15 ms·

ESP stuff is so damn cheap and capable now I'm not sure what you would use Arduino for these days.

by chpatrick 1y ago

dotancohen 1y ago
That's probably why these AI-capable Qualcomm boards are being introduced.
the__alchemist 1y ago
Community inertia / maker content.
- suyash 1y ago
  It used to be that but since Arduino and Pi have both gone full commercial, it's not longer viable. I teach kids coding and have been looking at alternatives like ESP or other boards that are much more cost effective and friendly for beginners.
  - cruffle_duffle 1y ago
    Exactly. I dunno why you’d ever use anything but an esp for “maker stuff” at this point. They are cheaper, more capable, and have the same DX (largely, setting aside 3.3v vs 5v).
    - daemonologist 1y ago
      Well you might go Nordic for the power efficiency, but I agree capital-A Arduino wouldn't even cross my mind as an option these days.
phoehne 1y ago
Don't look at just the specs. You also need to look at the board design and programming environment. I've used the ESP32 native tools and they are a lot more complex than Arduino. But I'm an embedded firmware developer, so it's kind of what I expect. But I used an Arduino, with 5V tolerant outputs, to light up Halloween costumes for years. I do it in 1 page of code that's I write in their IDE. I don't have to set up an SDK. And the Arudino API hides all the details I don't care about. Especially if I'm really just slinging solder and wiring something up quick.
- echoangle 1y ago
  You can program the normal ESP32 Devboards with the Arduino IDE.
  - tedivm 1y ago
    Yup- ESP32 is absolutely compatible with Arduino. There's also great support for CircuitPython and MicroPython, which makes it trivial to program the devices.
- skybrian 1y ago
  Even if you like the Arduino programming environment (and I do), there seems to be little reason to use Arduino hardware unless it’s for compatibility with other hardware you have? For example, there is a very nice unofficial port of Arduino for the Raspberry Pi Pico. There are also many fine Arduino-compatible single-board computers from Adafruit. The Arduino board form factor seems big and clunky in comparison. I don’t even use the Ardiuino IDE anymore; I've switched to VS Code using PlatformIO. It’s great that all these microcontroller boards and peripheral breakout boards can be programmed using the same basic API’s, but I don’t think it helps Arduino the company very much.
  - ssl-3 1y ago
    There's a wealth of easy projects that a person can get started with using an Arduino. Without any opportunities for getting bogged down in anything extra at all, they can follow a simple recipe and quickly begin to blink an LED at the rate of their choosing. The Arduino was developed to be a teaching tool, and it allows for a person to take little baby steps. (Whether this placement is good or bad for Arduino as a business entity isn't something that I find particularly important.)
    - skybrian 1y ago
      Blinking an LED is what you do for "hello world" on every microcontroller board I've tried. The Arduino IDE supports boards from many different manufacturers.
brunosutic 1y ago
I use it for learning and play with my kids. I load the program on the board then we wire the components together and get all excited about blinking LEDs or a LCD. The lack of features (notably Wifi on our boards) and somewhat larger size are benefits for us.
kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
The ATMega AVR devices are not cost effective for what they deliver. However, the new ATtiny 0/1/2-series devices are worthwhile for applications the Cortex-M devices aren't a good fit for. The Arduino ecosystem doesn't really acknowledge these parts.
ssl-3 1y ago
Various ESP dev boards, Arduino, Pi Pico -- any of these are good places to get started from on the road towards doing useful things with microcontrollers, I think. Arduino is just a familiar name with a long (~20 year!) history. There's a plethora of pre-existing projects that a person with no prior programming or electronics experience can implement easily to get their feet wet. Some manner of ESP32 (or STM or MSP or RP2...) may be a good choice for a project for someone with some experience, but if you put a reasonably-motivated person in a room with a computer and an Arduino starter kit then they'll successfully be building simple things in no time. It remains a friendly place to start doing stuff, and that was always the primary intent.
- chpatrick 1y ago
  You can use the exact same Arduino environment with ESP32 for a fraction of the price. A D1 mini dev board with wifi costs $5 (!) on AliExpress.
  - ssl-3 1y ago
    Yes. That's one way. It works fine if a person knows enough to find that board on AliExpress and buy it and is able to gather the resources to get themselves started with it. (I, myself, typically use cheap no-name dev boards...but I've been around the block a few times.) Another other way is a ~$100 Arduino starter kit. It includes a printed instruction book and enough useful parts to sit down and begin doing stuff immediately. Anyone with a sufficiently-large pocketbook can buy it for themselves (or for someone else). One of these things is like buying individual Lego bricks, or maybe lumber and fasteners from the hardware store, with a specific goal in mind. It's creative by necessity, and for those who know how to get where they're going then it's really quite lovely to have marketplaces like AliExpress and Ace Hardware available to satisfy our whims. The other is more like a buying a packaged Lego kit or Meccano or an erector set that includes instructions for building several different things using the included parts. If a person (including a child) doesn't yet have any idea how to get started, then this can help them get the clues they need to go further with building other things. --- I could buy a Chinese D1 mini dev board and a bag of assorted resistors, LEDs, transistors, and a breadboard and put it all in a nice box and give it to a kid, but I expect that they'll have a hard time figuring out what comes next. ["Now just draw the rest of the owl."] Or, I could buy an packaged Arduino starter kit for a kid and have a reasonable expectation that they'll soon be telling me all about the neat -- if simple -- stuff they've done with it. They might not even realize the things they've learned along the way, but it'll stick with them well-enough if they want it to. And then they can move on to using VS Code with PlatformIO and start hammering out RP2040 PIO assembler when that time comes. If that's something they choose to be interested in, then they'll have a good foundation for the independent projects that may come later. The whole is sometimes greater than the sum of its parts.
