. But realistically? Yeah no. It's Qualcomm. They wouldn't have let it get this bad if they ever cared.
Based on their first announced product (https://www.arduino.cc/product-uno-q), I think Qualcomm is trying to get into that space, and they bought Arduino for the brand name.
You're right that Qualcomm isn't in the business of small business. But maybe they expect that the market is big enough that it's worth their while to pay a subsidiary (Arduino) to do it.
Where can you get a half decent microcontroller with wifi integrated on it? Espressif. All the others are flat out bad in some very important dimension, which isn't to say the Espressif products are perfect, but they fit in the important ways.
Of course they are more expensive (not much more, really, compared to simillar specced ESPs) but they are western and the peripheral actually work as intended. In my projects with ESP32 i had to basically bitbang every peripheral that i needed to use beyond their simplest mode.
- Texas Instruments (soon.)
If you are cross shopping a full single board computer (Pi) with a microcontroller (arduino/esp32 etc) for a project, it's almost always a sign you don't know what you are doing. With the exception of the recent Pi Pico, non of the raspberry pis are Arduino/microcontroller competitors - they are typically full blown linux computers with all the benefits and drawbacks that provides.
While you can absolutely solve microcontroller-style problems with full blown computers, it's rarely the best/cheapest option.
The bigger concern is the overhead of the Linux OS in terms of interacting with it vs just flashing a microcontroller... but linux lets you run an SSH and FTP servers and wifi and a debugger on the thing easily.
So you get easier access to remotely playing with the programming of your gizmo, but you have the OS in the way of just talking to hardware in real-time. I haven't done projects like that since my undergrad, does it really make that much difference?
To me the big deal-breaker would probably be if the thing I was building was battery-powered.
I recently was doing a few projects with the Arduino Every, which is a nice board - but it's just too expensive. I did fry a few - so now I'm just using them as development board (the additional UARTs help a lot there), and for the actual project still use Nanos where I no longer care about the serial debug output, and therefore am fine with just the one serial port.
Under what legal theory?
(and eg. make sure their products are useless without some patent license for some software driver or algorithm)
Note that the Arduino libraries are LGPL licensed. Unless you have a commercial agreement with Arduino, you have to distribute your firmware to your customers as object files so it can be linked to updated/modified versions of the Arduino libraries. This means that I wouldn't use Arduino for a shipping product unless you're fine with the firmware on the device being publicly available.
I love it when my device stays dumb (or at least connect-local) and not become abadonware 6 months after release because the cloud provider felt it a chore to keep running.
That's not exactly easy. I doubt on-device training will become much of a thing. But on-device inference is desirable in all sorts of distributed use cases. We're still a long way off from reliable internet everywhere. Especially when you want to start pushing large quantities of sensor data down the pipe.
I can't even get reliable internet on my phone in the centre of London.
Except that it's not always an option...
We live in a broken world.
pick two.
well actually you can't really, low latency is pretty hard to do full stop
especially for such a specific, space/power/thermal constrained platform. itd be weird if meta didnt put their own custom soc into it.
running a big tech company these days, theres enough custom work going around that basically all the big players have internal silicon teams. hell, even fintech shops with ~100 employees are doing tape-outs these days!
Sadly, it seems that privacy is something that HN readers care about, but precious few others.
Look at the success of Facebook. The covers have been off that stinker for years, yet people still regularly use it; often to the exclusion of more traditional media. I have quite a few friends that I don't get invited to their occasions, because they only advertise them on FB. They invite a bunch of randos they've never met, but not those of us, they see all the time.
To be fair, if I sit down, and describe exactly what the ramifications of the "always on, always open" Facebook presence means, people will usually suddenly value privacy, but it seems that no one actually ever does that, at a level most folks can understand.
Hysterical rantings (even when well-founded), by geeks, don't get through to most folks. It needs to be done in the vernacular, and via media they actually consume.
So can the Pi Pico, the Milk-V Duo (one 64 bit Linux core, one 64 bit microcontroller core), and many others.
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 hardware SPI controller (half the speed because the interface clock is put up one cycle and down the next; this also gives enough time for data shuffling).
Why does the Arduino SDK necessitate a huge markup on Arduino boards, when $0 of every computer I buy to run Linux on goes to GCC?
