5 ms·

The problem is that there just isn't a whole lot of money to be made in providing hobby hardware for enthusiasts. Every time a big player gets involved, they th

The problem is that there just isn't a whole lot of money to be made in providing hobby hardware for enthusiasts. Every time a big player gets involved, they think they can change this. A decade ago, Intel tried that back in the day with Galileo / Edison, and tellingly, they came up with the same "ideas": IoT / AI. If you're doing cheap IoT trinkets, you're never going to pay extra for a brand. You're going to buy the cheapest wifi / BT chipset out there and make do with that. And if you're doing serious AI, you basically go for a real computer with real computing power, and in that segment, the Arduino brand means nothing. I suspect there was an internal deck saying how this acquisition is going to give them foothold in the hobby community, but if they wanted that, there's a million better ways. Starting with making documentation, SDKs, and toolchains accessible and easy to use. There's a reason why you see Microchip, STM, RPi, and Espressif chips in every other DIY project.

TheJoeMan 1y ago
I think it might be related to them charging say $100 instead of $5 for the device and providing "lifetime" (read: "indefinite") access to their IoT Cloud. Except there are no guarantees on the duration of that access. As a side note, I don't get why they can't find the NPV of actually lifetime cloud compute. Compute costs are decreasing rapidly, so a $5/yr perpetuity has a NPV of $185 assuming 2.7% inflation?
xg15 1y ago
I wonder if even inside the hobbyist space, Arduino got obsoleted by the Raspberry Pi and its clones/compatible devices. Basically, if you already got the skills to work with "bare" microcontrollers, you won't need all the simplification and handholding that Arduino provides and you can just buy the individual chips and fully utilize the tiny form factor and low power requirements. If you want to learn programming microcontrollers, then locking yourself into Arduino's abstractions is probably counterproductive. On the other hand, if you do want to just combine different ready-made modules, focus on programming and don't want to worry too much on the low-level stuff, you will probably use a raspberry pi or similar: The form factor is only slightly larger than an arduino, but you get a full-fledged PC instead of a microcontroller. So I don't really see a niche there.
- MountDoom 1y ago
  > Arduino got obsoleted by the Raspberry Pi and its clones/compatible devices. Not entirely. Arduino was always targeted at the "casual DIY" segment - artists, school robotics clubs, and other folks who wanted automation without a steep learning curve. This was a notch below the "serious hobbyist" tier where you could save a lot of money by just buying a bare-metal version of the same chip and write some code in C (or Rust). Or the pro tier, where there's way you're paying $20+ for a glorified breakout board. Casual DIY always had a ton of inertia. It's also the reason why every other design for an analog guitar pedal or whatever is using components that are 50 years old: ancient designs are just copied-and-pasted forever. So I don't think Arduino is dead there, although other platforms are definitely eating some of their lunch.
  - DamonHD 1y ago
    I designed a consumer product based on a respun Uno, that has sold >500k units. The toolchain and hardware remains pretty capable, and can run super low power with care (~1 microamp most of the time).
    - MountDoom 1y ago
      But why? You can have the same chip for much less. The "toolchain" is just a bit of syntactic sugar around existing languages and tools, but more to the point, nothing stops you from using it with your own hardware. I'm not doubting you, just sincerely curious.
      - DamonHD 1y ago
        That design started ~10Y ago. If I was starting again I might pick something different.
      - michaelt 1y ago
        If they've done 500k units, "based on a respun Uno" almost certainly means "there's a atmega328p on the PCB, a 16MHz crystal, and some points granting access to the serial and reset pins"
petra 1y ago