mrheosuper 1y ago
you are comparing apple to orange, Arduino is not MCU. In fact, the uno r4 has a variant with esp32 module on it. It's like saying AMD Cpu is so much better, why do you need Linux.
xkcd-sucks 1y ago
Cheap fun, if you acquired a box of Arduinos from a defunct makerspace or startup in the mid 2010s
potatolicious 1y ago
Yeah I'm kind of puzzled by what Qualcomm is getting out of this. Arduino has so little presence in production devices and is largely an enthusiast and hobbyist product. To be clear, this is good! Having well-supported high-quality enthusiast products is awesome. But it just doesn't... seem to overlap with the bulk of Qualcomm's business, which is large-scale silicon sales to consumer and industrial clients.
- cosmicgadget 1y ago
  To be selling shovels for the gold rush of AI-enabled embedded devices. Is it going to happen? I don't know. But ollama on an SBC is a sandbox I'd play in.
- hadlock 1y ago
  The earlier up the product development stream you can place your product, the bigger share you'll have down the road. There's the saying about planning for 1 year, rice, 20 years, trees, 100 years schools. Windows is the leader because most kids grow up using windows in elementary school and blindly continue on. If you own arduino, maybe they start on ardunio, continue on to qualcomm products, and they're already trained in the qualcomm ecosystem before they've started engineering school. Adobe famously was very lax on closing Photoshop cracks in the early 2000s and trained up an entire generation on their product with great success.
atoav 1y ago
I run a medialab at an university. ESP32 is great, but there are some downsides that are all not dealbreakers, but can in some cases lead me to recommend a classic Arduino-type device: 1. Lack of 5V tolerant pins. Beginners may or may not be aware of the possibility of destroying the device or the need to level-shift signals. 2. Tooling may not work out of the box. As of today the tooling step boils down to pasting a URL into a field in the preferences, but that is something you need to know. You need to select the right uploading options which are much more complex than with arduino type devices. 3. IMO less clear naming of different dev boards, thus also harder to find docs. 4. Examples may not work out of the box, simple Arduino examples may fail with hard to debug issues (for beginners) where they don't know whether it is a hardware issue, wrong board/uploader setup or a pinout issue (e.g. if the onboard LED pin differs). These are all examples of issues students had when they used the ESP32 boards without my guidance, so not just my opinion or a theory. And as I said none of these are dealbreakers, but depending on the patience, stress levels, perceived skill etc. of the student this might make me recommend an Arduino over an ESP32.
cameldrv 1y ago
ESP stuff is very cheap and works well, but the Arduino Uno is a great board/ecosystem for beginners and simple projects. Being 5V is more convenient for a lot of things, and having the pin headers already on the board that you can just start plugging things in with jumper wires is great. The Arduino IDE is awesome for an extremely quick setup time. You can very easily download libraries and add them to your project, you don't have to create a blank source file, you just have to fill in setup() and loop(). The Arduino IDE makes it very easy to set up a new board and download code to it. Much of this also applies to the Arduino IDE with and ESP32, but what I really appreciate about the whole Arduino ecosystem is if you want to do something really simple, like say, activate a servo when some sensor reaches a certain value, you literally only have to type 5-6 lines of code. You're not messing around with SDKs and Makefiles and git cloning repositories etc etc etc. You can get kits for $70 that have an Arduino clone, and a bunch of different sensors, servos, steppers, etc. It's absolutely fantastic for teaching basic programming and electronics.
- vdfs 1y ago
  With ESP you can do that without even coding, using ESPHome it can be done using YAML config, it can also be paired with Home Assitante, MQTT or many other thing without any coding
j45 1y ago
Arduino is an ecosystem of pushing solutions. This is likely what is partially the appeal. My hope and wish is Arduino sincerely remains accessible as it's always been and not solely drift into B2B or enterprise spaces. There is a lot of chip building and delivery capacity being aligned this year.
leptons 1y ago
"Arduino" is more a framework than it is a specific piece of hardware. You can run "Arduino" the framework on an ESP32. Not that I would, I don't recommend it as ESP-IDF is way better, but you can run "Arduino" code on an ESP32.
bhaktatejas922 1y ago
this. esp 32 supermini is $3 and has wifi and bluetooth. Arduino stopped being useful many years ago
pbandhoney 1y ago
It's not the hardware but the ecosystem, libraries and support which is available. Sure there are alternatives like platformio but when you're learning most of the stuff out there eg youtube use Arduino IDE and libs. And just try and get an LLM to produce code based on Espressif libraries not Arduino lols...

