3 ms·

A lot of people still program ESP32's with the arduino IDE. And there are a good number of devices on the shelves of stores today which contain the arduino boo

A lot of people still program ESP32's with the arduino IDE. And there are a good number of devices on the shelves of stores today which contain the arduino bootloader. It turns out the "point and click and get a working IoT product" tends to outcompete hiring a professional embedded coder to spend months to make something bespoke from scratch. My dumb fridge for example runs on top of the arduino bootloader on an atmel chip - it has the distinctive 1 second startup delay and speaks stk500. And all that chip supports is four temperature sensors, two fans, two door switches and lights, a little 7 seg display and up/down buttons for temperature, a defrost heater, door edge heater, and a relay for the compressor motor.

Dork1234 3y ago
If it isn't Arduino, then it will be MicroPython/CiruitPython and you won't even need a compiler.
- mbanzi 3y ago
  Arduino is supporting the official MicroPython project and has released ports for a number of boards in addition to tools like a simple MicroPython IDE and a GUI installer.
  - jazzyjackson 3y ago
    True, which is to say they are a competitor with alternate toolchains If I get a board with an Arm0 chip and want to flash it with micropython, Arduino is not the only game in town (not even my first choice by a long shot, ymmv) With the lower power AVR chips, Arduino's only competitor was the project it was forked from, Wiring - any other embedded toolchains were not even trying to reach the casual hobbyist, the Arduino IDE dominates that niche.
chasd00 3y ago
> It turns out the "point and click and get a working IoT product" tends to outcompete hiring a professional embedded coder to spend months to make something bespoke from scratch. Setting up an embedded toolchain and development/debug workflow from scratch is so tedious. No wonder Arduino (and Micropython) has had so much success. I write Micropython for flight controllers in the High Power Rocketry hobby. I get a lot of snide remarks from the other people doing embedded coding but my stuff runs just fine and i can get to a blinking LED (the helloworld of embedded) on a new board in ..seconds typically.
- londons_explore 3y ago
  > I get a lot of snide remarks Those remarks tend to stop when you can add some new feature in 5 minutes which would take a 'proper' embedded dev days. Eg.: Gee, it would be nice to measure CO2 high in the atmosphere from our hobby rocket, let me just plonk this CO2 monitor in, hook it up to 2 pins, and add 3 lines of code to read from the sensor and write to an SD card file every second. Thats the kind of thing that, for most other toolchains/IDE's, would require reconfiguring HAL's to get I2C working, configuring the pins to have the right drive strength and pullups, studying datasheets to find out what registers to read/write to get the sensor going, etc...

Dork1234 3y ago

If it isn't Arduino, then it will be MicroPython/CiruitPython and you won't even need a compiler.

mbanzi 3y ago
Arduino is supporting the official MicroPython project and has released ports for a number of boards in addition to tools like a simple MicroPython IDE and a GUI installer.
- jazzyjackson 3y ago
  True, which is to say they are a competitor with alternate toolchains If I get a board with an Arm0 chip and want to flash it with micropython, Arduino is not the only game in town (not even my first choice by a long shot, ymmv) With the lower power AVR chips, Arduino's only competitor was the project it was forked from, Wiring - any other embedded toolchains were not even trying to reach the casual hobbyist, the Arduino IDE dominates that niche.

chasd00 3y ago

> It turns out the "point and click and get a working IoT product" tends to outcompete hiring a professional embedded coder to spend months to make something bespoke from scratch. Setting up an embedded toolchain and development/debug workflow from scratch is so tedious. No wonder Arduino (and Micropython) has had so much success. I write Micropython for flight controllers in the High Power Rocketry hobby. I get a lot of snide remarks from the other people doing embedded coding but my stuff runs just fine and i can get to a blinking LED (the helloworld of embedded) on a new board in ..seconds typically.

londons_explore 3y ago
> I get a lot of snide remarks Those remarks tend to stop when you can add some new feature in 5 minutes which would take a 'proper' embedded dev days. Eg.: Gee, it would be nice to measure CO2 high in the atmosphere from our hobby rocket, let me just plonk this CO2 monitor in, hook it up to 2 pins, and add 3 lines of code to read from the sensor and write to an SD card file every second. Thats the kind of thing that, for most other toolchains/IDE's, would require reconfiguring HAL's to get I2C working, configuring the pins to have the right drive strength and pullups, studying datasheets to find out what registers to read/write to get the sensor going, etc...