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There is a conflation of ideas here. Arduino was not created to stand for Italian manufactoring or fair wages. > The Arduino project began in 2005 as a tool f
by cowl 4y ago
There is a conflation of ideas here.
Arduino was not created to stand for Italian manufactoring or fair wages.
> The Arduino project began in 2005 as a tool for students at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, Italy, aiming to provide a low-cost and easy way for novices and professionals to create devices that interact with their environment using sensors and actuators.
The main Purpose was "easy and low-cost access to create devices". By that measure Every chinese Clone has helped in that purpose.
The fact that their Original Arduino was produced in Italy to also support local Business was secondary to the main purpose and it can be said that it was in conflict with the main purpose. Sure 35 Eur is not much for Italy, but a cheaper product reached a much more wider audience who starts with cheaper products and then gains enough knowledge to appreciate the why of the original. (better quality control, better parts, more reliable etc). All this factors come after you have dipped your toes, for which the clones has been a crucial factor.
The same holds true for Prusa. Most of the comunity of Prusa came initially from the reprap project, Prusa has benefited from their open Ideas and refined them and I know many in the community who have chosen Prusa instead of cheaper Variants only as giving back for them being open (though not exactly open development)
- nyanpasu64 4y agoSpeaking for myself (an unemployed tinkerer), I bought three Pi Picos instead of one Arduino because Picos were $4 and Arduinos were $24, meaning I could buy three Picos for half the price, and hang onto them for future projects I need a microcontroller for. I cannot justify buying a $24 Arduino to solder together a game controller to USB converter, when I can get a preflashed clone Arduino, plus custom PCB with three controller connectors (then solder them on myself), for $16. (makerfabs.com sells Arduino Nanos for $9 if you can trust them, which I don't since their website spawned a Russian liveinternet.ru popup window likely from a malicious script.) Later I found out that AliExpress sells clone Arduino Nanos for under $4 (https://github.com/timville85/TripleController#tested-parts https://github.com/timville85/TripleController#tested-parts), but by this time I had already bought three Picos and was learning to program the USB stack, PIO, and microcontroller gdb using a second Pico (not sure if ESP8266 or ESP32 requires a JTAG to debug, or you can use gdb over serial like https://arduino-esp8266.readthedocs.io/en/latest/gdb.html https://arduino-esp8266.readthedocs.io/en/latest/gdb.html).