I agree. The Arduino brand isn't for professionals. But let's say tomorrow they come together with bundle/partnerships to create a new, great dev environment, very easy, that a mechanical engineer can prototype a great robot for a niche use case,and continue to use that chip and code, with some changes in V1 production ? Is there value to the Arduino brand and community than ?
- bluGill 1y ago
  Arduino is used by many professionals. It is cheap enough that you can buy it on your corporate cards and you boss won't ask many questions. As such many products start with an Ardunio based demo, and if/when the demo is a success it moves to a real company project with a real budget. The question though is does this add value for the owners of Arduino? All too often when a project moves from the demo to real engineering (making a demo something you can sell is typically about ten times harder than the demo) you select all new hardware.
  - kovac 1y ago
    When professionals use Arduinos for such use cases, do they use the Arduino software platform or do they use the chio verndors' toolchains? Just curious how the professionals work with these things.
    - carlgreene 1y ago
      From what I've heard (primarily in the music hardware space) is that it depends. Some use Arduino's software and language while others use the lower level toolchains. This is prototyping mostly so I'm not sure if any of the Arduino code actually gets shipped with production devices.
    - ACCount37 1y ago
      It depends, really. Mostly on who does the project. Some people hail from hacker town and will use whatever they have at hand. Some learned on vendor tooling, and would want it to be "proper", and would always try to use a vendor SDK with a vendor IDE. Some learned on vendor tooling and prefer not to use vendor tooling for "familiarity breeds contempt" reasons. As a degenerate case: I've seen software for an ESP32 board that was prototyped entirely in Arduino IDE, and we almost shipped it that way. Because the prototype team cooked, and when the "make it an actual product team" tried to remake it in ESP-IDF, they ended up with less features and more bugs. They got it together eventually though.
agloe_dreams 1y ago
I mean, if you have seen RasPi prices lately, I'm not so sure this is true. Seems like a really profitable biz..granted, I wouldn't pay their absurd prices for such underpowered hardware. Virtually nobody should buy their $200 CM5 product for example.
bluescrn 1y ago
> The problem is that there just isn't a whole lot of money to be made in providing hobby hardware for enthusiasts. With Arduino, the hardware is probably the least interesting/important part. The software side is more important, providing an easy-to-use IDE and a simplified API and platform abstraction layer to make it super-easy to get started. Then there's the documentation, sample code, and community.
- analog31 1y ago
  Indeed, at this point, there are possibly hundreds of Arduino compatible boards, and the other pieces of the puzzle are more important. Arduino is the Python of microcontroller development. Come for the odd little microcontroller board. Stay for the community.
pclmulqdq 1y ago
> If you're doing cheap IoT trinkets, you're never going to pay extra for a brand. Except for the Arduino brand. Arduino boards have margins that traditional hardware vendors can only dream of achieving. The only thing carrying that profit margin is the Arduino brand. The software stack is not tied to their hardware, but they make tons of money on hardware.
- noobermin 1y ago
  If life is so sweet for them, why sell arduino?
  - pclmulqdq 1y ago
    Because you have a good income stream but you want more money now? Arduino is a lifestyle business (a good lifestyle, don't get me wrong) much more than a growth business. It's easy to price what the income stream is worth.
    - noobermin 1y ago
      I don't know if you realise it or not but the point you're making is self-contradictory. If they make great margins, that's why qualcomm would want to buy them, but not why they'd want to sell and have to share it. I guess it makes sense if you're saying arduino are suckers
      - sneak 1y ago
        It’s unlikely that Qualcomm purchased them for their revenue or margins, which to Qualcomm’s scale are basically irrelevant.