But you still used the Arduino SDK with the bluepill, so clearly Arduino had a point. Unless you were one of the few masochist who dealt with the STM32 toolchain directly for fun?
The Pi Pico is such a breath of fresh air in that regard. Finally a decent-enough toolchain for a decent-enough performing ARM MCU!
Haven't seen any examples of bottom 'high speed' shields yet, though. They said there would be some made available.
The more I look at it, the more it sounds like a platform designed by M&A team
There's also great support for CircuitPython and MicroPython, which makes it trivial to program the devices.
Another other way is a ~$100 Arduino starter kit. It includes a printed instruction book and enough useful parts to sit down and begin doing stuff immediately. Anyone with a sufficiently-large pocketbook can buy it for themselves (or for someone else).
One of these things is like buying individual Lego bricks, or maybe lumber and fasteners from the hardware store, with a specific goal in mind. It's creative by necessity, and for those who know how to get where they're going then it's really quite lovely to have marketplaces like AliExpress and Ace Hardware available to satisfy our whims.
The other is more like a buying a packaged Lego kit or Meccano or an erector set that includes instructions for building several different things using the included parts. If a person (including a child) doesn't yet have any idea how to get started, then this can help them get the clues they need to go further with building other things.
---
I could buy a Chinese D1 mini dev board and a bag of assorted resistors, LEDs, transistors, and a breadboard and put it all in a nice box and give it to a kid, but I expect that they'll have a hard time figuring out what comes next. ["Now just draw the rest of the owl."]
Or, I could buy an packaged Arduino starter kit for a kid and have a reasonable expectation that they'll soon be telling me all about the neat -- if simple -- stuff they've done with it. They might not even realize the things they've learned along the way, but it'll stick with them well-enough if they want it to. And then they can move on to using VS Code with PlatformIO and start hammering out RP2040 PIO assembler when that time comes. If that's something they choose to be interested in, then they'll have a good foundation for the independent projects that may come later.
The whole is sometimes greater than the sum of its parts.
Other than that, Broadcom never really had any community involvement, nor any involvement in the Raspberry Pi Foundation that runs it. However, some broadcom engineers were part of the foundation, which isn't quite the same.
I wouldn't minimise the effect of people just googling around and finding the name Arduino all over the place. It would be very hard for an entirely new platform to get critical mass while esp32 is not standing still.
However, if they are distributing SDKs or something separately from the hardware, that software could have its own license that forbids commercial use.
> Last but not least, you need to comply with article 4.d of the LGPL license which has specific and very technical requirements. Complying with such requirements, which derive from the LGPL being used in the Arduino core, is usually a matter of providing end users with some documentation and binary files.
Article 4d of the LGPL requires library users to either:
> 0) Convey the Minimal Corresponding Source under the terms of this License, and the Corresponding Application Code in a form suitable for, and under terms that permit, the user to recombine or relink the Application with a modified version of the Linked Version to produce a modified Combined Work, in the manner specified by section 6 of the GNU GPL for conveying Corresponding Source.
> 1) Use a suitable shared library mechanism for linking with the Library. A suitable mechanism is one that (a) uses at run time a copy of the Library already present on the user's computer system, and (b) will operate properly with a modified version of the Library that is interface-compatible with the Linked Version.
Because the Arduino code is statically linked to your application to create the firmware binary, you're required to use option 0 (distribute your application's object files so it can be relinked with the Arduino library).
> And for some low-volume Arduino based products, the software isn't the valuable part of the project, anyway
That's definitely true! That's why I said I wouldn't use Arduino for a shipping product unless you're fine with the firmware on the device being publicly available.
But what you think of as an old core design is in fact a mature, well-understood, well-tested, widely-supported, cost-effective core design. It also has some features such as in-order execution which none of the newer chips have. From an engineering perspective, it still can make a lot of sense in the right applications today.
This _is_ possible with Linux, but not at all trivial and likely impossible with general-purpose distros.
Interrupt handling and (on RP2040) dedicated multicore code is also nice.
I assume initramfs-only with special purpose pid0 and only the modules needed statically compiled into the kernel?
What else would it take?
Bootloaders need to initialize most of the devices and load the kernel image. Then they hand the control over to Linux which proceeds to re-init these devices again.
