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I work on IoT projects professionally, and we see a large gap between makers-grade hardware and production-quality systems. Every week we talk with startups and

I work on IoT projects professionally, and we see a large gap between makers-grade hardware and production-quality systems. Every week we talk with startups and enterprise customers who start off on something like an Arduino, only to hit a wall because there is no good way to take it to production. IMHO, the market is ripe for a hardware/software platform that bridges the ease of Arduino with a path to production. A bunch of the silicon vendors are in this space, but they offer weak solutions, and things like AWS IoT are really bad on the hardware side.

robertelder 9y ago
I'd be interested to hear more about which specific features of maker-grade hardware are particularly problematic for taking things to production.
- howard941 9y ago
  Provisioning more than one ethernet PHY is an issue. There aren't a lot of choices for two or more PHYs at a reasonable (singe $ digits in medium quantities) cost
- avs733 9y ago
  to what others are mentioning I will add: -stability -recoverability / error handling -quality of construction -documentation -ease of use/support/baked in features
  - dsacco 9y ago
    Can you be a bit more specific, maybe with an example issue?
- ianhowson 9y ago
  * Cost. Maker-grade stuff costs 10-100x what a production embedded does. You're leaving a lot of money on the table. * There's no guarantee of long-term support; RPi and Arduino both regularly change form factors. They make no guarantees that they will continue manufacturing what you're already committed to. * Maker vs. production system architectures are totally different. Linux is rare among production systems. It just needs too much hardware (see Cost). So you have to rebuild the thing anyway when cost-reduction time comes. 'Production' means different things to different people, of course. I'm thinking of a world where you want to ship 10k+ units of a device. If you're only shipping 100 units, your concerns are very different.
  - fhood 9y ago
    Big one for me is shape. A lot of the stuff that I work on has to fit in pressure cases that are already pretty cramped. That means that there is no room for a bunch of breakout boards and whatnot.
  - moolcool 9y ago
    The Arduino itself might cost 10-100x of something that could go into production, but couldn't you prototype with an Arduino and use cheap Atmel chips with the bootloader installed in production?
    - LeifCarrotson 9y ago
      You absolutely could. But many, many startups suck at this step, and get stuck at the "systems integration" phase, able to connect purchased components like Arduinos to other purchased components with wires, but unable to transition to purchasing the raw parts and connecting them using printed circuit boards.
      - pjc50 9y ago
        That seems to me rather basic - like being a software startup but not being able to get beyond "hello world" in node.js. Yes, it's a skill, but surely you hire people or contractors who can actually do it properly?
        nerfhammer 9y ago
        I'm also pretty confused here. Are the "startups" in the ancestor threads more like college hackathon projects? Like I put a raspberry pi in my toaster and know nothing else about embedded systems, now how can I sell a million of these?
        pjc50 9y ago
        Kickstarter! You can easily pre-sell a million of them. Actually shipping them turns out to be harder, but by that time you've got the money.
- pjc50 9y ago
  I'm a little confused here too; obviously an arduino-inna-box is not a proper solution and for production run you should design your own board with an Atmega328 on it, so what's unsuitable about the Atmega?
ccozan 9y ago
Indeed, there are a few companies that can help you with this[0][1], even bigger ones like TI. It is somewhat expected that you are driving this, though. There are plenty of resources on the internet about every step to production. [0] https://www.baldengineer.com/arduino-prototype-into-product.html https://www.baldengineer.com/arduino-prototype-into-product.... [1] https://www.postscapes.com/forum/arduino/47-if-arduino-is-for-prototyping-how/when-do-you-make-the-actual-product/ https://www.postscapes.com/forum/arduino/47-if-arduino-is-fo...
petra 9y ago
Which competitor is the closest to that platform? the mbed ?
csours 9y ago
When you say IoT professionally, do you mean PLC based solutions? or something like Arduino and Pi?
_chap 9y ago
I've been really impressed with Particle easing that transition from Arduino to production: https://www.particle.io/ https://www.particle.io/
awjr 9y ago
Unsure if you've seen Samsung's Artik platform. I think this is what you are looking for https://www.artik.io/ https://www.artik.io/ I was working in this space, but never got on to their beta program.
- euyyn 9y ago
  Yeah I think system-on-modules are the way to go. It's what we promote on Android Things too.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
euyyn 9y ago
