6 ms·

The Untold History of Arduino (2016)

177 points by cristoperb 8y ago

azdle 8y ago
(2016) See https://github.com/ArduinoHistory/arduinohistory.github.io https://github.com/ArduinoHistory/arduinohistory.github.io
ttsda 8y ago
Prior discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11212021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11212021
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
And this is why I buy Chinese made clones of Arduino.
- miketery 8y ago
  What site do you use?
  - gvand 8y ago
    Nowadays you can find them on amazon too (or for example on seeed studio).
  - blhack 8y ago
    I use aliexpress.
  - dsd 8y ago
    Sparkfun. I've had bad luck with cloned ESP32s. Arduinos seem to be more forgiving for some reason.
    - anujdeshpande 8y ago
      Anything specific? I work there - would love to help out if you are still working on it
- 00deadbeef 8y ago
  I don't even bother with Arduino clones. You can get much better for less money. E.g. in the UK on Amazon an Arduino Uno R3 is £39.99 and a clone with excellent reviews is £6.99. For £5 I can get an ESP8266 on a NodeMCU board - these have more GPIO, much faster CPU, WiFi, drop nicely in to a breadboard, etc. They work with the Arduino IDE with only a tiny bit of configuration. For not much more there's an ESP-32 which adds, among other things, a faster dual-core CPU and Bluetooth.
  - landa 8y ago
    I agree. I think the esp8266 is an awesome platform. I started out with a board from Adafruit: https://www.adafruit.com/product/2471 https://www.adafruit.com/product/2471 I later switched to this one for cost savings: https://www.banggood.com/Geekcreit-Doit-NodeMcu-Lua-ESP8266-ESP-12F-WIFI-Development-Board-p-985891.html?rmmds=myorder&cur_warehouse=CN https://www.banggood.com/Geekcreit-Doit-NodeMcu-Lua-ESP8266-...
  - swiley 8y ago
    Aren't you forced into using the RTOS provided with the devkit though? I don't like having blobs on my laptop much less in MCU firmware.
    - opencl 8y ago
      You're not forced to use it and it's not a blob[1]. [1] https://github.com/nodemcu/nodemcu-firmware https://github.com/nodemcu/nodemcu-firmware
      - swiley 8y ago
        Just looking at that briefly it looks like there are still closed source components. (although they might not be part of the RTOS so I might have been wrong about that)
    - ficklepickle 8y ago
      You can even use the arduino IDE thanks to the awesome work of this [0] project. [0] - https://github.com/esp8266/Arduino https://github.com/esp8266/Arduino
gvand 8y ago
One year later: "Arduino Welcomes Hernando Barragán as Arduino Chief Design Architect" https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2017/05/19/988294/0/en/Arduino-Welcomes-Hernando-Barrag%C3%A1n-as-Arduino-Chief-Design-Architect.html https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2017/05/19/988294...
martin_a 8y ago
I don't really get the whole point in this. Besides all the things going on with the two Arduino "entities" (which is obscure, sure), is this just about "someone based his work on my student work and didn't ask me"? What a crybaby. Could have easily founded his own company and make sure nobody can misuse the "invention".
IshKebab 8y ago
Arm have finally started making a decent offline mBed IDE so hopefully in a year or two there will be no reason to use Arduino at all. The mBed API is much better and the range and price of boards is generally better too. E.g. ST Nucleo boards are around £10. Or the nRF52 device board is £30 - that gets you a proper BLE/Thread/etc board with a fully documented radio peripheral. You can write your own radio protocol if you want.
- petra 8y ago
  mBed is complicated. Arduino is simpler for artists/hobbists. The libraries of each are written for different groups of people, and it shows. For example, you can do a lot of stuff in the Arduino without using pointers. The mBed requires pointer usage.
  - IshKebab 8y ago
    I don't think it needs pointers any more than Arduino does. Can you give an example?
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Best of all, C++ based OS.
- zzzcpan 8y ago
  I don't get your point. Atmega328p arduino boards start at $2 or so ($4 for uno) and are currently at "apt-get install arduino" level of convenience that arm isn't getting anytime soon. Plus the whole point of microcontrollers is in working against specific chip, not universal API.
  - danieldk 8y ago
    You can get STM32 boards for the same price (Blue Pill/Black Pill). ARM does have 'apt-get install arduino'-level of convenience. You can actually use the Arduino IDE through stm32duino, which is literally a matter of adding an additional board manager URL to the IDE. Moreover, you program STM32 boards (besides mBed, etc.) with Rust, which is also easily set up. The Rust embedded ecosystem is much smaller, but still nice for hobbyists. Moreover Rust with ARM cross-compilation is easy to set up. Another nice feature is most ARM CPUs is that setting up and using gdb is trivial (e.g. with STM32s it's usually a matter of starting OpenOCD and then connecting to that with gdb).
homoiconic 8y ago
I built some things with Wiring back in the day (2005 through 2006-ish) and was very impressed with it. I had considered Arduino for the project, but I believe I decided against it because it didn't support USB at the time. There seemed to be fundamentally different philosophies to the two projects. Arduino at the time was catering to the maker crowd--selecting only through-hole components so people could assemble their own boards without having to deal with SMD soldering. I think they didn't even sell pre-assembled boards back then. Wiring was definitely more polished, trading low cost and ease of assembly for additional features like USB. Of course now you can buy fully assembled Arduino boards and a bunch of them even use SMD components, which may be evidence validating the Wiring philosophy...
ncmncm 8y ago
I couldn't tell from the article who was Arduino SRL and who was Arduino LLC. It's great that Hernando is now Chief Design Architect, but how does that fit with the rest of the story? Did his opponent have to take him on as part of a settlement? Is this a win for the little guy?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
xparco 8y ago
Massimo, you are pretentious and have a shitty attitude, karma will get you eventually or if it hasn't already because you seem like a depressed prole already
beardyw 8y ago
I owe Arduino a lot though I never bought one (real or clone). I retired from commercial development in Java, saw these discussed, but looking at them I thought - that's just an Atmel chip on a board. Not quite true, but with a £10 programmer I got a range of DIP Atmel chips and found it was easy to program them with avr-gcc. It is a bit more complex, but not much, and very satisfying to know what everything is doing. Ironically I do use the Arduino IDE with the esp8266 but I consider I will never fully know what those things are doing.