        noobermin 1y ago
        So it sounds like again, this purchase makes no sense from anyone's perspective unless arduino are suckers.
vayup 1y ago
There is a whole lot of commerical products built out of what we consider hobby projects (Adruino, Raspberry Pi). Eg: digital displays, industrial equipment controllers etc. All of this is clubbed under the nebulous IoT moniker. My take: Qualcomm hopes to leverage Adriano adoption to expand their IoT share, and also to grow Adruino's footprint to include more smart IoT devices using Qualcomm's chipsets (Eg: Robotics)
riazrizvi 1y ago
Maybe. New people means new perspective. Maybe they see value in an ecosystem of developers who are keen to spend their free time to drum up interesting content, based on their projects and applications. This grassroots interest is what drove Apple to displace Sun Microsystems as the de facto, UNIX system.
mrheosuper 1y ago
>If you're doing cheap IoT trinkets, you're never going to pay extra for a brand. You're going to buy the cheapest wifi / BT chipset out there and make do with that. It's the opposite of that. Hobbyist/low volume maker gonna spend extra money to buy a familar tool, instead of going extra miles finding the cheapest available. Even ESP32 is bad in term of perfomance/features and how much it cost.
Alupis 1y ago
> A decade ago, Intel tried that back in the day with Galileo / Edison, and tellingly, they came up with the same "ideas": IoT / AI. Intel's execution - as usual - was poor and lacking. Both the Galileo and Edison were much more expensive than their Arduino counterparts, and their x86 cpu's were of little value within that space (especially at the time). Neither made it past 5 years without being killed - which is exactly what people feared. A stunning lack of long-term commitment from Intel to develop and grow a community, leaving anyone that actually built products based on their devices holding a useless bag.
- userbinator 1y ago
  and their x86 cpu's were of little value within that space Intel could've attracted the entire retrocomputing community if they realised that the peripherals around x86 and the PC ecosystem were what got them to where they were in the first place, and made Galileo/Edison actually PC-compatible, but they ended up making a SoC with a 486DX+ core and mostly-incompatible peripherals (one would think they should've learned their lesson with the 80186/88...) and somehow convinced Microsoft to make a special version of Windows(!) for it despite a complete lack of any video output capabilities. "WTF were they thinking!?" is the most concise summary of that fiasco.
- vachina 1y ago
  Intel Edison/Galileo didn’t work because everything they could do is replaced by purpose built ASICs, much cheaper at scale and energy efficient, important metrics for IoT. They were at best PoC material in the lab.
slightwinder 1y ago
> And if you're doing serious AI, you basically go for a real computer with real computing power, and in that segment, the Arduino brand means nothing. What about cheap AI for toys and gadgets? Maybe the next Furby or some smart Toaster could run on their chips. AI is spreading, moving into casual corners outside of hobbyists and high professionals, maybe they aim to get a foothold there?
hackernewds 1y ago
Not everything in life is about money.
MisterTea 1y ago
> I suspect there was an internal deck saying how this acquisition is going to give them foothold in the hobby community, No. This is to give them a foothold in the "IoT hammer" manufacturing business. They looked at how the Raspberry Pi went from cheap hobby computer running Linux to low effort rapid prototyping embedded platform that can run a full web stack. They want to be part of a full dev pipeline from prototype to product. The real target audience are people building things who don't care how it works as long as it works. So expect 99.9% of these projects to use some sort of Python or JS thing running in a container on the Linux while the microcontroller runs a few lines of c to manipulate IO pin state from the Linux thing. Just like all those abandoned Spin scooters in Seattle that had raspberry Pi's in them. That is the market they are after, not the person who builds a one-off Arduino fish feeder.