Android Things promotes the SoM approach to bridge that gap: https://youtu.be/sjpNek_7z-I?t=18m18s https://youtu.be/sjpNek_7z-I?t=18m18s (further explained here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6Q8MCyuIks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6Q8MCyuIks ). Disclosure: I work on Android Things.
- iqster 9y ago
  Thank you for the links. I work in this space professionally. I had heard about Brillo and Android Things a while back (there was very little info back then). Looks like there is a lot more good info now. Will delve into it. By the way, if you are in Mountain View and want to grab coffee, please reach out (email in HN profile).
  - euyyn 9y ago
    I got your email bounced :)
    - iqster 9y ago
      My captcha was too obtuse ;-) Please check the email again.
- anujdeshpande 9y ago
  I am very curious to see how this pans out - I badly want something like this to succeed. It will be so much more better for someone like me who works in this domain. Google has the weight to pull this off- and it looks like the SoM approach might be the right way forward (Particle, Electric Imp are good examples of managed hardware+software) Having said that, there's a bigger market for micro controllers imo - which probably doesn't fit in to this strategy at all. There used to be Weave (RIP- which also makes one cautious about Android Things) - and there's Zephyr (kinda similar, but not really) - but no clear winners here yet.
slackingoff2017 9y ago
IMO, the biggest problem is software startups unwillingness to hire other types of engineers. It's easy to bridge from Arduino to Atmel AVR IF you know how to do board layout. Startups need to either grow their knowledge of electronics or hire some electrical engineers. The AVR documentation is excellent, you could easily design your own board if you have anything beyond rudimentary electronics skills. A lot of IoT startups are dependent on attachment "blades" for interfaces. They get burned because a lot of their value proposition and profit is tied up in some other guy's blade they don't know how to build.
- euyyn 9y ago
  Unwillingness to hire is related to cost, which is a supply/demand thing. There's many more software engineers around. Layout of high-frequency electronics has many gotchas, and for devices with wireless communication you need to get your design certified too. Getting high-volume discounts as a startup is also hard. I think system-on-module approaches like Samsung's or Android Things' solve those problems, though.
  - anonymousDan 9y ago
    I really don't get the point of Android things. Looking at their website the most constrained device they support is on the order of a raspberry pi. Why wouldn't you just go with Linux/Raspbian in that scenario instead of locking yourself into Google?
    - euyyn 9y ago
      There are many factors. To start, many companies were already choosing to run a fork of Android in their products, like the Amazon Echo. This gives you access to Android's APIs, developer tools, and knowledge base, which is a significant boost in productivity. By using Android Things specifically, you also get hassle-free OTA updates directly from Google, which is essential for security. Raspbian is pretty much only supported on Raspberry Pis, so I think the worry of lock-in is worse there; and it's significant, taking into account that it's harder to go from prototype to production with a Raspberry Pi than with a SoM-based board. The UserDriver system is another factor: Android already does sensor fusion, so if your product uses, say, a GPS receiver, you can hook it up to the OS with a short amount of user-space Java code, and all existing Android code that uses the location APIs now works with your GPS. No need to modify client code nor compile anything into the OS. And your UserDriver works on any Android Things system. The talks of this year's Google I/O explain these kind of things in more detail.
beambot 9y ago
Take a look at Samsung's Artik platform: https://www.artik.io https://www.artik.io I believe these are now available on digikey: https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/s/samsung-led/artik-5-module https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/s/samsung-led/a...
eagletusk 9y ago
I have worked professionally in this space. IMHO I can't imagine a technology that is closer to production that the Arduino, it gets you 90% and more importantly instills the limits of the technology before it goes to a electronic prototype house. Prototypes are easy. Production is hard. This is the current issue with the Tesla Model 3, a few is easy, a full production line with all it's perils that's a massively harder proposition. and there is always the Pit of Despair: https://www.sparkfun.com/news/909 https://www.sparkfun.com/news/909
- paulgerhardt 9y ago
  Many years ago we worked on releasing an Arduino compatible design. To do so we had to: 1) Release the board files - fine. 2) Open source the code - ok. 3) Pay the foundation 20% of our retail profit - ~record scratch~ - not going to happen. There is not enough margin in retail to justify asking for a $40 license per chip for a $5 hardware part. The Arduino compatible initiative was dropped and we built on bare metal instead. Other Maker boards have some leverage here (Raspberry Pi, Next Thing Co, Electric Imp) because they have control of an exclusive chip supply. Arduino being a clone of the Wiring SDK + an off the shelf chip on a break out board never got to exercise their position effectively in the enterprise / mass market consumer electronics space. Analogously the Apple ][ started as a development platform for hobbyists that became the business workhorse with VisiCalc. Arduino never left the hobbyist space and scared off a lot of legitimately interested businesses with the ambiguous licensing terms and Genuino debacle.
