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The most relevant part for me is this cherry picked line from the article: ... Consequently, the megaAVR remains the most open-source 8-bit microco

The most relevant part for me is this cherry picked line from the article: ... Consequently, the megaAVR remains the most open-source 8-bit microcontroller on the market — by a long shot. ... Even though the Atmel AVRs aren't the fastest, or cheapest (in cost per unit) or the toolchain isn't the easiest to use or the debugging capabilities aren't as good, the fact that it's open-source makes it win, hands down. There's a reason why nearly every hobby electronics project you see has an Arduino in it. Assuming the Arduino IDE is installed and permissions issues have been resolved, you can go from unboxing your Arduino to making it blink in under 60 seconds. In addition, places like Adafruit [1] and Sparkfun [2] build their own boards and make most of their code free/libre/open-source [3] [4], with a large focus on Arduino. It'll be interesting to see how the electronics market evolves when the current and subsequent generations are trained on AVRs. [1] https://www.adafruit.com/ https://www.adafruit.com/ [2] https://www.sparkfun.com/ https://www.sparkfun.com/ [3] https://github.com/adafruit https://github.com/adafruit [4] https://github.com/sparkfun https://github.com/sparkfun

fermienrico 9y ago
ESP8266 and ESP32 trumps AVR in every respect, including their openness.
- tomcam 9y ago
  They don’t meet the explicitly stated $1 goal
  - fermienrico 9y ago
    Understand and I am very well aware having purchased over 20k ESP32 MCUs. However, the parent comment that I responded to is talking about opensource aspects and community of AVR microcontroller to which I responded that Espressif is not only cost competitive, but it beats AVR in every aspect (perhaps you can say it's not as mature of an ecosystem).
radix07 9y ago
Open source hardware in the microcontroller world isn't quite as big of a deal as it is in the software world. While it would be great to see the processor architecture and all, I would much rather have an ARM that I know works and won't have to look at. I believe modern Arduinos are going to Cortex processors which are ARM as well, so I don't think the open source claim is what keeps Arduino hardware going. It is most likely going to be ease of use, accessibility, community and the tools.
- abetusk 9y ago
  I agree that open source hardware isn't as big of a deal (yet?) as open source software but the open source that we're talking about here is mostly software in the form of Arduino libraries to drive modules and other chips. I think the major point is that "ease of use, accessibility, community and the tools" are exactly where the open source software model thrives over a walled garden one. It's not impossible to do this with proprietary software but for the open source projects that are successful, they tend to be successful because the freedom they offer encourages each of those points (imo).
  - radix07 9y ago
    I would love to see open source hardware take off at that level! You do see plenty of projects at the PCB level, which is nice and likely as far as most people will ever need to go. The price point of a small custom PCB is actually very reasonable now and usually easier to buy than rolling your own anymore. But until you can spin your own silicon with the ease of something like a 3D printer or buy custom low cost/quantity silicon, it doesn't matter what your open source HW design does if you don't have the money or a business to create and distribute it. That's one thing that is very hard to do with something physical and why opensource has worked so well in the software community. There does seem to be some stuff being done here using FPGAs... But they are still a rather expensive way to go just to drop a custom architecture on for now. In the meantime, there is still plenty of software work to do to make a truly useful and professional grade opensouce stack that you can develop on the chips we have.
gh02t 9y ago
It's important to note the rest of that portion though. But even as popular as Atmel is among hobbyists, Atmel has largely stayed out of this space directly. Instead, they’ve secured small-volume AVR sales by relying on the open- source community to build their own tools for themselves: turning out a slew of hardware and software used to program the megaAVR devices. While I applaud the efforts of these developers, these tools are inferior to Atmel’s. Their programming speeds are terrible, they don’t support the new tinyAVR 1-Series devices, and they have absolutely no debug capability. Atmel has deliberately enabled the open source toolchains for its MCUs but it largely keeps out of it directly.
- Stratoscope 9y ago
  Mobile-friendly copy of the parent's quote: > Consequently, the megaAVR remains the most open-source 8-bit microcontroller on the market — by a long shot. and your quote: > But even as popular as Atmel is among hobbyists, Atmel has largely stayed out of this space directly. Instead, they’ve secured small-volume AVR sales by relying on the open-source community to build their own tools for themselves: turning out a slew of hardware and software used to program the megaAVR devices. > While I applaud the efforts of these developers, these tools are inferior to Atmel’s. Their programming speeds are terrible, they don’t support the new tinyAVR 1-Series devices, and they have absolutely no debug capability. Don't use leading spaces to quote text, that's for unformatted text. Do this instead: > *Text.*
hexane360 9y ago
This is why I'm so excited to see Rust (with full core libs) running on AVR. https://github.com/avr-rust https://github.com/avr-rust
- Bromskloss 9y ago
  That's great! I've been looking forward to Rust on microcontrollers. What's the current status? Is it fully functional so that you can use your usual Cargo and rustc? Are all AVRs supported?

