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I think pricing is also an issue. Anyone with 5 dollars in their pocket can buy an arduino clone and go to town. And many people do as can be seen by the huge h

I think pricing is also an issue. Anyone with 5 dollars in their pocket can buy an arduino clone and go to town. And many people do as can be seen by the huge hobbyist scene. You want to try FPGA development and do anything that is not blinking a LED? Good luck shelling out hundreds to thousands of dollars for the shittiest software known to this planet.

bsder 6y ago
A Max10 T-Core board from Terasic is $55 academic and tools are free for the Max10 class. You only start paying for FPGA tools when you need the really big FPGAs. And, I'll go out on a limb, but, at this point, I think Arduino causes more harm to beginning embedded developers than good. Yeah, the ecosystem is wonderful if you aren't a developer. However, Arduino is now weird compared to mainstream embedded development. Most things have converged to 32-bit instead of 8-bit. Arm Cortex-M is now mainstream so your architectural understanding is useless. 5V causes a lot of grief given that everybody else in the world is at 3V/3.3V. A developer basically has to unlearn a bunch of things to move up from an Arduino. I still recommend Arduino to non-developers or somebody just trying to throw together a project, but I no longer recommend them to someone actually trying to learn embedded development.
- rowanG077 6y ago
  What does usb 3 gigabit ethernet or pcie ip cost? Is it for free using intel?
- captainmarble 6y ago
  Arduino gets the job done for most hobbyst, it's also easy to move forward from arduino to esp32 which is 32bit and freertos based.
- elcritch 6y ago
  Just to clarify, there are many Cortex-M* based Arduino or Arduino compatible boards. There's official Arduino-SAMD BSP support, though they do lack the depth of features, like Timers and such. Though it seems 8-bit procs are still common for super cheap MCU's.
- himinlomax 6y ago
  The issue is not whether the end-user has to pay, the issue is that this kills incentives for free software tools. gcc and BSD were initially developed on machines costing hundreds of thousands of dollar, that didn't stop them.

bsder 6y ago

A Max10 T-Core board from Terasic is $55 academic and tools are free for the Max10 class. You only start paying for FPGA tools when you need the really big FPGAs. And, I'll go out on a limb, but, at this point, I think Arduino causes more harm to beginning embedded developers than good. Yeah, the ecosystem is wonderful if you aren't a developer. However, Arduino is now weird compared to mainstream embedded development. Most things have converged to 32-bit instead of 8-bit. Arm Cortex-M is now mainstream so your architectural understanding is useless. 5V causes a lot of grief given that everybody else in the world is at 3V/3.3V. A developer basically has to unlearn a bunch of things to move up from an Arduino. I still recommend Arduino to non-developers or somebody just trying to throw together a project, but I no longer recommend them to someone actually trying to learn embedded development.

rowanG077 6y ago
What does usb 3 gigabit ethernet or pcie ip cost? Is it for free using intel?
captainmarble 6y ago
Arduino gets the job done for most hobbyst, it's also easy to move forward from arduino to esp32 which is 32bit and freertos based.
elcritch 6y ago
Just to clarify, there are many Cortex-M* based Arduino or Arduino compatible boards. There's official Arduino-SAMD BSP support, though they do lack the depth of features, like Timers and such. Though it seems 8-bit procs are still common for super cheap MCU's.
himinlomax 6y ago
The issue is not whether the end-user has to pay, the issue is that this kills incentives for free software tools. gcc and BSD were initially developed on machines costing hundreds of thousands of dollar, that didn't stop them.