  - Animats 9y ago
    The previous poster's point is that if you can cram your problem into the limited resources of an Arduino, with its small ATMega CPU and very limited memory, it's not a big jump to a custom board for your low-cost product. Anyone can buy an ATMEGA328 CPU, the low-end Arduino processor. $1.78 from DigiKey; $1.27 at Seeed. No royalties.
    - paulgerhardt 9y ago
      Sure, getting your program to run on an Arduino is 90% of the work. Getting it from Arduino to production is the other 90%.
feedjoelpie 9y ago
Isn't this more of a lack-of-education problem? There are plenty of maker-grade boards out there that are easier to turn into manufactured product. Arduino is particularly bad and almost an outlier.
bschwindHN 9y ago
Do you have any opinion on the ESP32 and how "production ready" it is? What would be an example of makers-grade hardware vs a production-quality system?
- pjmlp 9y ago
  An ESP32 has enough CPU juice like an Amiga 500 or PCW 1512 (minus graphics), with network capabilities, so personally I think it is well suited for lots of tasks, given how we used them back in the day.
komali2 9y ago
This is literally the exact niche solution that attracted me to my current company (Electric Imp). I'm still fairly new, but generally the pitch is it's easy to get started, and easy to scale to whatever level you need to, theoretically up to millions of devices for a single product (certainly that many across the spread of customers). Edit: since everyone else is promoting the competitors ;) : https://electricimp.com https://electricimp.com A shame this post didn't come up in ~2 weeks, we're about to massively update our docs, API, and frontend IDE environment.
- lend000 9y ago
  I used Electric Imp in college for an electronics project -- glad to hear it's still kicking! It was a great platform, minus the custom Squirrel language (a Python or Lua library would be more familiar to most people).
  - komali2 9y ago
    Hah, that's exactly what I brought up in the interview - why squirrel? I've talked to our CEO and the original core team about this a couple times. In their minds LUA, while 7 years ago was more widely adopted, was also less well supported and more volatile than squirrel. Squirrel got the job done, was pretty straightforward, and was small to get going. And, once the decision was made and customers were already compiling it onto live projects.... Well, at least there haven't been growing pains as a result, it still gets the job done and we have metric tons of libraries for it. Also the files end in .nut which is incredible. Edit: to note, it's not exactly squirrel, we made some changes: https://electricimp.com/docs/squirrel/learningsquirrel/ https://electricimp.com/docs/squirrel/learningsquirrel/
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      I like the idea of a type safe programming language for IoT.
    - krylon 9y ago
      > Also the files end in .nut which is incredible. Mmmh, that is probably the funniest file extension I have come across to this day. Awesome!
sly010 9y ago
We can put abstraction upon abstraction in software, because it's weightless. We have containers and platforms that make it very easy for a hobbyist to create something production quality. It's not so easy with hardware. If you don't understand your stack fully, things can get bulky and expensive fast. I don't know if there really is a good solution here. The only thing that exists today is a white glove services. If you have enough money, there are plenty of engineering firms that will take your prototype and build you a production version.
- Animats 9y ago
  There's SEEED Studio, in Shenzhen. They make PCB boards and assemble them. If you design using only parts in their Open Parts Library [1], they offer quite fast turnaround. They have ARM and ATMega CPU parts. They can also source from DigiKey and Mouser. They have a Design for Manufacturing manual, with lots of information on tolerances.[2] They'll hand-build one-off prototypes for you. Upload your Gerbers and BOM, and they'll give you a quick quote. Of course, all this assumes you can design a working board. It's not inherently difficult, but there's a considerable learning curve. There are lots of online resources. For board design, there are lots of packages. I use KiCAD, which is open source, but Eagle is probably more suitable for pro work. (KiCAD is a good package, but the component footprint libraries are not that complete and may be somewhat off.) (I've used them for blank boards. They do a nice job, but it's not super-fast. All their boards have been good, although once, by mistake, I got boards intended for someone in Japan, and they got my boards. Seeed re-made the boards and shipped again.) [1] https://www.seeedstudio.com/opl.html https://www.seeedstudio.com/opl.html [2] https://statics3.seeedstudio.com/fusion/ebook/PCB+DFM+V1.0+.pdf https://statics3.seeedstudio.com/fusion/ebook/PCB+DFM+V1.0+....
  - SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago
    For one-off boards bigger than a few square inches I like 4PCB.com. $33+shipping for a 2-layer board, 5 day turnaround, up to 60 square inches for the fixed price. Minimum quantity 1. For contrast Seeed charges $4.90/sq inch for 2-layer and 5-day turn, minimum quantity 5. $66 for their 4-layer boards, though "only" 30 square inches. And they have a 1-day turnaround bare-bones prototyping service: those boards have no solder mask, but they credit the price of the bare-bones boards to your production order, so it ends up being a fast PCB prototyping service that only costs shipping). They're in the US too, so shipping is faster than the Chinese companies.
joezydeco 9y ago
There are some companies out there trying this, but then you're locked into a single hardware solution for your gateway. That tends to meet with a lot of resistance.
Dwolb 9y ago
Pretty interesting perspective - maybe check out the Hologram Dash which is programmed with the Arduino IDE + has full compatibility with Arduino functions. It includes a cell modem as well: https://hologram.io/dash/ https://hologram.io/dash/
fiveguys94 9y ago
You should probably look at our stuff - electricimp.com There are over a million commercial devices on our platform, which is essentially a mass production platform that's excessively well documented, tested, scalable, and free to prototype with. Been in the market for 5 years now. Critically, we take security very seriously and maintain the security stack on every device for its lifetime - whether or not the product owner has cycles to spend on security, we keep it up to date. We're also the first and currently only platform which has been UL2900-2-2 certified - yes an arbitrary standard but it's all sensible stuff. It doesn't look like an Arduino, but that architecture is not well suited to IoT in our collective opinions, and individual customers with hundreds of thousands of devices on our platform agree. A silicon vendor's interest generally dies off once they have a design win...
dividuum 9y ago
What's wrong with something like the Raspberry Pi? I'm working with it professionally (see my profile) and am very successful at using it in "production". Right now I don't have the need to build a custom board but if I should ever decide to take that path, there's the compute module which was designed for that. It is successfully used by NEC and at least one other display vendor that have a dedicated compute module slot. Also the Pi is still backwards compatible with even the first released Pi. Unlike other platform it's slow moving and you have some guarantee that your investment isn't wasted once some new shiny "board of the week" appears.
- wiremine 9y ago
  Depends on what the definition of production is. Sourcing all the components for 10,000 units and building a reasonable BOM that business will accept is a typical type of production I see... not something that you can do with a Pi.
- ianhowson 9y ago
  OK, I'll bite: "What's wrong with RPi?" * Expensive * Physically large * Sucks power like crazy * Slow * Hardware is unreliable and inconsistent * Constant hardware availability issues * Form factor changes on every release * CPU changes on every release * I/O is adequate if you're building a PC replacement. It doesn't have the right sort of I/O for embedded tasks (multiple SPI buses, multiple serial buses and so on). The RPi is a fine learning tool, but don't treat it as production-ready. I strongly recommend the BeagleBone Black instead.
  - dividuum 9y ago
    Thanks for your feedback. > Hardware is unreliable and inconsistent That's not true from my experience. I'm running a digital signage service based on the Pi. So far all devices are very reliable. Of course that depends on other factors such as SD card or power supply. If you don't try to save money on those, Pis run for many years without a single problem. > CPU changes on every release Some chipset revision changed (I would have to look up details), but they are all more or less compatible if you don't go too low level. I have no problem running the same build of my software on all Pi revisions. Of course you can benefit from NEON or multiple threads on later versions, but that's all optional.
jasonlaramburu 9y ago
Totally agree. For a wifi device, the best options to bring the "ease of Arduino" into production are particle or electric imp. Great products but high cost, especially for startups.
AceJohnny2 9y ago
Have you looked at mBed stuff? From what I've tried and their marketing, it looks like the wide variety of chips in the ecosystem offer the required spectrum for production. https://www.mbed.com/en/ https://www.mbed.com/en/
rocky1138 9y ago
Can you elaborate why the Ardunio is not production-ready? Asking as a complete layman.
logicallee 9y ago
Please expand on your thoughts and include more details! your comment is very packed, and your replies are even briefer.
synicalx 9y ago
Does anyone use Arduino in production though? I always got the impression that it was more of a toy/home-user kind of thing?

