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Okay, so Arduino is probably done at this point and we'll just see its downfall. Which leads me to the question: Is there an IDE/language that is as easy as th

Okay, so Arduino is probably done at this point and we'll just see its downfall. Which leads me to the question: Is there an IDE/language that is as easy as that of the Arduino IDE? PlatformIO is often mentioned, but I don't speak C/C++ and am not really into learning it.

eternityforest 3y ago
I have a very hard time imagining the Arduino language going away soon, even if anything happened to the company (I don't know anything about the business world, no idea what's going on with them, seems like they're making some cool new stuff). The community will maintain it. Pretty sure the more interesting implementations aren't even by Arduino (doesn't Espressif do theirs themselves?). I wouldn't be surprised if long term, we started seeing an Arduino competitor in Rust, the hobby space is the perfect place to start something like that, but for now, I would think Arduino is safe... Also, you already know C++. Maybe not C, but that's OK, because everything a hobbyist needs to pay attention to is C++. Arduino is just some libraries on top of C++. A really nice and portable set of libraries, with a really cool and easy build process, but not the only set of libraries. PlatformIO is pretty nice. But there is something easier than Arduino. ESPHome. It's a YAML declarative kind of thing. Not as general as Arduino but for what it does, it's amazing. Vastly easier, clearer, and just generally nicer than just writing code, especially when it comes with so many nice features like logging, a web server, and an amazingly reliable LAN API you can call from Python. They even have OTA updates. Right now it's got a few missing things, like light sleep, but I suspect it's going to cover a lot of Arduino use cases. They have a web dashboard written in Python you run from the CLI.
- martin_a 3y ago
  Thank you so much, I'll make sure to have a closer look at ESPHome!

eternityforest 3y ago

I have a very hard time imagining the Arduino language going away soon, even if anything happened to the company (I don't know anything about the business world, no idea what's going on with them, seems like they're making some cool new stuff). The community will maintain it. Pretty sure the more interesting implementations aren't even by Arduino (doesn't Espressif do theirs themselves?). I wouldn't be surprised if long term, we started seeing an Arduino competitor in Rust, the hobby space is the perfect place to start something like that, but for now, I would think Arduino is safe... Also, you already know C++. Maybe not C, but that's OK, because everything a hobbyist needs to pay attention to is C++. Arduino is just some libraries on top of C++. A really nice and portable set of libraries, with a really cool and easy build process, but not the only set of libraries. PlatformIO is pretty nice. But there is something easier than Arduino. ESPHome. It's a YAML declarative kind of thing. Not as general as Arduino but for what it does, it's amazing. Vastly easier, clearer, and just generally nicer than just writing code, especially when it comes with so many nice features like logging, a web server, and an amazingly reliable LAN API you can call from Python. They even have OTA updates. Right now it's got a few missing things, like light sleep, but I suspect it's going to cover a lot of Arduino use cases. They have a web dashboard written in Python you run from the CLI.

martin_a 3y ago
Thank you so much, I'll make sure to have a closer look at ESPHome!