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> Adafruit founder Limor Fried doesn’t find much value in arguing about who is right in the clone wars. Agree wholeheartedly. The clones are here to stay. I pu

> Adafruit founder Limor Fried doesn’t find much value in arguing about who is right in the clone wars. Agree wholeheartedly. The clones are here to stay. I push people, beginners especially, in the direction of Adafruit because their documentation and build quality are excellent. I also use a lot of Adafruit hardware in my own freelancing work. Their products are well worth the price premium. With the exception of M5Stack, I haven't found a product line that I think is as well thought out. That said, clones have their own place in the ecosystem. Often the differences between a cheap clone and the more expensive original are nonexistent across all axes: quality, support, documentation, etc. Most people are not going to pay more for an identical product.

pclmulqdq 3y ago
Traditionally, dev kits are sold at roughly the cost to produce them, perhaps with a small markup. Arduino is a notable exception, charging at least 10x their production cost for a dev kit. The competition was inevitable. In the case of the original Arduino, I have a Chinese clone purchased for $3 that has substantially better quality, and has many of the features you would want from a dev kit, like ESD protection on the I/O pins.
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
  Agreed. I used to produce a custom product that was used an Arduino Nano clone as a component on a PCB because the clone cost less than I could buy its component parts for (yay economies of scale!). I'd generally buy 10 at a time for about $25 total.
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  > Traditionally, dev kits are sold at roughly the cost to produce them, perhaps with a small markup. Maybe, but pre-arduino dev kits were often hundreds of dollars because doing low-volume PCB manufacturing was expensive. Now that it's cheap, Arduino is kind of obsolete.
  - pclmulqdq 3y ago
    Yeah. After Arduino proved that there was a market for low-feature dev kits, TI made their MSP430-based Arduino competitor that they sold for $4.30 and manufactured in volume, just like the Arduino.
    - Tildey 3y ago
      Espressif has also capitalised on this trend with the ESP32, having cheap (~$10) official dev boards available at or before the launch of a new Esp32 model
bityard 3y ago
I watched Limor give a talk--gosh it must be at least a decade ago--about why she and Adafruit do open source hardware. She of course went through all the usual reasons but one thing that stuck with me is when someone asked, "doesn't making your hardware open source make it easier for companies to clone your stuff?" Limor's response was: not really! You see, the Chinese are literally the world experts at reverse-engineering electronics. It is nothing for them to take literally any piece of electronic kit on adafruit.com, crack it open, list out a BOM, scan and trace out the circuit board, and have a prototype ready before lunch time. If they decide to clone your widget, making it closed source isn't even going to slow them down. YES, they will make money off your design. And you have to be okay with that. Because what they can't (or at least don't) do is build a thriving and supportive community (and ideally, repeat customers) around themselves.
- generj 3y ago
  100% agree. Open source hardware is a marketing tool that can be highly effective. Adafruit is the master of this type of marketing (Pimoroni are pretty good too). They are selling an ecosystem of parts that enable making nearly anything. The idea of being a maker is everywhere on their site. It’s the difference between going to a wood working shop and a Home Depot - many of the products may be similar or even identical but the goal and the brand are different. Sparkfun never fit as well in the maker space, and their move towards closed source isn’t surprising in light of their slow decline over the past few years. Their marketing is much more engineer focused, including their product selection. Adafruit and Pimoroni have the bravery to make new product categories knowing the clones are coming but that they will capture enough of the market to succeed in them anyways. Neopixels are the prime example of this to me. I love shopping at Adafruit. They make it easy to want to buy from them. It will just work, I know it will just work, and I know they have a library and an example project waiting for me. I can get the “same” thing on AliExpress often for half or less (depending on the part). But not with the same fit and finish, not with a no solder hookup, and not this week. And if I do buy it on AliExpress I will use an Adafruit library with it. Open source means everyone using parts they introduced to the maker market is their customer, some just didn’t buy the part from them. Open source helps their customers reverse engineer their products more than their competitors. Paying someone with actual electrical engineering background to read data sheets closer/better than me is well worth it. I’ll buy their parts, prototype with a few of them, and then make the combined form factor I want with JLCPCB. Adafruit even published many of the tutorials teaching how me to do this! They win by trusting their customer enough to let them go free, knowing they will come back.
deleted 3y ago
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pclmulqdq 3y ago

