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The Untold History of Arduino
- Etheryte 11y agoWow, what a bag of douches.
- mohsinr 11y agoWow thanks for sharing! Why you took so long to write! Glad you finally did!
- reimertz 11y agoHow-to become a douchbag in 10 steps: 1. Be the supervisor for a thesis that will become a open-sourced project 2. Use this open sourced project in one of the classes you teach at University 3. work together with and ask for help from the creator of the open-sourced project 4. see the value of the open-sourced project 5. fork it 6. claim it as yours 7. get rich by selling it 8. write super douchy email to a previous maintainer of the project you forked. "Sorry JC but you had nothing to do.with this…. You can’t possibly try to get credit for.something you hadn’t been involved with" 9. Lie to media ".. In two days, Mellis banged out the code; three days more and the board was complete. .." 10. Tada - you are the biggest scumbag of all times. Man, these guys deserve some shit. Why don't you send him a tweet? https://twitter.com/mbanzi/ https://twitter.com/mbanzi/
- sygma 11y agoStep 8 is inaccurate. JC is not the author of Wiring, he's a faculty member of IDII [0]. Banzi was saying that IDII should not try and get credit for Arduino as they did not help them with the funding (beyond ordering 50 boards). [0]: https://interactionivrea.org/ https://interactionivrea.org/
- pygy_ 11y agoHere's Jan-Christoph Zoels' reply to that message: http://arduinohistory.github.io/images/full/JCEmailThread2.jpg http://arduinohistory.github.io/images/full/JCEmailThread2.j...
- makomk 11y agoThis is part of the reason I just buy the cheapest Arduino-compatible clones possible and laugh at the idea that we should all buy genuine Arduino to support the people who put in the hard work - it's been fairly obvious for a long time that it was a Wiring rip-off through and through. Probably also why the official Arduino ports to non-AVR architectures are so incompetent compared to third-party ones; the AVR port was taken from Wiring and just modified slightly, so no-one there had the skills to write one from scratch.
- huuu 11y agoAgree. I bought a better than Arduino clone for $5. The Chinese even sell cheaper ones but you must have some luck with the soldering.
- Tempest1981 11y agoI also remember needing a non-standard USB driver, for a CH340 -- a bit scary to install: http://0xcf.com/2015/03/13/chinese-arduinos-with-ch340-ch341-serial-usb-chip-on-os-x-yosemite/ http://0xcf.com/2015/03/13/chinese-arduinos-with-ch340-ch341...
- huuu 11y agoOn Windows that is. On Linux they work out of the box.
- god_bless_texas 11y agoI would do that but I'm afraid of the ftdi clones that can get bricked
- thawkins 11y agoMy favorite Peeve about the arduino boards, was the half pin center shift on one of the headers that makes it impossible to just plug in some perfboard with headers on it and make your own shields. Thus opening up the path to selling expensive shield hardware.
- samstave 11y agoAre these the same guys from this arduino documentary? https://vimeo.com/18539129 https://vimeo.com/18539129 EDIT: Yep - the first speaker in that doc is Banzi
- camillomiller 11y agoBanzi might come out as a douche, like Steve Jobs was. At a very very very different level they achieved the same. Would you prefer a world where wiring would still be a pretty niche project badly marketed only available for those in the field or a world where someone much more marketing oriented made Arduino explode and ignite a small but meaningful revolution in the approach to electronics?
- stdbrouw 11y agoThis is a false dichotomy. I would prefer a world in which Banzi worked together with Barragán, which Barragán would have clearly loved and which might have given Arduino an innovator at its helm and the ability to actually keep up with the times, rather than being steamrolled by the Raspberry Pi on one end and by better microcontroller designs like Particle (Spark), Tessel and the MicroPython boards on the other.
- camillomiller 11y agoOf course, you're right, but we don't really know whether that could work. From the way Barragan puts it I don't think he would have liked the path Arduino followed, although he's of course happy about the success, just frustrated by attribution issues. Therefore I think your outcome would have been improbable at least.
