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It's great that these kits are available and fairly cheap. But as it turns out, the kit that TFA links to is a Chinese clone of Arduino and none of the profits
by bityard 1y ago
It's great that these kits are available and fairly cheap. But as it turns out, the kit that TFA links to is a Chinese clone of Arduino and none of the profits made on that kit contribute to further development of Arduino hardware, software, documentation, community, and so on.
I'm not saying don't buy this kit, what I am saying is if you find yourself needing or wanting a second dev board, consider purchasing an official Ardiuno from https://store.arduino.cc https://store.arduino.cc to support the folks that made all of this happen in the first place.
- dekhn 1y agoI don't think there is much value in the arduino hardware and the value of the arduino software is mainly in it being a standard SDK that works across a wide range of microcontrollers.
- hnuser123456 1y agoBut if you want the software to continue getting updates and support more chips, and support the people doing that work, buying an official one is a good idea.
- dekhn 1y agoI have really mixed opinions on whether I want to support the Arduino folks with my money. When I use tools like PlatformIO and the ESP32 ecosystem with FreeRTOS, I begin to wonder if we can evolve away from Arduino, or treat it as some sort of legacy backwards API while porting all the drivers to FreeRTOS with platform-specific details.
- bityard 1y agoWho is "we"? There are many options for working with microcontrollers at the hobbyist level and that's because there are many different needs. It sounds like you don't need/use Arduino and that's fine. My comment was targeted at folks to do or are just getting started.
- HeyLaughingBoy 1y agoThe majority of arduino hardware, software and community development is now outside the "official" Arduino project. We definitely owe them a debt of gratitude, but the framework has moved on. Every major microcontroller vendor now has development boards that have the standard Arduino Uno pinout so you can add cheap "shields" for prototyping. There are entire companies like M5Stack, SeeedStudio and LilyGo whose business model is providing high-integration platforms (CPU, touchscreen, I/O and sometimes an enclosure) that use the arduino framework but run on 32-bit chips instead. And so on. These days, when you say "arduino" you're almost always referring to a framework and a hardware abstraction layer, instead of the Arduino company itself (sorry, mbanzi).