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Did Arduino recently regain their relevance for serious work? I haven't followed this topic for a few years, my previous impression was that Arduino products we

• DenseComet 3y ago
  The Arduino strategy seems to be similar to the Raspberry one - as people who grew up tinkering with Arduinos go into industry and are placed in charge of decisions, an upmarket edition of Arduino is a natural pick.
  • rootbeerdan 3y ago
    Also see: espressif and the esp-32, it's like a sick joke dealing with TI and NXP afterwards
  • bongodongobob 3y ago
    Nah. You just use the Atmel chip and get rid of Arduino completely.
    • londons_explore 3y ago
      The benefit of Arduino is that your boss can say "we just need something that switches this water pump on whenever it's above 20C but not if the battery is low or for more than an hour per day", and you can have the whole project coded, soldered and working in an hour. The advantage of the platform is speed of development, not engineering good practice or mass manufacturing.
      • stavros 3y ago
        I don't know, I'll use an ESP32, it takes the exact same amount of time to develop for and I get free wifi. I haven't used an Arduino in years.
• duskwuff 3y ago
  > Did Arduino recently regain their relevance for serious work? IMO: No. Arduino, as a company, wants that to change, but I have yet to see anyone take them seriously. Most of the "industrial" Arduino products are unsuitable for purpose; they lack critical features which would be required for those applications like protected inputs, wide range power input, or field bus interfaces.
• dylan604 3y ago
  > More serious hobbyists seemed to have switched to Raspberry products at the time Why would you use a Raspberry when an Arduino will do everything required? If you don't need a full Linux OS, then why waste it on something that just doesn't need it?
  • II2II 3y ago
    There are RP2040 boards (e.g. Pi Pico) that offer similar functionality to Arduino boards, are more powerful than Arduinos, and are much less expensive than (official) Arduinos. If you are more interested in performance or memory than the I/O options offered by a microcontroller, a Pi Zero is about the same price as Arduino's cheapest offering. You can also develop software for the Pi zero on the Pi Zero, which is considerably easier than developing for microcontrollers. I think Arduino boards are best suited for what they were originally designed for: education. While that covers some of the hobbiest market, it doesn't cover all hobbiests.
    • dylan604 3y ago
      Sure, anybody can program when there are GBs of memory on a Pi as evidenced in the fact that I have a job. Those that can do it in the KBs of memory on an Arduino are on a different level. Depending on all of the things you listed just sounds like lazy to me. /s
      • II2II 3y ago
        Sorry if I was a bit ambiguous. I was not referring to the gigabytes of memory or even the abundant number of libraries when I mentioned that it is easier to program Raspberry Pis. Those are certainly factors, though I doubt that many embedded projects will exploit that much memory. In cases where they do exploit the resources, it is probably needed (albeit, likely at the level of megabytes rather than gigabytes). I actually meant the Pis are easier to program since development can be self-hosted. Uploading a program to a microcontroller after each build is a royal pain in the bottom. Debugging (with a debugger) is also annoying, both from the perspective of setting up the software and having the necessary hardware. With respect to laziness, I hold two points of view. I definitely agree the inefficient of resources should be viewed in a negative way. This is especially true when a solution goes from bytes or kilobytes to megabytes or gigabytes. More critically, I believe that laziness is a negative when the inefficiencies lead to less robust code. On the other hand, one of the chief benefits of computers is to reduce the burden placed upon people. Setting up a toolchain for microcontrollers can be nearly as complex as developing code for the microcontroller itself. That strikes me as wrong. Aside: I periodically write software for microcontrollers for fun. One of my favourite exercises involves prototyping with high level code, such as using Arduino libraries, and rewriting it using increasingly low level code. It is how I approach learning a microcontroller, but I am also extremely conscious of both volatile and non-volatile memory usage. I am definitely sympathetic with your notion of avoiding laziness. On the other hand, we should also realize that microcontrollers are often used because we are "lazy". There are many cases where microcontrollers are used even when a basic circuit can accomplish the same task since it is cheaper to throw an absurd number of transistors at something than it is to pursue more efficient solutions. (Labour costs add to project costs, along with the number/type of components, board size, the relative ease of iterating code verses iterating on board revisions, etc..) There are reasons beyond the challenge of generating the most efficient solution possible to consider because the efficiency of development is also a factor. As someone who pursues software and hardware development as a hobby, I often bemoan the state of affairs of commercial products. Yet I also realize that commercial development, or even the motivations of other hobbiests, leads to different perspectives.
• mp05 3y ago
  I just received an Arduino Edge control unit to run some 9v valves but it was DOA. Well, it worked when I threw a bench supply at it but USB doesn't work. FWIW support has been amazingly responsive but not a great first go around with their professional line. Super curious about that WiFi enabled PNC controller though...
  • baq 3y ago
    just get anything esp32. it's like $10 or so for a maxed out dev board and you get wifi, bluetooth and more flash than you'll ever need.