- ArduinoGuy 11y agoIf you put two Steve Jobs in a room and ask them to work together, the result isn't always going to be mecha-Jobs, it will just as often be a fight over clashing visions. Open source is great because it lets people pursue those visions. Sometimes it isn't going to work out.
- goldenkey 11y agoStill, super scummy not to be open about ehat arduino really was. And then to make oodles of profit and not even give a gift or some type of consolation? Highly against internet standards for openness.
- imdsm 11y agoI dub this...The Banzi Scheme.
- ArduinoGuy 11y agoWhy open source a project and let other people fork it if you are going to get completely bent out of shape when someone does fork it and build on it? What is the point of open source if that isn't exactly what happens?
- SeanDav 11y agoSince you created this account 17 minutes ago (before this post) you are clearly trying to troll, but in this case I will make an exception and reply to a troll. The Wiring developer is not upset about someone forking the project, but the lack of acknowledgement and deliberate misinformation, even lying by the Arduino developers.
- ArduinoGuy 11y agoWhat I am arguing against is that people shouldn't be using the word "steal" in reference to forking an open source project and building a business on top of it. People do that every day. They aren't expected to walk around giving credit to the originators for everything they do afterwards. Steal is when I take something private, locked down, under patent and use it to profit. Show me what was stolen that wasn't given for free. Arduino did give them credit, they said it originated from Wiring. The other factual details where relatively minor, something that could easily be confused by most people. I love how the voting system in Hacker News is used as a weapon to suppress all dissent. What did I say that was trolling? Creating a new account because I work too near this field.
- ZenoArrow 11y ago> "The other factual details where relatively minor" The team behind Arduino hasn't made its lineage clear enough, that's why this article is newsworthy. I also think it's worth knowing about as it adds a new perspective to the recent legal issues surrounding the rights to Arduino.
- ArduinoGuy 11y agoAlso: Don't DOWNVOTE people because you disagree with them. DISCUSS with them. Downvote me if I am being an asshole. To downvote because you disagree is not the right use of downvote. I actually did read the entire article. Most people seem to be reacting to the title, Arduino clearly attributed Wiring, they didn't just steal it and not say anything: 34. Banzi is the creator of the Programma2003 Development Platform, a precursor of the many ARDUINO-branded products. See: http://sourceforge.net/projects/programma2003/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/programma2003/. Banzi was also the Master’s Thesis advisor of Hernando Barragan whose work would result in the Wiring Development Platform which inspired Arduino. This was probably written by a lawyer and not Massimo himself. Its a legal filing. It says clearly Arduino is inspired directly by Wiring. What else do you wan't from an attribution of credit? Should Massimo get a tattoo that says "Wiring" on it and put it on his forehead?
- Isamu 11y agoThis clears up a lot of mysteries (and some of the drama) surrounding Arduino and Wiring that had puzzled me in the past. A bit late in the game to read this but good to know. Also: not an entirely unusual case. There is always a race for credit for a true success, and it is not always due to real malice (not saying this is the case here.) People have a hard time remembering what came before they were involved, and lack the incentive to find out.
- nickff 11y agoYou are essentially restating the old saying: >"Success has many fathers, while failure is an orphan."
- pat_space 11y agoincredible read. I checked out the author's current work, and it's beautiful: http://barraganstudio.com/ http://barraganstudio.com/
- brandonmenc 11y agoThe real work involved thousands of hours of research, prototyping, testing, and backtracking. The most infuriating part of the story is the usurpers painting themselves as geniuses with the claim that they "banged it out" in a few days.