177 points by cristoperb 8y ago

(2016) See https://github.com/ArduinoHistory/arduinohistory.github.io https://github.com/ArduinoHistory/arduinohistory.github.io

ttsda 8y ago

Prior discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11212021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11212021

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago

And this is why I buy Chinese made clones of Arduino.

miketery 8y ago
What site do you use?
- gvand 8y ago
  Nowadays you can find them on amazon too (or for example on seeed studio).
- blhack 8y ago
  I use aliexpress.
- dsd 8y ago
  Sparkfun. I've had bad luck with cloned ESP32s. Arduinos seem to be more forgiving for some reason.
  - anujdeshpande 8y ago
    Anything specific? I work there - would love to help out if you are still working on it
00deadbeef 8y ago
I don't even bother with Arduino clones. You can get much better for less money. E.g. in the UK on Amazon an Arduino Uno R3 is £39.99 and a clone with excellent reviews is £6.99. For £5 I can get an ESP8266 on a NodeMCU board - these have more GPIO, much faster CPU, WiFi, drop nicely in to a breadboard, etc. They work with the Arduino IDE with only a tiny bit of configuration. For not much more there's an ESP-32 which adds, among other things, a faster dual-core CPU and Bluetooth.
- landa 8y ago
  I agree. I think the esp8266 is an awesome platform. I started out with a board from Adafruit: https://www.adafruit.com/product/2471 https://www.adafruit.com/product/2471 I later switched to this one for cost savings: https://www.banggood.com/Geekcreit-Doit-NodeMcu-Lua-ESP8266-ESP-12F-WIFI-Development-Board-p-985891.html?rmmds=myorder&cur_warehouse=CN https://www.banggood.com/Geekcreit-Doit-NodeMcu-Lua-ESP8266-...
- swiley 8y ago
  Aren't you forced into using the RTOS provided with the devkit though? I don't like having blobs on my laptop much less in MCU firmware.
  - opencl 8y ago
    You're not forced to use it and it's not a blob[1]. [1] https://github.com/nodemcu/nodemcu-firmware https://github.com/nodemcu/nodemcu-firmware
    - swiley 8y ago
      Just looking at that briefly it looks like there are still closed source components. (although they might not be part of the RTOS so I might have been wrong about that)
  - ficklepickle 8y ago
    You can even use the arduino IDE thanks to the awesome work of this [0] project. [0] - https://github.com/esp8266/Arduino https://github.com/esp8266/Arduino