Traditionally, dev kits are sold at roughly the cost to produce them, perhaps with a small markup. Arduino is a notable exception, charging at least 10x their production cost for a dev kit. The competition was inevitable. In the case of the original Arduino, I have a Chinese clone purchased for $3 that has substantially better quality, and has many of the features you would want from a dev kit, like ESD protection on the I/O pins.

HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
Agreed. I used to produce a custom product that was used an Arduino Nano clone as a component on a PCB because the clone cost less than I could buy its component parts for (yay economies of scale!). I'd generally buy 10 at a time for about $25 total.
AlexandrB 3y ago
> Traditionally, dev kits are sold at roughly the cost to produce them, perhaps with a small markup. Maybe, but pre-arduino dev kits were often hundreds of dollars because doing low-volume PCB manufacturing was expensive. Now that it's cheap, Arduino is kind of obsolete.
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
  Yeah. After Arduino proved that there was a market for low-feature dev kits, TI made their MSP430-based Arduino competitor that they sold for $4.30 and manufactured in volume, just like the Arduino.
  - Tildey 3y ago
    Espressif has also capitalised on this trend with the ESP32, having cheap (~$10) official dev boards available at or before the launch of a new Esp32 model

bityard 3y ago

I watched Limor give a talk--gosh it must be at least a decade ago--about why she and Adafruit do open source hardware. She of course went through all the usual reasons but one thing that stuck with me is when someone asked, "doesn't making your hardware open source make it easier for companies to clone your stuff?" Limor's response was: not really! You see, the Chinese are literally the world experts at reverse-engineering electronics. It is nothing for them to take literally any piece of electronic kit on adafruit.com, crack it open, list out a BOM, scan and trace out the circuit board, and have a prototype ready before lunch time. If they decide to clone your widget, making it closed source isn't even going to slow them down. YES, they will make money off your design. And you have to be okay with that. Because what they can't (or at least don't) do is build a thriving and supportive community (and ideally, repeat customers) around themselves.

generj 3y ago
100% agree. Open source hardware is a marketing tool that can be highly effective. Adafruit is the master of this type of marketing (Pimoroni are pretty good too). They are selling an ecosystem of parts that enable making nearly anything. The idea of being a maker is everywhere on their site. It’s the difference between going to a wood working shop and a Home Depot - many of the products may be similar or even identical but the goal and the brand are different. Sparkfun never fit as well in the maker space, and their move towards closed source isn’t surprising in light of their slow decline over the past few years. Their marketing is much more engineer focused, including their product selection. Adafruit and Pimoroni have the bravery to make new product categories knowing the clones are coming but that they will capture enough of the market to succeed in them anyways. Neopixels are the prime example of this to me. I love shopping at Adafruit. They make it easy to want to buy from them. It will just work, I know it will just work, and I know they have a library and an example project waiting for me. I can get the “same” thing on AliExpress often for half or less (depending on the part). But not with the same fit and finish, not with a no solder hookup, and not this week. And if I do buy it on AliExpress I will use an Adafruit library with it. Open source means everyone using parts they introduced to the maker market is their customer, some just didn’t buy the part from them. Open source helps their customers reverse engineer their products more than their competitors. Paying someone with actual electrical engineering background to read data sheets closer/better than me is well worth it. I’ll buy their parts, prototype with a few of them, and then make the combined form factor I want with JLCPCB. Adafruit even published many of the tutorials teaching how me to do this! They win by trusting their customer enough to let them go free, knowing they will come back.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]