robertelder 9y ago

I'd be interested to hear more about which specific features of maker-grade hardware are particularly problematic for taking things to production.

howard941 9y ago
Provisioning more than one ethernet PHY is an issue. There aren't a lot of choices for two or more PHYs at a reasonable (singe $ digits in medium quantities) cost
avs733 9y ago
to what others are mentioning I will add: -stability -recoverability / error handling -quality of construction -documentation -ease of use/support/baked in features
- dsacco 9y ago
  Can you be a bit more specific, maybe with an example issue?
ianhowson 9y ago
* Cost. Maker-grade stuff costs 10-100x what a production embedded does. You're leaving a lot of money on the table. * There's no guarantee of long-term support; RPi and Arduino both regularly change form factors. They make no guarantees that they will continue manufacturing what you're already committed to. * Maker vs. production system architectures are totally different. Linux is rare among production systems. It just needs too much hardware (see Cost). So you have to rebuild the thing anyway when cost-reduction time comes. 'Production' means different things to different people, of course. I'm thinking of a world where you want to ship 10k+ units of a device. If you're only shipping 100 units, your concerns are very different.
- fhood 9y ago
  Big one for me is shape. A lot of the stuff that I work on has to fit in pressure cases that are already pretty cramped. That means that there is no room for a bunch of breakout boards and whatnot.
- moolcool 9y ago
  The Arduino itself might cost 10-100x of something that could go into production, but couldn't you prototype with an Arduino and use cheap Atmel chips with the bootloader installed in production?
  - LeifCarrotson 9y ago
    You absolutely could. But many, many startups suck at this step, and get stuck at the "systems integration" phase, able to connect purchased components like Arduinos to other purchased components with wires, but unable to transition to purchasing the raw parts and connecting them using printed circuit boards.
    - pjc50 9y ago
      That seems to me rather basic - like being a software startup but not being able to get beyond "hello world" in node.js. Yes, it's a skill, but surely you hire people or contractors who can actually do it properly?
      - nerfhammer 9y ago
        I'm also pretty confused here. Are the "startups" in the ancestor threads more like college hackathon projects? Like I put a raspberry pi in my toaster and know nothing else about embedded systems, now how can I sell a million of these?
        pjc50 9y ago
        Kickstarter! You can easily pre-sell a million of them. Actually shipping them turns out to be harder, but by that time you've got the money.
pjc50 9y ago
I'm a little confused here too; obviously an arduino-inna-box is not a proper solution and for production run you should design your own board with an Atmega328 on it, so what's unsuitable about the Atmega?

ccozan 9y ago

Indeed, there are a few companies that can help you with this[0][1], even bigger ones like TI. It is somewhat expected that you are driving this, though. There are plenty of resources on the internet about every step to production. [0] https://www.baldengineer.com/arduino-prototype-into-product.html https://www.baldengineer.com/arduino-prototype-into-product.... [1] https://www.postscapes.com/forum/arduino/47-if-arduino-is-for-prototyping-how/when-do-you-make-the-actual-product/ https://www.postscapes.com/forum/arduino/47-if-arduino-is-fo...

petra 9y ago

Which competitor is the closest to that platform? the mbed ?

csours 9y ago

When you say IoT professionally, do you mean PLC based solutions? or something like Arduino and Pi?

_chap 9y ago

I've been really impressed with Particle easing that transition from Arduino to production: https://www.particle.io/ https://www.particle.io/

awjr 9y ago

Unsure if you've seen Samsung's Artik platform. I think this is what you are looking for https://www.artik.io/ https://www.artik.io/ I was working in this space, but never got on to their beta program.

euyyn 9y ago
Yeah I think system-on-modules are the way to go. It's what we promote on Android Things too.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

euyyn 9y ago

Android Things promotes the SoM approach to bridge that gap: https://youtu.be/sjpNek_7z-I?t=18m18s https://youtu.be/sjpNek_7z-I?t=18m18s (further explained here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6Q8MCyuIks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6Q8MCyuIks ). Disclosure: I work on Android Things.