fermienrico 9y ago

ESP8266 and ESP32 trumps AVR in every respect, including their openness.

tomcam 9y ago
They don’t meet the explicitly stated $1 goal
- fermienrico 9y ago
  Understand and I am very well aware having purchased over 20k ESP32 MCUs. However, the parent comment that I responded to is talking about opensource aspects and community of AVR microcontroller to which I responded that Espressif is not only cost competitive, but it beats AVR in every aspect (perhaps you can say it's not as mature of an ecosystem).

radix07 9y ago

Open source hardware in the microcontroller world isn't quite as big of a deal as it is in the software world. While it would be great to see the processor architecture and all, I would much rather have an ARM that I know works and won't have to look at. I believe modern Arduinos are going to Cortex processors which are ARM as well, so I don't think the open source claim is what keeps Arduino hardware going. It is most likely going to be ease of use, accessibility, community and the tools.

abetusk 9y ago
I agree that open source hardware isn't as big of a deal (yet?) as open source software but the open source that we're talking about here is mostly software in the form of Arduino libraries to drive modules and other chips. I think the major point is that "ease of use, accessibility, community and the tools" are exactly where the open source software model thrives over a walled garden one. It's not impossible to do this with proprietary software but for the open source projects that are successful, they tend to be successful because the freedom they offer encourages each of those points (imo).
- radix07 9y ago
  I would love to see open source hardware take off at that level! You do see plenty of projects at the PCB level, which is nice and likely as far as most people will ever need to go. The price point of a small custom PCB is actually very reasonable now and usually easier to buy than rolling your own anymore. But until you can spin your own silicon with the ease of something like a 3D printer or buy custom low cost/quantity silicon, it doesn't matter what your open source HW design does if you don't have the money or a business to create and distribute it. That's one thing that is very hard to do with something physical and why opensource has worked so well in the software community. There does seem to be some stuff being done here using FPGAs... But they are still a rather expensive way to go just to drop a custom architecture on for now. In the meantime, there is still plenty of software work to do to make a truly useful and professional grade opensouce stack that you can develop on the chips we have.

gh02t 9y ago

It's important to note the rest of that portion though. But even as popular as Atmel is among hobbyists, Atmel has largely stayed out of this space directly. Instead, they’ve secured small-volume AVR sales by relying on the open- source community to build their own tools for themselves: turning out a slew of hardware and software used to program the megaAVR devices. While I applaud the efforts of these developers, these tools are inferior to Atmel’s. Their programming speeds are terrible, they don’t support the new tinyAVR 1-Series devices, and they have absolutely no debug capability. Atmel has deliberately enabled the open source toolchains for its MCUs but it largely keeps out of it directly.

Stratoscope 9y ago
Mobile-friendly copy of the parent's quote: > Consequently, the megaAVR remains the most open-source 8-bit microcontroller on the market — by a long shot. and your quote: > But even as popular as Atmel is among hobbyists, Atmel has largely stayed out of this space directly. Instead, they’ve secured small-volume AVR sales by relying on the open-source community to build their own tools for themselves: turning out a slew of hardware and software used to program the megaAVR devices. > While I applaud the efforts of these developers, these tools are inferior to Atmel’s. Their programming speeds are terrible, they don’t support the new tinyAVR 1-Series devices, and they have absolutely no debug capability. Don't use leading spaces to quote text, that's for unformatted text. Do this instead: > *Text.*

hexane360 9y ago

This is why I'm so excited to see Rust (with full core libs) running on AVR. https://github.com/avr-rust https://github.com/avr-rust

Bromskloss 9y ago
That's great! I've been looking forward to Rust on microcontrollers. What's the current status? Is it fully functional so that you can use your usual Cargo and rustc? Are all AVRs supported?