The userspace matters, but on recent computers it doesn't matter that much. You can get to sub-40ms with https://katacontainers.io/ That's a project that uses full VMs to run Docker images boot instead of kernel namespacing.
In a way this mirrors how people opt for using apps even though a web version exists, because the apps are generally more performant.
I'd argue that ChatGPT is already there. The instant check out feature they've added, along with integrations was that crucial link between recommending and fulfilling a purchase. It turns ChatGPT into something that can very directly assist with typical "life stuff".
As examples: You're having a dinner party, it can set the menu, then buy the ingredients. At christmas, spend a few minutes talking about your kids and then it can make christmas gift suggestions and go and buy it for you, then do it again 12 months later.
Getting between the consumer and their purchases would be highly lucrative, it functionally replaces one of the core functions of advertising and retail.
-- Tom Hagen
AMD briefly gave them a run for their money, but it was nowhere near the catastrophe that bulldozer was, where the company basically needed rescuing. For a brief moment, they weren't a monopolist - that's all that happened, right?
AMD being circled by OpenAI makes sense since AMD makes NVidia knockoffs. that's objectively useful. Harddrive company make sense for storing weights and generative content. Marvell is networking...
what does QCOm present here, that openai or the AI scene at large needs? the only bet is robotics - but why on earth would I put some washed-up adreno into a 40kg man-sized apparatus which would very comfortably fit a H100?
Without any opportunities for getting bogged down in anything extra at all, they can follow a simple recipe and quickly begin to blink an LED at the rate of their choosing.
The Arduino was developed to be a teaching tool, and it allows for a person to take little baby steps.
(Whether this placement is good or bad for Arduino as a business entity isn't something that I find particularly important.)
Generics may have the same active ingredient but (vastly) different pharmacokinetics - i.e. different absorption rates/retention in the body. For basic stuff such as painkillers that's one thing, but for more sensitive medication such as insulin, antidepressants or anything related to the cardiovascular system (heart rate, blood pressure and clotting) one has to be very careful when switching between brands.
Some people hail from hacker town and will use whatever they have at hand. Some learned on vendor tooling, and would want it to be "proper", and would always try to use a vendor SDK with a vendor IDE. Some learned on vendor tooling and prefer not to use vendor tooling for "familiarity breeds contempt" reasons.
As a degenerate case: I've seen software for an ESP32 board that was prototyped entirely in Arduino IDE, and we almost shipped it that way. Because the prototype team cooked, and when the "make it an actual product team" tried to remake it in ESP-IDF, they ended up with less features and more bugs. They got it together eventually though.
This is prototyping mostly so I'm not sure if any of the Arduino code actually gets shipped with production devices.
For ex, we want to prototype a new mux switch, and need to toggle some gpio from computer. We finished in 1 evening, with arduino and python on host.
But "decent" is Qualcomm at its absolute best. And Qualcomm at its worst?
I'd rather chew down broken glass than work with Qualcomm.
my vision of them is that the engineering side can be great to deal with when they want to be (and my personal experience is they want to be). but the other part of their business is like set the standard, and then enforce it.
The only time I have seen this incredible feat accomplished was in a company large enough that they had a department dedicated to dealing with other large companies.
> you want more money now
But honestly, on HN, no one should have to explain why founders seek exits.
Just like any other founder, if the vast majority of their net worth is tied up in the company, they'd like to have an exit to take some chips off the table and diversify their investments.
I'm not doubting you, just sincerely curious.
Exactly. But my point was that this demographic would today get a more powerful and more accessible platform for their projects by buying a Raspberry Pi.
The main strength of microcontroller-based hobby boards (I hesitate to say "bare-metal", but something like that) is that tuning them for long operation on a small pouch cell is pretty straightforward. There is no such easy path to prolong battery life on a Raspberry Pi (not including the RPI Pico). After that, with microcontrollers, you have direct visibility into most interrupts you may need to use. You do not have that in the standard Raspbian linux distro.
They are foundationally different items, and it does not take a tremendously complicated project to reach the boundary between them. Need a robust wifi stack or to run a camera? You need something with at least an RTOS (like an ESP), or an actual operating system. Need to service a rapidly spinning rotary encoder without missing clicks or blocking other operations? You need a microcontroller.
Its certainly true that you can make a Raspberry Pi do everything an arduino can (and mostly vice versa), but in terms of what's accessible to a early-intermediate hobbyist, they are different tools for different tasks.