iqster 9y ago
Thank you for the links. I work in this space professionally. I had heard about Brillo and Android Things a while back (there was very little info back then). Looks like there is a lot more good info now. Will delve into it. By the way, if you are in Mountain View and want to grab coffee, please reach out (email in HN profile).
- euyyn 9y ago
  I got your email bounced :)
  - iqster 9y ago
    My captcha was too obtuse ;-) Please check the email again.
anujdeshpande 9y ago
I am very curious to see how this pans out - I badly want something like this to succeed. It will be so much more better for someone like me who works in this domain. Google has the weight to pull this off- and it looks like the SoM approach might be the right way forward (Particle, Electric Imp are good examples of managed hardware+software) Having said that, there's a bigger market for micro controllers imo - which probably doesn't fit in to this strategy at all. There used to be Weave (RIP- which also makes one cautious about Android Things) - and there's Zephyr (kinda similar, but not really) - but no clear winners here yet.

slackingoff2017 9y ago

IMO, the biggest problem is software startups unwillingness to hire other types of engineers. It's easy to bridge from Arduino to Atmel AVR IF you know how to do board layout. Startups need to either grow their knowledge of electronics or hire some electrical engineers. The AVR documentation is excellent, you could easily design your own board if you have anything beyond rudimentary electronics skills. A lot of IoT startups are dependent on attachment "blades" for interfaces. They get burned because a lot of their value proposition and profit is tied up in some other guy's blade they don't know how to build.

euyyn 9y ago
Unwillingness to hire is related to cost, which is a supply/demand thing. There's many more software engineers around. Layout of high-frequency electronics has many gotchas, and for devices with wireless communication you need to get your design certified too. Getting high-volume discounts as a startup is also hard. I think system-on-module approaches like Samsung's or Android Things' solve those problems, though.
- anonymousDan 9y ago
  I really don't get the point of Android things. Looking at their website the most constrained device they support is on the order of a raspberry pi. Why wouldn't you just go with Linux/Raspbian in that scenario instead of locking yourself into Google?
  - euyyn 9y ago
    There are many factors. To start, many companies were already choosing to run a fork of Android in their products, like the Amazon Echo. This gives you access to Android's APIs, developer tools, and knowledge base, which is a significant boost in productivity. By using Android Things specifically, you also get hassle-free OTA updates directly from Google, which is essential for security. Raspbian is pretty much only supported on Raspberry Pis, so I think the worry of lock-in is worse there; and it's significant, taking into account that it's harder to go from prototype to production with a Raspberry Pi than with a SoM-based board. The UserDriver system is another factor: Android already does sensor fusion, so if your product uses, say, a GPS receiver, you can hook it up to the OS with a short amount of user-space Java code, and all existing Android code that uses the location APIs now works with your GPS. No need to modify client code nor compile anything into the OS. And your UserDriver works on any Android Things system. The talks of this year's Google I/O explain these kind of things in more detail.

beambot 9y ago

Take a look at Samsung's Artik platform: https://www.artik.io https://www.artik.io I believe these are now available on digikey: https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/s/samsung-led/artik-5-module https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/s/samsung-led/a...

eagletusk 9y ago

I have worked professionally in this space. IMHO I can't imagine a technology that is closer to production that the Arduino, it gets you 90% and more importantly instills the limits of the technology before it goes to a electronic prototype house. Prototypes are easy. Production is hard. This is the current issue with the Tesla Model 3, a few is easy, a full production line with all it's perils that's a massively harder proposition. and there is always the Pit of Despair: https://www.sparkfun.com/news/909 https://www.sparkfun.com/news/909

paulgerhardt 9y ago
Many years ago we worked on releasing an Arduino compatible design. To do so we had to: 1) Release the board files - fine. 2) Open source the code - ok. 3) Pay the foundation 20% of our retail profit - ~record scratch~ - not going to happen. There is not enough margin in retail to justify asking for a $40 license per chip for a $5 hardware part. The Arduino compatible initiative was dropped and we built on bare metal instead. Other Maker boards have some leverage here (Raspberry Pi, Next Thing Co, Electric Imp) because they have control of an exclusive chip supply. Arduino being a clone of the Wiring SDK + an off the shelf chip on a break out board never got to exercise their position effectively in the enterprise / mass market consumer electronics space. Analogously the Apple ][ started as a development platform for hobbyists that became the business workhorse with VisiCalc. Arduino never left the hobbyist space and scared off a lot of legitimately interested businesses with the ambiguous licensing terms and Genuino debacle.
- Animats 9y ago
  The previous poster's point is that if you can cram your problem into the limited resources of an Arduino, with its small ATMega CPU and very limited memory, it's not a big jump to a custom board for your low-cost product. Anyone can buy an ATMEGA328 CPU, the low-end Arduino processor. $1.78 from DigiKey; $1.27 at Seeed. No royalties.
  - paulgerhardt 9y ago
    Sure, getting your program to run on an Arduino is 90% of the work. Getting it from Arduino to production is the other 90%.