ESP stuff is so damn cheap and capable now I'm not sure what you would use Arduino for these days.

dotancohen 1y ago

That's probably why these AI-capable Qualcomm boards are being introduced.

the__alchemist 1y ago

Community inertia / maker content.

suyash 1y ago
It used to be that but since Arduino and Pi have both gone full commercial, it's not longer viable. I teach kids coding and have been looking at alternatives like ESP or other boards that are much more cost effective and friendly for beginners.
- cruffle_duffle 1y ago
  Exactly. I dunno why you’d ever use anything but an esp for “maker stuff” at this point. They are cheaper, more capable, and have the same DX (largely, setting aside 3.3v vs 5v).
  - daemonologist 1y ago
    Well you might go Nordic for the power efficiency, but I agree capital-A Arduino wouldn't even cross my mind as an option these days.

phoehne 1y ago

Don't look at just the specs. You also need to look at the board design and programming environment. I've used the ESP32 native tools and they are a lot more complex than Arduino. But I'm an embedded firmware developer, so it's kind of what I expect. But I used an Arduino, with 5V tolerant outputs, to light up Halloween costumes for years. I do it in 1 page of code that's I write in their IDE. I don't have to set up an SDK. And the Arudino API hides all the details I don't care about. Especially if I'm really just slinging solder and wiring something up quick.