Raspberry pi, is a full ledge computer, with boottime measured in seconds
OR buy an SD card, learn what the heck “writing images” is, find a spare keyboard and monitor so you can see the RPi, learn how to use Linux for your first time, figure out how to copy files between your Macbook and Linux, figure out how to setup Wi-Fi, figure out how to run a program, then restart your RPi to find that your program didn’t start on its own, then figure out the million different ways in Linux to start a program on boot, only to find it takes forever before your program starts when you plug the RPi back in, then it turns out Linux screws up your timings so your LED art project doesn’t even work…
I'm not expecting a $0 markup, but Arduino prices are simply unreasonable for what they offer, especially if you live in a lower income country.
Arduino targets the hobyist market where customers will buy one (or at best a handful) of their boards. Arduino simply has no other way of recouping their investment than selling expensive hardware.
So I don't think it's fair to say that Arduino is being greedy. Also FWIW, Espressif's official dev boards are also pretty expensive. Not Arduino expensive, but several times the price of identical "clones" based on the same reference design and using the same official esp32 module.
As an aside, wonder how this will impact Qualcomm's RISC-V plans? They were apparently working on some RISC-V cores, but I wonder whether that was just a play to put pressure on Arm, or are they still planning on bringing those out to market?
(The "Arduino UNO Q" that they're launching now is based on a Cortex A53. One would think if they're serious about RISC-V they would start with this kind of things, as in low-end stuff for tinkerers.)
I do not expect to see Qualcomm made RISC-V application cores until Android or Windows is completely ported to it, which I think rules out the next several years.
They have to fix their approach to Linux driver development. (and driver development in general).
Qualcomm likes to lob hardware to consumers while spending the minimal amount of time making sure the drivers to support that hardware actually works.
I couldn't imagine someone like Valve leaping at the opportunity to use them.
did you notice how ARMs stock jumped 5% after that ruling? that tells you everything you need to know.
not to be reddity but reminds me of that scene from The Social Network, where Zuck's buddy couldn't udnerstand how the the record companies winning was actually a massive L.
all the court proved was its total irrelevance to market forces, thats all. ARM is in NVidia accelerators, in Apple phones, in things of actual relevance.
Where is qcom "in"? theyre competing in... laptops!? i could not think of a worse commodity to be in. low volume, no margins, no added value. NPUs? holy snakeoil. again, this edge inferencing that nobody cares about. theres not even a roadmap for anyone to care about it.
>next generation of handheld gaming. If Valve or someone paired with them for the next Steamdeck style project, they'd dominate.
yeah, a market of what, $50M? jeez louise.
>Outside of Snapdragon its basically 5G Telecoms atm
seems to be the only thing going for it.
On the other topic
>>Outside of Snapdragon its basically 5G Telecoms atm
>seems to be the only thing going for it.
Did you guys forget the $4B a year in auto rev that they generate, they essentially captured the entire auto market from Nvidia and NXP.
//ARM’s CEO wrote in a contemporaneous internal message that the Nuvia ALA “had left a route to blow a hole in [ARM’s] revenue plan” because “Qualcomm already ha[d] a v9 architecture license” under its own ALA. That observation led him to vent that “I’m struggling not to be pissed that we set up a route for Qualcomm to collapse the payments to Arm,” which “feels like in our chess game we left ourselves very exposed.”
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/delawar...
Re: Handheld gaming - The dedicated Xbox gaming handheld was cancelled because AMD required a minimum of 10 million units in its contract. With Steam Deck only selling ~5 million units and ASUS ROG/Lenovo Legion only selling 1-2 million MS didn't want to take the risk.
Reduce that BOM, go with ARM, and realise there's an incumbent leaving the market, and you have a compelling argument for Qualcomm. Particularly given the Nintendo Switch 2 sold 1.6M units in June, the highest launch month unit sales for video game hardware in US history
Valve managing to land Steam Deck within 2 orders of magnitude from that? That was already an unlikely feat.
Not that performance matters to all users, but with how much Pixels cost you have to ask yourself what it is you’re paying for. Even if you don’t care for Apple, for a little more you can get a competitor for a Snapdragon.
Pixels get first class support by google in terms of software which means I can rock my phone for several generations before upgrading.