feedjoelpie 9y ago

Isn't this more of a lack-of-education problem? There are plenty of maker-grade boards out there that are easier to turn into manufactured product. Arduino is particularly bad and almost an outlier.

bschwindHN 9y ago

Do you have any opinion on the ESP32 and how "production ready" it is? What would be an example of makers-grade hardware vs a production-quality system?

pjmlp 9y ago
An ESP32 has enough CPU juice like an Amiga 500 or PCW 1512 (minus graphics), with network capabilities, so personally I think it is well suited for lots of tasks, given how we used them back in the day.

komali2 9y ago

This is literally the exact niche solution that attracted me to my current company (Electric Imp). I'm still fairly new, but generally the pitch is it's easy to get started, and easy to scale to whatever level you need to, theoretically up to millions of devices for a single product (certainly that many across the spread of customers). Edit: since everyone else is promoting the competitors ;) : https://electricimp.com https://electricimp.com A shame this post didn't come up in ~2 weeks, we're about to massively update our docs, API, and frontend IDE environment.

lend000 9y ago
I used Electric Imp in college for an electronics project -- glad to hear it's still kicking! It was a great platform, minus the custom Squirrel language (a Python or Lua library would be more familiar to most people).
- komali2 9y ago
  Hah, that's exactly what I brought up in the interview - why squirrel? I've talked to our CEO and the original core team about this a couple times. In their minds LUA, while 7 years ago was more widely adopted, was also less well supported and more volatile than squirrel. Squirrel got the job done, was pretty straightforward, and was small to get going. And, once the decision was made and customers were already compiling it onto live projects.... Well, at least there haven't been growing pains as a result, it still gets the job done and we have metric tons of libraries for it. Also the files end in .nut which is incredible. Edit: to note, it's not exactly squirrel, we made some changes: https://electricimp.com/docs/squirrel/learningsquirrel/ https://electricimp.com/docs/squirrel/learningsquirrel/
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    I like the idea of a type safe programming language for IoT.
  - krylon 9y ago
    > Also the files end in .nut which is incredible. Mmmh, that is probably the funniest file extension I have come across to this day. Awesome!

sly010 9y ago

We can put abstraction upon abstraction in software, because it's weightless. We have containers and platforms that make it very easy for a hobbyist to create something production quality. It's not so easy with hardware. If you don't understand your stack fully, things can get bulky and expensive fast. I don't know if there really is a good solution here. The only thing that exists today is a white glove services. If you have enough money, there are plenty of engineering firms that will take your prototype and build you a production version.

Animats 9y ago
There's SEEED Studio, in Shenzhen. They make PCB boards and assemble them. If you design using only parts in their Open Parts Library [1], they offer quite fast turnaround. They have ARM and ATMega CPU parts. They can also source from DigiKey and Mouser. They have a Design for Manufacturing manual, with lots of information on tolerances.[2] They'll hand-build one-off prototypes for you. Upload your Gerbers and BOM, and they'll give you a quick quote. Of course, all this assumes you can design a working board. It's not inherently difficult, but there's a considerable learning curve. There are lots of online resources. For board design, there are lots of packages. I use KiCAD, which is open source, but Eagle is probably more suitable for pro work. (KiCAD is a good package, but the component footprint libraries are not that complete and may be somewhat off.) (I've used them for blank boards. They do a nice job, but it's not super-fast. All their boards have been good, although once, by mistake, I got boards intended for someone in Japan, and they got my boards. Seeed re-made the boards and shipped again.) [1] https://www.seeedstudio.com/opl.html https://www.seeedstudio.com/opl.html [2] https://statics3.seeedstudio.com/fusion/ebook/PCB+DFM+V1.0+.pdf https://statics3.seeedstudio.com/fusion/ebook/PCB+DFM+V1.0+....
- SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago
  For one-off boards bigger than a few square inches I like 4PCB.com. $33+shipping for a 2-layer board, 5 day turnaround, up to 60 square inches for the fixed price. Minimum quantity 1. For contrast Seeed charges $4.90/sq inch for 2-layer and 5-day turn, minimum quantity 5. $66 for their 4-layer boards, though "only" 30 square inches. And they have a 1-day turnaround bare-bones prototyping service: those boards have no solder mask, but they credit the price of the bare-bones boards to your production order, so it ends up being a fast PCB prototyping service that only costs shipping). They're in the US too, so shipping is faster than the Chinese companies.