echoangle 1y ago
You can program the normal ESP32 Devboards with the Arduino IDE.
- tedivm 1y ago
  Yup- ESP32 is absolutely compatible with Arduino. There's also great support for CircuitPython and MicroPython, which makes it trivial to program the devices.
skybrian 1y ago
Even if you like the Arduino programming environment (and I do), there seems to be little reason to use Arduino hardware unless it’s for compatibility with other hardware you have? For example, there is a very nice unofficial port of Arduino for the Raspberry Pi Pico. There are also many fine Arduino-compatible single-board computers from Adafruit. The Arduino board form factor seems big and clunky in comparison. I don’t even use the Ardiuino IDE anymore; I've switched to VS Code using PlatformIO. It’s great that all these microcontroller boards and peripheral breakout boards can be programmed using the same basic API’s, but I don’t think it helps Arduino the company very much.
- ssl-3 1y ago
  There's a wealth of easy projects that a person can get started with using an Arduino. Without any opportunities for getting bogged down in anything extra at all, they can follow a simple recipe and quickly begin to blink an LED at the rate of their choosing. The Arduino was developed to be a teaching tool, and it allows for a person to take little baby steps. (Whether this placement is good or bad for Arduino as a business entity isn't something that I find particularly important.)
  - skybrian 1y ago
    Blinking an LED is what you do for "hello world" on every microcontroller board I've tried. The Arduino IDE supports boards from many different manufacturers.

brunosutic 1y ago

I use it for learning and play with my kids. I load the program on the board then we wire the components together and get all excited about blinking LEDs or a LCD. The lack of features (notably Wifi on our boards) and somewhat larger size are benefits for us.

kevin_thibedeau 1y ago

The ATMega AVR devices are not cost effective for what they deliver. However, the new ATtiny 0/1/2-series devices are worthwhile for applications the Cortex-M devices aren't a good fit for. The Arduino ecosystem doesn't really acknowledge these parts.

ssl-3 1y ago

Various ESP dev boards, Arduino, Pi Pico -- any of these are good places to get started from on the road towards doing useful things with microcontrollers, I think. Arduino is just a familiar name with a long (~20 year!) history. There's a plethora of pre-existing projects that a person with no prior programming or electronics experience can implement easily to get their feet wet. Some manner of ESP32 (or STM or MSP or RP2...) may be a good choice for a project for someone with some experience, but if you put a reasonably-motivated person in a room with a computer and an Arduino starter kit then they'll successfully be building simple things in no time. It remains a friendly place to start doing stuff, and that was always the primary intent.

chpatrick 1y ago
You can use the exact same Arduino environment with ESP32 for a fraction of the price. A D1 mini dev board with wifi costs $5 (!) on AliExpress.
- ssl-3 1y ago
  Yes. That's one way. It works fine if a person knows enough to find that board on AliExpress and buy it and is able to gather the resources to get themselves started with it. (I, myself, typically use cheap no-name dev boards...but I've been around the block a few times.) Another other way is a ~$100 Arduino starter kit. It includes a printed instruction book and enough useful parts to sit down and begin doing stuff immediately. Anyone with a sufficiently-large pocketbook can buy it for themselves (or for someone else). One of these things is like buying individual Lego bricks, or maybe lumber and fasteners from the hardware store, with a specific goal in mind. It's creative by necessity, and for those who know how to get where they're going then it's really quite lovely to have marketplaces like AliExpress and Ace Hardware available to satisfy our whims. The other is more like a buying a packaged Lego kit or Meccano or an erector set that includes instructions for building several different things using the included parts. If a person (including a child) doesn't yet have any idea how to get started, then this can help them get the clues they need to go further with building other things. --- I could buy a Chinese D1 mini dev board and a bag of assorted resistors, LEDs, transistors, and a breadboard and put it all in a nice box and give it to a kid, but I expect that they'll have a hard time figuring out what comes next. ["Now just draw the rest of the owl."] Or, I could buy an packaged Arduino starter kit for a kid and have a reasonable expectation that they'll soon be telling me all about the neat -- if simple -- stuff they've done with it. They might not even realize the things they've learned along the way, but it'll stick with them well-enough if they want it to. And then they can move on to using VS Code with PlatformIO and start hammering out RP2040 PIO assembler when that time comes. If that's something they choose to be interested in, then they'll have a good foundation for the independent projects that may come later. The whole is sometimes greater than the sum of its parts.

mrheosuper 1y ago

you are comparing apple to orange, Arduino is not MCU. In fact, the uno r4 has a variant with esp32 module on it. It's like saying AMD Cpu is so much better, why do you need Linux.

