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Because, to be frank, Arduino is a bit of a toy platform. It is really good for beginners and for hobbyists to make embedded devices available to a wider audie
by user-the-name 6y ago
Because, to be frank, Arduino is a bit of a toy platform.
It is really good for beginners and for hobbyists to make embedded devices available to a wider audience, but nobody in their right mind would build an actual product on top of Arduino.
- EmpirePhoenix 6y agoWell prusa did with their printers
- user-the-name 6y agoThey would be one of an exceedingly small minority, then.
- IgorPartola 6y agoAlmost every consumer 3D printer out there runs on top of Arduino. Sure that’s a small market compared to all electronics. But it’s still a big market in absolute terms.
- mbushey 6y agoThis was true three years ago. Plenty of 3D printers are now using ARM. The Monoprice MP Mini Delta has been out about two years now with a price of $175 US. Marlin 2.0 has support for ARM, I think it would be accurate to say "Almost every consumer 3D printer out there runs on top of Marlin", although there are a few alternatives like Smoothie.
- marcan_42 6y agoPeople trying to build "real" products on top of Arduino usually do so in spite of, not thanks to, the platform. Once you start trying to build a polished experience, not a quick hack, you quickly run into limitations that are solvable by dropping to lower levels. I ran into this when I tried to make an ESP8266 temperature sensor - the Arduino stuff didn't have working power management, so it would heat up skewing the measurements, nor anything like threading or coroutines for network handlers, so a single stuck network request would block all others. Ironically, the Arduino port included a coroutines implementation under the hood, but used it in a silly way with a single coroutine. I rebuilt the thing on top of the ESP SDK, stole the thread switching code from Arduino, and used it to build a nice low power version that could handle up to 4 requests at once. I don't think I've ever seen a well engineered product built on Arduino that wasn't trivial. They might've hacked on it until the user experience is good, but then you peek under the hood and it's clear the engineering isn't good. And that ends up creeping into the user experience in the end, or worse. (OnlyKey comes to mind, which is built on Arduino and also its authors clearly do not have the competence to be writing security/crypto code, but they seem unwilling to accept any criticism).
- lostlogin 6y agoI know of a good production line that has seen improvements in efficiency and safety due to automation with Arduino. I’m sure there are better ways but in terms of bang for buck, it’s hard to see how a non-programmer could have done better.
- user-the-name 6y agoThat doesn't sound like using Arduino in a product, though?
- lostlogin 6y agoNo, they are on big bits of equipment.
- IgorPartola 6y agoWhat is the best open source alternative? Ideally one that works similar to PlatformIO where you aren’t tied to a specific IDE.
- user-the-name 6y agoOn things I've personally worked on, I tend to just use the basic libraries supplied by the vendor, or even just implement everything myself from reading data sheets. This is obviously realistic mainly for very small and simple systems, which is what I've usually worked with.