I've owned a 2, 6, and now 9. Even though the 9 is much faster than the 2 or 6, I've reached a point where that performance difference simply doesn't matter. I'm not being held back by the CPU in any real way. That leaves security, software, and battery life as the main reasons why I might decide to update my phone.
As for bloatware, any mobile OS comes with stuff included. I've used both a Xiaomi and a OnePlus device and neither felt too bad, bloat wise.
The average consumer seems to be stuck on the same question, judging by Pixel's 3% market share.
for google, pushing 3rd parties out of the supply chain gives them a ton of security and stability concerning pricing and budgeting. its a smart long term move, and i think the industry is going to continue to push towards consolidation and in-housing.
This is not true at all. Performance matters because it enables exceptional battery life.
While it's nice to have exposure to PLC programming at an Arduino price point, the IDE, and PLC firmware was VERY rough around the edges. It took lots of resets and fiddling to even get the units connected over their USB serial, and you'd come back the next day and you'd have to repeat the process. Lots of "hold your tongue the right way while pressing this button". The IDE was also very buggy (though it may have improved in the last 12 months), but once you got things going, it did the job.
Besides, what's the market? The non-pro hardware is fine for prototypes, but you don't want a bowl of spaghetti in production, so porting it to the pro is pointless. If you want a generic compute board, why not a Raspberry Pi? If you want a PLC, why not go for a proper PLC?
There's perhaps a market for the shadow IT equivalent of electronics projects where an Arduino sketch is suddenly a load-bearing part of the company, but that's about it.
What actually happened was that our management very quickly started telling the people who came along with the acquisition that they were doing everything wrong. The salespeople were selling wrong, the marketing people were marketing wrong, the customer support people were supporting customers wrong. Everything that the company we acquired did differently was seen as a problem.
Within about a year, anyone they hadn't pressured to adopt our practices had left and been replaced with a transplant from the Mothership. Another year later, the customers we picked up in the acquisition were rapidly leaving for other vendors. They simply couldn't work with us in a way that worked for their business anymore. Last I heard, pretty much the only remaining vestiges of the company we acquired were trademarks, and we were back to only having very large customers.
Instead of analogRead, you need to write your own busy loop watching certain bits in a register (or ISR), you need to twiddle bits in several registers to set up the ADC the way you want it, etc.
Serial.write? Nope, gotta read the docs, twiddle some bits again, and then you actually do get to use printf.
Those two right there are big hurdles to someone new to microcontrollers. In fact, they're a hurdle to me and I've read AVR datasheets for fun.
Nobody has done embedded MCU programming as simple as Arduino. There is so much open source code libraries in the Arduino Ecosystem to do almost anything that much of your programming becomes plug-and-play and accessible to all. You can then ship it as long as your power/performance budgets are met.
A few years ago they went professional with their "Arduino PRO" industrial hardware and a good Cloud IoT platform. Again they gave you a simple software interface to easily program your nodes and add them to your own IoT application/services.
I think Qualcomm has a winner on their hands here if they can encompass all their offerings within the Arduino Software Ecosystem so any hobbyist/maker/developer/professional can easily develop applications/systems.
A beginner should be introduced to the processor, not C++ or python abstractions. Those abstractions are good and useful in the general sense, but you really should be aware of what your abstractions actually do to the physical processor.
Have you tried it? It's simply not in the same league of battle tested as the ESP one is, and I will happily agree almost everything else about the RP based ecosystem is superior.
I would probably go Atmega otherwise. It's rare I need something in the gap between 8-bit and a dedicated Raspberry Pi. And I'll take some rough edges to support a local company (though for transparency I do hold some stock in RPI).
No they can't. That's like suggesting "the aircraft carrier could simply turn around." The cheap and simple way for a multi-billion-dollar secretive semiconductor manufacturing behemoth that doesn't know how to write a contract for less than a million dollars or to publish documents for the public is not to just change that. It's to write a contract for millions of dollars to buy someone else that can already do that.
You picked an unfortunate analogy.
More importantly, if Qualcomm management is just unable to do this, why would they suddenly be able to do this with a different brand under their umbrella?
Pretty sure it can turn 180 degrees fairly quickly.
Evasive maneuvers are a thing
In that case everyone's a winner...except maybe us as customers.