- dammitcoetzee 11y agoIt makes a lot of sense that they forked the project. If you're selling a hardware product, like hell you're giving someone else administrative command over the code base that you're going to have to pay money to support. The code that your product's five star rating relies on. push request #800020201 "Hey, Hernando, think you can push that update to Wiring now, we're paying quite a lot in support time here. The LEDs aren't blinking since you pushed that update to support EEPROM chips from the 80s" It's the same reason Apple keeps their code to their hardware. I think it's a brillant business move, and anyone thinking of releasing low-level open-source code as a primary component of a hardware project should imitate it. Also, did I miss the part in the article where Wiring and its boards were set up to become a huge success without Arduino's clever marketing and business plan? It seems like it was doomed to have "huge successes", like one class in one university out of thousands. The guy should 100% get more credit, and if this happened to me I would always be a little hurt about it, but at the same time, would it be a big deal if it had never extended past a thesis somewhere? Would it matter if Arduino hadn't been a bunch of really clever people?
- teacup50 11y agoJuniper sells hardware with support demands far beyond that of Arduino, and yet somehow maintains a productive downstream relationship with FreeBSD. It's telling that Arduino is flailing now that they've extracted as much value as they possibly could out of the ideas they stole.
- uxp 11y ago> The guy should 100% get more credit, and if this happened to me I would always be a little hurt about it, but at the same time, would it be a big deal if it had never extended past a thesis somewhere? That's not the argument. He's not upset Arduino was a huge success, nor is he all that upset that he is not involved with Arduino (as far as I can tell from this article, as it's written very professionally). The argument is that there is a rather significant fight between the co-founders of the Arduino project about who owns what of the Arduino brand. This article paints a picture that in reality, the product behind the brand was essentially ripped off of someone else's hard work with very little contributed back to the original project. I don't think anyone wouldn't start to feel rather frustrated if someone forked their open source project, made it hugely successful (while complying with licenses and other conditions, but without directly contributing back) and then started fighting within themselves over who "started the project all on their own".
- justifier 11y agoThe idea that the mere fact that Banzi was my thesis advisor gives him some sort of higher claim to the work done on Wiring, is, to say the least, frustrating to read. i dated an interior design student when at university there was a competition and my so was given second place my so was crushed and honestly thaer entry was far superior.. the ideas were more interesting and applied, and the effort was more pronounced i quipped, 'the best entries always get second place because everyone forgets who got second place.. which makes it easier to steal your ideas' it was meant to console with a bit of humor, but since then i have found the notion poignantly evidenced academia can be a scary place for ideas
- digi_owl 11y agoToss profit into anything, and it can be a scary place.
- officialchicken 11y agoI saw these boards all over pratt.edu in the school of architecture in 2005 and later. It was referred to as "wiring board" at the time - no one called it an Arduino, and I just continued to use my STK501 instead. There were serious issues with the board design and fabrication - the location of the caps were pretty and aligned, but not "smart" for power distribution. Faulty signals, bad timing, and other issues were common with those boards. It was a terrible PCB by any measure (but looked awesome, like 2015 gamer mobos). However the ideas behind "Wiring" and the "Sketch" were really innovative ideas for non-techs designers who mostly wanted to servo-blinky-sensor artsy stuff. And it really did open up embedded development to a whole new semi-technical audience.
- agumonkey 11y agoOne of the saddest thing I read in a long time. Damn me.
- officialchicken 11y agoHave you read the Autodesk File [1]? By a founder and the co-creator of the famous software. I've heard it can't be hosted in the US for legal reasons. [1] https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/autofile.html https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/autofile.html
- 11y ago
- jcoffland 11y agoThe whole Arduino thing has always baffled me a bit. I've been programming 8-bit AVR chips since 2000. There have always been many different development board options. Even long before Wiring and Arduino. Sure many were more expensive but neither Wiring nor Arduino added much technically to the hardware itself. The real innovation of Arduino has always been the Wiring programming system. Personally I prefer the low-level interface the AVR chips provide and document very well in their datasheets. I find it frustrating to have another layer, like wiring, between me and the hardware. As an embedded systems programmer my perspective is different. To me Arduino has always been little more than a really good marketing campaign.