joezydeco 9y ago

There are some companies out there trying this, but then you're locked into a single hardware solution for your gateway. That tends to meet with a lot of resistance.

Dwolb 9y ago

Pretty interesting perspective - maybe check out the Hologram Dash which is programmed with the Arduino IDE + has full compatibility with Arduino functions. It includes a cell modem as well: https://hologram.io/dash/ https://hologram.io/dash/

fiveguys94 9y ago

You should probably look at our stuff - electricimp.com There are over a million commercial devices on our platform, which is essentially a mass production platform that's excessively well documented, tested, scalable, and free to prototype with. Been in the market for 5 years now. Critically, we take security very seriously and maintain the security stack on every device for its lifetime - whether or not the product owner has cycles to spend on security, we keep it up to date. We're also the first and currently only platform which has been UL2900-2-2 certified - yes an arbitrary standard but it's all sensible stuff. It doesn't look like an Arduino, but that architecture is not well suited to IoT in our collective opinions, and individual customers with hundreds of thousands of devices on our platform agree. A silicon vendor's interest generally dies off once they have a design win...

dividuum 9y ago

What's wrong with something like the Raspberry Pi? I'm working with it professionally (see my profile) and am very successful at using it in "production". Right now I don't have the need to build a custom board but if I should ever decide to take that path, there's the compute module which was designed for that. It is successfully used by NEC and at least one other display vendor that have a dedicated compute module slot. Also the Pi is still backwards compatible with even the first released Pi. Unlike other platform it's slow moving and you have some guarantee that your investment isn't wasted once some new shiny "board of the week" appears.

wiremine 9y ago
Depends on what the definition of production is. Sourcing all the components for 10,000 units and building a reasonable BOM that business will accept is a typical type of production I see... not something that you can do with a Pi.
ianhowson 9y ago
OK, I'll bite: "What's wrong with RPi?" * Expensive * Physically large * Sucks power like crazy * Slow * Hardware is unreliable and inconsistent * Constant hardware availability issues * Form factor changes on every release * CPU changes on every release * I/O is adequate if you're building a PC replacement. It doesn't have the right sort of I/O for embedded tasks (multiple SPI buses, multiple serial buses and so on). The RPi is a fine learning tool, but don't treat it as production-ready. I strongly recommend the BeagleBone Black instead.
- dividuum 9y ago
  Thanks for your feedback. > Hardware is unreliable and inconsistent That's not true from my experience. I'm running a digital signage service based on the Pi. So far all devices are very reliable. Of course that depends on other factors such as SD card or power supply. If you don't try to save money on those, Pis run for many years without a single problem. > CPU changes on every release Some chipset revision changed (I would have to look up details), but they are all more or less compatible if you don't go too low level. I have no problem running the same build of my software on all Pi revisions. Of course you can benefit from NEON or multiple threads on later versions, but that's all optional.

jasonlaramburu 9y ago

Totally agree. For a wifi device, the best options to bring the "ease of Arduino" into production are particle or electric imp. Great products but high cost, especially for startups.

AceJohnny2 9y ago

Have you looked at mBed stuff? From what I've tried and their marketing, it looks like the wide variety of chips in the ecosystem offer the required spectrum for production. https://www.mbed.com/en/ https://www.mbed.com/en/

rocky1138 9y ago

Can you elaborate why the Ardunio is not production-ready? Asking as a complete layman.

logicallee 9y ago

Please expand on your thoughts and include more details! your comment is very packed, and your replies are even briefer.

synicalx 9y ago

Does anyone use Arduino in production though? I always got the impression that it was more of a toy/home-user kind of thing?