I'm not saying it's not a real or an easy problem, just that I wonder if it truly is the reason Arduino is "bad"
The gpio thing is really just my personal pet peeve. There are a lot of things like this though. For example, the arduino core will consume several milliseconds doing something in between calls to your main function. I2C and similar drivers are typically not well designed and either use too much memory or just operate not-quite-right.
Which brings up another point, the Arduino ecosystem is not at all unified. If you use a chip that is not popular enough to be mainlined, you have to go out and find an Arduino core that supports it and try to plug that into your compiler. Such cores frequently are not API compatible and have slightly different behaviors. It's all a big mess.
There are a lot of features that are compile time conditional based on CPU, but the actual implementation of this is horrible. I once had to modify someone else's custom Arduino core to tweak some low level behavior and despite the change being very minimal, it took three days to find all the places and all the conditionals that needed tweaking.
But really my main complaint is that Arduino is incredibly slow and hides far too much from you. Firmware developers should know about CPU registers and hardware features. This is very important for understanding the machine! A lack of awareness of the machine and what its doing is (IMO) one of the major factors in how awful modern programs are.
IIRC their standalone wifi chip is pretty good even… just stick them together already c’mon.
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 decision for all designs.
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.
Valve managing to land Steam Deck within 2 orders of magnitude on their first handheld hardware launch, without some of the largest exclusive gaming IP in the world, selling direct to consumer... represent salient arguments for its ability to compete at a far greater extent when on more equal terms.
You need to do a little research. It will usually tell in the spec sheet. Which is why the Arduino is useful. You don't have to buy a level shifter. You don't have to read a level shifter spec sheet.
I just wanted that someone mentioned these Arduino-likes in the comments. I suspect many of you have come across them though.
But high chance they will look it up on Amazon/Ebay/whatever e-store and buy a clone without knowing.
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.
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.
Hah! I like to underestimate scope as well, but this is really something else. Definitely a competent engineer could make something like this. But a couple of months maybe. You won't even read the documentation for the chip in a day.
Also a million dev kits is unrealistic for vast majority of companies 5-20k is more the number I hard.
Wireless/network stack is hard.
Wasn't Arduino not for developers, but for hobbyists? People who aren't super technical but want to do something neat with basic microcontroller functionality?
You're complaint kinda seems like saying "BASIC isn't great language, it's got a lot of problems when used for enterprise applications." It's not really meant for that.
Unfortunately the Mbed guys stuck to their crap web-based IDE for waaaay too long, and when they finally realised it couldn't cut it, they pivoted to Yotto, which was a terrible Python based build too. When that failed they finally made Mbed Studio which was based on Theia (same as Arduino is now) but by then it was too late.
I think they also lacked an obvious "start with this" board like the Arduino Duo.
I think if they have blessed one of the Neutrino boards (which were incredibly cheap and powerful compared to Arduino) with their branding, and switched to Theia like 5 years earlier they might have had a chance.
Real shame because it really was a far superior software system.
That also means that simple projects are abstracted from the hardware. Means I can go across a dozen different CPU arch and board/pin layouts, and I change nothing in my source. I only change my target and it just works.
I did that when I went from a board operating at 16MHz/atmel to a STmicro running 50MHz. No change in my source. And that's really valuable in rapid prototyping.
Once I settled in on a board and everything, I could do it the "right way" aka the old waterfall-gile embedded approach and get things tweaked and optimized.
But for people getting started, the ability to just plug in an Uno R3 and stack a motor controller shield on it, is pretty attractive. I like the Cytron break out boards for the Picos, but I still think the path from opening the box to working thing is still easiest with Arduino.
Once you know what you're doing, (and maybe that's when you realize you need a debugger), you move on to something else. And with the Pico I can spend the $800 on an O-scope instead of the Segger.
But yeah there's also CircuitPython where you literally drag and drop a firmware blob onto the volume that shows up when plugging in an RP2040 board, and then you're just editing a Python-esque script to do stuff. Not sure what could be easier when it comes to starting with embedded stuff. You can even use the Arduino IDE with RP2040 boards if you like.
https://learn.adafruit.com/getting-started-with-raspberry-pi...
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…
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 debug -- which usually entails stepping through execution, right?
I'm used to just printing debug statements to the Serial.println() function, I learned on the 8051 where the best bet was to toggle different pins when code lines are passed, so even Serial.println() was a huge step up.