- ssalazar 11y agoEmbedded systems engineers are very intentionally not the audience for Arduino. With Arduino you can go from zero EE/FW experience to blinky LEDs in an evening. This is a powerful tool for opening up hardware hacking to young people, artists, designers, and other non-technical professions. Very few of these people are going to read through a datasheet or figure out the difference between DDRB and PORTB.
- eggy 11y agoI agree, but is it then just the open source of it that drove Arduino over say, the Basic Stamp 1 by Parallax? I believe it was very accessible, affordable, and even the smallest Arduinos today are not much smaller albeit with more chips on them. I was using the Parallax Basic Stamp 1 in 1994, 10 years before he even wrote his thesis. It had a BASIC interpreter on ROM, PBasic, 5V regulator, EEPROM, oscillator, and 16 i/o pins (GPIO nowadays). It wasn't called the Stamp for its size for nothing! I was controlling Christmas Window displays - pneumatics solenoids, motors with relays, and lighting and smoke machines. I used relatively-new capacitive switches on the windows facing the street in NYC, that children could touch and make a Xmas Nutcracker bite and raise a bell in his arm for the Saks and Lord & Taylor Christmas windows. This is why I was not pulled into the whole Arduino thing; I essentially already had it without going all techy and banging bits on self-assembled circuit. All I needed were some interface resistors or relays for the high voltage stuff beyond the output pins 150mA limit. The BS1 had a nice text editor, and you could leave the BS1 connected while programming and re-write the program to see the affect immediately. If anything, no genius needed for Arduino; the tech and very exact model, although, commerical was already there, so indeed history is written and some truths lost in time or washed away. He highlights commands he takes credit for terming like 'digitalWrite'. These all had similar counterparts in PBasic back then (you could define ledA PIN 2, then just write HIGH ledA or TOGGLE ledA)that are in my opinion no more difficult. I was on the Processing forums when they first started, ECHO in NYC, at the time. I am grateful for the internet in bringing these to my doorstep, but sometimes hype, or fashion wins over true technical marvels, and we give accolades to imitation or mediocrity. The true geniuses usually don't seek fame, fortune at first, but only thirst to discover. As I get older I smile when somebody thinks they invented something. The knowledge to build a catapult was "re-discovered" at least twice in history due to communications and wars. Nowadays, the internet ensures you should be able to dig up some precursors to your efforts, and not reinvent something that existed only 10 years before your university education.
- Animats 11y agoIt's really just an Atmel AVR CPU, which you could buy on a development board before Arduino. Atmel has a tool chain for AVR CPUs, which is a version of GCC, so it's open source.[1] I've developed for such boards without any "Arduino" stuff. The Arduino project put a simplified IDE on the front of that. Their real innovation was social. They built a community around the thing and provided documentation that wasn't addressed to EEs. I'm so glad they didn't choose the PIC. [1] http://www.atmel.com/tools/ATMELSTUDIO.aspx http://www.atmel.com/tools/ATMELSTUDIO.aspx
- analog31 11y agoBut doesn't PIC use GCC too? Disclaimer: I'm a long time PIC user, going all the way back to the PIC16C84. Long before anything like Arduino came out, I always found Microchip's documentation to be much easier to crack. Of course, I admit to a certain amount of mental inertia and familiarity with the platform as well.
- cellularmitosis 11y agoDoes it? The whole reason I chose AVR back in the day was the gcc port. http://www.ladyada.net/library/picvsavr.html http://www.ladyada.net/library/picvsavr.html
- neltnerb 11y agoI had to get a proprietary crippled third-party compiler to do anything on a PIC12 in C. The PIC16 at the time at least definitely didn't have GCC support, I recall having to boot Windows to compile my code for it. Pretty sure that's still the case.