xkcd-sucks 1y ago

Cheap fun, if you acquired a box of Arduinos from a defunct makerspace or startup in the mid 2010s

potatolicious 1y ago

Yeah I'm kind of puzzled by what Qualcomm is getting out of this. Arduino has so little presence in production devices and is largely an enthusiast and hobbyist product. To be clear, this is good! Having well-supported high-quality enthusiast products is awesome. But it just doesn't... seem to overlap with the bulk of Qualcomm's business, which is large-scale silicon sales to consumer and industrial clients.

cosmicgadget 1y ago
To be selling shovels for the gold rush of AI-enabled embedded devices. Is it going to happen? I don't know. But ollama on an SBC is a sandbox I'd play in.
hadlock 1y ago
The earlier up the product development stream you can place your product, the bigger share you'll have down the road. There's the saying about planning for 1 year, rice, 20 years, trees, 100 years schools. Windows is the leader because most kids grow up using windows in elementary school and blindly continue on. If you own arduino, maybe they start on ardunio, continue on to qualcomm products, and they're already trained in the qualcomm ecosystem before they've started engineering school. Adobe famously was very lax on closing Photoshop cracks in the early 2000s and trained up an entire generation on their product with great success.

atoav 1y ago

I run a medialab at an university. ESP32 is great, but there are some downsides that are all not dealbreakers, but can in some cases lead me to recommend a classic Arduino-type device: 1. Lack of 5V tolerant pins. Beginners may or may not be aware of the possibility of destroying the device or the need to level-shift signals. 2. Tooling may not work out of the box. As of today the tooling step boils down to pasting a URL into a field in the preferences, but that is something you need to know. You need to select the right uploading options which are much more complex than with arduino type devices. 3. IMO less clear naming of different dev boards, thus also harder to find docs. 4. Examples may not work out of the box, simple Arduino examples may fail with hard to debug issues (for beginners) where they don't know whether it is a hardware issue, wrong board/uploader setup or a pinout issue (e.g. if the onboard LED pin differs). These are all examples of issues students had when they used the ESP32 boards without my guidance, so not just my opinion or a theory. And as I said none of these are dealbreakers, but depending on the patience, stress levels, perceived skill etc. of the student this might make me recommend an Arduino over an ESP32.

cameldrv 1y ago

ESP stuff is very cheap and works well, but the Arduino Uno is a great board/ecosystem for beginners and simple projects. Being 5V is more convenient for a lot of things, and having the pin headers already on the board that you can just start plugging things in with jumper wires is great. The Arduino IDE is awesome for an extremely quick setup time. You can very easily download libraries and add them to your project, you don't have to create a blank source file, you just have to fill in setup() and loop(). The Arduino IDE makes it very easy to set up a new board and download code to it. Much of this also applies to the Arduino IDE with and ESP32, but what I really appreciate about the whole Arduino ecosystem is if you want to do something really simple, like say, activate a servo when some sensor reaches a certain value, you literally only have to type 5-6 lines of code. You're not messing around with SDKs and Makefiles and git cloning repositories etc etc etc. You can get kits for $70 that have an Arduino clone, and a bunch of different sensors, servos, steppers, etc. It's absolutely fantastic for teaching basic programming and electronics.

vdfs 1y ago
With ESP you can do that without even coding, using ESPHome it can be done using YAML config, it can also be paired with Home Assitante, MQTT or many other thing without any coding

j45 1y ago

Arduino is an ecosystem of pushing solutions. This is likely what is partially the appeal. My hope and wish is Arduino sincerely remains accessible as it's always been and not solely drift into B2B or enterprise spaces. There is a lot of chip building and delivery capacity being aligned this year.

leptons 1y ago

"Arduino" is more a framework than it is a specific piece of hardware. You can run "Arduino" the framework on an ESP32. Not that I would, I don't recommend it as ESP-IDF is way better, but you can run "Arduino" code on an ESP32.

bhaktatejas922 1y ago

this. esp 32 supermini is $3 and has wifi and bluetooth. Arduino stopped being useful many years ago

pbandhoney 1y ago

It's not the hardware but the ecosystem, libraries and support which is available. Sure there are alternatives like platformio but when you're learning most of the stuff out there eg youtube use Arduino IDE and libs. And just try and get an LLM to produce code based on Espressif libraries not Arduino lols...