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.
The $7 burrito era is long gone unless it's a frozen burrito or someplace that is extremely sus.
I prefer to get things done quickly over cheap.
I have some ESP-based hardware ideas of my own (which include custom PCBs) but the CE certification is prohibitively expensive..
I have actually done embedded engineering in the past and I was being generous with "a day." Skimming a datasheet is a skill and it certainly will not take a day to get the information you need off of it.
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 PCB design side, and, again, this is quite an exaggeration from your side, saying you could do it in a day.
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 starting and every now and then will just refuse to upload the firmware. The other part are libraries, really difficult to setup all the needed libraries for larger code bases.
On that sense, Visual Code with PlatformIO went far beyond. Just open the project there and the libraries are taken care. The connection to boards is more robust. I'm not so sure how to feel with this sale to Qualcomm, it just feels that it is going there to die.
Quite the difference from the early days where Arduino had such energy and the tools would bring almost anyone into microntrollers with such ease.
And the problem I have is that ESP32s aren't much more difficult to set up nowadays, are wildly cheaper, and I'm soso excited to start messing around with ESP-NOW which I don't think Arduino has? But having like 10 ESP32s for messing around freely is more valuable than the cloud thing for me. And there are some super fun projects for ESP32 also like the Cheap Yellow Display thing. I ordered what I thought was one display, except it was 3, and I thought I would have to provide my own ESP32s but nope, they come with them. And these three CYDs were cheaper than a single Arduino it's actually crazy.
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.
Would I have been able to learn assembly with ESP32? Probably not. You couldn't even find proper manuals for ESP8266 back in the day because they either didn't exist, weren't in English or weren't released to the general public...
Sure, to you and me this may seem trivial, you paste the URL into the prefs, but there are people who will get stumped by this and with an Arduino there is one less step you can forget, not know about or do wrong.
As someone who teaches those things at an University level I can assure you that does make a difference for at least 50% of my students if I let them try to do this unguided.
But PlatformIo with VSCode has it and was extremely easy to setup.
And that's like, I think installing VSCode itself can be more scary, so...
Lots of people don't program.
More people don't know how to program than do know how to program.
In that way, just because I can't imagine it being hard, doesn't mean I understand everything there is to understand.
This creates a gap and opportunity for products to make technology more approachable for the majority, instead of the minority (programmers).
Making things accessible to more people instead of less people seems to increasingly be the way.
Besides I don't get this argument considering you're setting up an arduino/esp32 to program/learn to program a microcontroller...
Cathy Woods says we are all programmers now, so this shouldn't be a problem anymore.
I do my certification testing in China by a reputable lab which is much cheaper than doing it here in Switzerland (at least 15k USD). At a minimum expect to spend 1000-2000 USD if all goes well.
There is a workaround for CE but it's a bit of a dirty trick. If you are not expecting to sell very many and your target audience are tinkerers then you can sell your device as a kit. There must be assembly that the end user has to do but they are then the ones "putting the device into the market" and they take on that responsivity of CE. That basically means they can't sell it unless they get a CE. Such an example is https://www.clockworkpi.com/ which sell their products a kits.
And, worst case, they could take it all to IntelliJ or other IDE vendors and quickly spin out an Arduino-branded IDE that isn't raw sewage.
For me, VS code always felt like a "jack of all trades and master of none". C/C++ are strongly typed languages, they aren't different from Java in that regard and yet it is so time consuming to navigate code, see if the syntax is correct and so forth. Really annoying to only know if the code is compiling correctly after pressing the compile button and wait about 30 seconds.
These are things that in the Java world nobody really thinks about because the IDE does a lot of the heavy effort in the background, yet in VS code or C++ it really feels like going back to 2005. For Javascript gets even worse on VS code whenever one is not using NPM. Needs reload the browser to check the console and see if things are working as expected. Good luck trying to find functions somewhere in the codebase without manual text search.
It is not my intention to shade any of those languages nor IDE, I just honestly wish that the IDE for those languages was as powerful as the ones in Java and C#. Arduino had the opportunity to do that since they are tightly committed to C/C++ and control everything on the build process but their goal was always more focused on education level than a more professional development. Let's see if with Qualcomm this is now changing into a tighter IDE+language integration.