- analog31 11y agoAs I understand it, the architecture of the 8-bit PIC chips were not "C friendly," and still use a crippled proprietary compiler. I programmed those beasts in assembly. There were enough other advantages for me, such as EEPROM/Flash program memory and peripherals that I could wrap my head around. The 16- and 32-bit chips are more mainstream, and after using their proprietary compiler for a while, they switched over to GCC. Now from my standpoint, it's still "their" GCC, in that I download and use their tools. And there are some features that you still have to pay for such as optimization. I'm certainly not in love with those aspects, but it's good enough for me to wait it out until something else comes along that's compelling enough for me to switch. Folks have demonstrated building their own GCC toolchain for PIC, but I haven't bothered. Somebody without my mental inertia and legacy projects might make a different choice. My uses aren't critical enough to require considering the smallest, cheapest parts, so I simply avoid the 8-bit chips.
- k1w1 11y agoIt is always interesting to read genesis stories. I was especially surprised as I was reading this story to discover that the first prototype was built using the Javelin Stamp which I created. It is particularly ironic given that the rise in popularity of the Arduino was probably a contributing factor to the waning of interest in the Javelin Stamp. Not to belittle the contributions of Hernando, he did great work. But so often each incremental step in technology is made with the help and inspiration from those who came before. It is the very nature of open source that it will be embraced and expanded. Anyway, I was gratified to see now, that something I worked on 18 years ago would intersect with a such an interesting story, even if only in a tangential way.
- bhagman 11y agoHernando has always held that he didn't make something massively different. All he did was bring together technologies and experience to an area that had a huge gap between entry level users and experts. He has always gone by the quote: "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants" (from Isaac Newton). He fully recognizes that none of the work he did would be possible without the amazing work done by people before him. So, all I have to say is: Thank you! Without people like you, the state of electronics and education in technology wouldn't be where it is today. BTW, the Javelin Stamp, and it's predecessors, were all incredible feats of engineering and science. As well as the Propeller!
- camillomiller 11y agoLOL The wrong thesis that Circuits Today is referring to is my BA thesis from 2013, that was a (much different) thesis on the history of the platform and its application in the field of Arts. That was more of a journalistic oriented thesis and has nothing to do with Hernando's original work. By the way, it's here if anyone's interested but it's not up to date with the latest legal issues and models: http://camillomiller.com/arduino http://camillomiller.com/arduino
- fsloth 11y agoUh, I would not like to work with Banzi. This pattern matches so well with other narcistical leaders I'm unfortunately familiar with.
- watchdogtimer 11y agoThe JAL programming language mentioned in the article (now called JALv2) is still actively developed. The latest version of the compiler was released less than 3 months ago. It's no longer a Windows-only compiler. The standard compiler package includes binaries for OSX and Linux, too. It will even run on ARM if you compile it from source using the appropriate modifiers. JALv2 is has a PASCAL-like syntax that is easy to learn and allows you to write some very elegant code. The JAL libraries (jallib) are incredibly extensive, covering virtually every 8-bit PIC made and every possible peripheral function. Vim supports syntax highlighting for JAL, making it a good text editor to use for writing code. I use Vim on a Raspberry Pi 2 to write and compile my code, then upload it to the PIC using the Pi's GPIO port and Pickle (http://wiki.kewl.org/dokuwiki/projects:pickle http://wiki.kewl.org/dokuwiki/projects:pickle). No external programmer is necessary. I prefer using JAL and one of the USB-capable PICs for my projects instead of an Arduino since I can build the entire project on a breadboard using one chip. I don't need to add a second serial-to-USB converter that's not available in a DIP package, nor require my users to install special serial driver from some unknown third party just to make it work.
- BogusIKnow 11y agoDevelopers undervaluing marketing work. Marketeers undervaluing developers work.
- BogusIKnow 11y agoCreating an open source tool chain then being annoyed (angry?) when the code is being forked.
- bborud 11y agoGenesis stories never match, but there is one thing to learn from many that I have read: if you want a place in the spotlight you have to take it. The value is not created in just making technology, leaning back and expecting the adoring masses to come flooding in the doors. Creating technology is part of the work, but sadly not the part that makes you successful. To be successful you need to get out and about and get in people's faces.