gvand 8y ago

One year later: "Arduino Welcomes Hernando Barragán as Arduino Chief Design Architect" https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2017/05/19/988294/0/en/Arduino-Welcomes-Hernando-Barrag%C3%A1n-as-Arduino-Chief-Design-Architect.html https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2017/05/19/988294...

martin_a 8y ago

I don't really get the whole point in this. Besides all the things going on with the two Arduino "entities" (which is obscure, sure), is this just about "someone based his work on my student work and didn't ask me"? What a crybaby. Could have easily founded his own company and make sure nobody can misuse the "invention".

IshKebab 8y ago

Arm have finally started making a decent offline mBed IDE so hopefully in a year or two there will be no reason to use Arduino at all. The mBed API is much better and the range and price of boards is generally better too. E.g. ST Nucleo boards are around £10. Or the nRF52 device board is £30 - that gets you a proper BLE/Thread/etc board with a fully documented radio peripheral. You can write your own radio protocol if you want.

petra 8y ago
mBed is complicated. Arduino is simpler for artists/hobbists. The libraries of each are written for different groups of people, and it shows. For example, you can do a lot of stuff in the Arduino without using pointers. The mBed requires pointer usage.
- IshKebab 8y ago
  I don't think it needs pointers any more than Arduino does. Can you give an example?
pjmlp 8y ago
Best of all, C++ based OS.
zzzcpan 8y ago
I don't get your point. Atmega328p arduino boards start at $2 or so ($4 for uno) and are currently at "apt-get install arduino" level of convenience that arm isn't getting anytime soon. Plus the whole point of microcontrollers is in working against specific chip, not universal API.
- danieldk 8y ago
  You can get STM32 boards for the same price (Blue Pill/Black Pill). ARM does have 'apt-get install arduino'-level of convenience. You can actually use the Arduino IDE through stm32duino, which is literally a matter of adding an additional board manager URL to the IDE. Moreover, you program STM32 boards (besides mBed, etc.) with Rust, which is also easily set up. The Rust embedded ecosystem is much smaller, but still nice for hobbyists. Moreover Rust with ARM cross-compilation is easy to set up. Another nice feature is most ARM CPUs is that setting up and using gdb is trivial (e.g. with STM32s it's usually a matter of starting OpenOCD and then connecting to that with gdb).

homoiconic 8y ago

I built some things with Wiring back in the day (2005 through 2006-ish) and was very impressed with it. I had considered Arduino for the project, but I believe I decided against it because it didn't support USB at the time. There seemed to be fundamentally different philosophies to the two projects. Arduino at the time was catering to the maker crowd--selecting only through-hole components so people could assemble their own boards without having to deal with SMD soldering. I think they didn't even sell pre-assembled boards back then. Wiring was definitely more polished, trading low cost and ease of assembly for additional features like USB. Of course now you can buy fully assembled Arduino boards and a bunch of them even use SMD components, which may be evidence validating the Wiring philosophy...

ncmncm 8y ago

I couldn't tell from the article who was Arduino SRL and who was Arduino LLC. It's great that Hernando is now Chief Design Architect, but how does that fit with the rest of the story? Did his opponent have to take him on as part of a settlement? Is this a win for the little guy?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

xparco 8y ago

Massimo, you are pretentious and have a shitty attitude, karma will get you eventually or if it hasn't already because you seem like a depressed prole already

beardyw 8y ago

I owe Arduino a lot though I never bought one (real or clone). I retired from commercial development in Java, saw these discussed, but looking at them I thought - that's just an Atmel chip on a board. Not quite true, but with a £10 programmer I got a range of DIP Atmel chips and found it was easy to program them with avr-gcc. It is a bit more complex, but not much, and very satisfying to know what everything is doing. Ironically I do use the Arduino IDE with the esp8266 but I consider I will never fully know what those things are doing.