TheJoeMan 1y ago

I think it might be related to them charging say $100 instead of $5 for the device and providing "lifetime" (read: "indefinite") access to their IoT Cloud. Except there are no guarantees on the duration of that access. As a side note, I don't get why they can't find the NPV of actually lifetime cloud compute. Compute costs are decreasing rapidly, so a $5/yr perpetuity has a NPV of $185 assuming 2.7% inflation?

xg15 1y ago

I wonder if even inside the hobbyist space, Arduino got obsoleted by the Raspberry Pi and its clones/compatible devices. Basically, if you already got the skills to work with "bare" microcontrollers, you won't need all the simplification and handholding that Arduino provides and you can just buy the individual chips and fully utilize the tiny form factor and low power requirements. If you want to learn programming microcontrollers, then locking yourself into Arduino's abstractions is probably counterproductive. On the other hand, if you do want to just combine different ready-made modules, focus on programming and don't want to worry too much on the low-level stuff, you will probably use a raspberry pi or similar: The form factor is only slightly larger than an arduino, but you get a full-fledged PC instead of a microcontroller. So I don't really see a niche there.

MountDoom 1y ago
> Arduino got obsoleted by the Raspberry Pi and its clones/compatible devices. Not entirely. Arduino was always targeted at the "casual DIY" segment - artists, school robotics clubs, and other folks who wanted automation without a steep learning curve. This was a notch below the "serious hobbyist" tier where you could save a lot of money by just buying a bare-metal version of the same chip and write some code in C (or Rust). Or the pro tier, where there's way you're paying $20+ for a glorified breakout board. Casual DIY always had a ton of inertia. It's also the reason why every other design for an analog guitar pedal or whatever is using components that are 50 years old: ancient designs are just copied-and-pasted forever. So I don't think Arduino is dead there, although other platforms are definitely eating some of their lunch.
- DamonHD 1y ago
  I designed a consumer product based on a respun Uno, that has sold >500k units. The toolchain and hardware remains pretty capable, and can run super low power with care (~1 microamp most of the time).
  - MountDoom 1y ago
    But why? You can have the same chip for much less. The "toolchain" is just a bit of syntactic sugar around existing languages and tools, but more to the point, nothing stops you from using it with your own hardware. I'm not doubting you, just sincerely curious.
    - DamonHD 1y ago
      That design started ~10Y ago. If I was starting again I might pick something different.
    - michaelt 1y ago
      If they've done 500k units, "based on a respun Uno" almost certainly means "there's a atmega328p on the PCB, a 16MHz crystal, and some points granting access to the serial and reset pins"

petra 1y ago

I agree. The Arduino brand isn't for professionals. But let's say tomorrow they come together with bundle/partnerships to create a new, great dev environment, very easy, that a mechanical engineer can prototype a great robot for a niche use case,and continue to use that chip and code, with some changes in V1 production ? Is there value to the Arduino brand and community than ?

bluGill 1y ago
Arduino is used by many professionals. It is cheap enough that you can buy it on your corporate cards and you boss won't ask many questions. As such many products start with an Ardunio based demo, and if/when the demo is a success it moves to a real company project with a real budget. The question though is does this add value for the owners of Arduino? All too often when a project moves from the demo to real engineering (making a demo something you can sell is typically about ten times harder than the demo) you select all new hardware.
- kovac 1y ago
  When professionals use Arduinos for such use cases, do they use the Arduino software platform or do they use the chio verndors' toolchains? Just curious how the professionals work with these things.
  - carlgreene 1y ago
    From what I've heard (primarily in the music hardware space) is that it depends. Some use Arduino's software and language while others use the lower level toolchains. This is prototyping mostly so I'm not sure if any of the Arduino code actually gets shipped with production devices.
  - ACCount37 1y ago
    It depends, really. Mostly on who does the project. Some people hail from hacker town and will use whatever they have at hand. Some learned on vendor tooling, and would want it to be "proper", and would always try to use a vendor SDK with a vendor IDE. Some learned on vendor tooling and prefer not to use vendor tooling for "familiarity breeds contempt" reasons. As a degenerate case: I've seen software for an ESP32 board that was prototyped entirely in Arduino IDE, and we almost shipped it that way. Because the prototype team cooked, and when the "make it an actual product team" tried to remake it in ESP-IDF, they ended up with less features and more bugs. They got it together eventually though.

agloe_dreams 1y ago

I mean, if you have seen RasPi prices lately, I'm not so sure this is true. Seems like a really profitable biz..granted, I wouldn't pay their absurd prices for such underpowered hardware. Virtually nobody should buy their $200 CM5 product for example.

bluescrn 1y ago

> The problem is that there just isn't a whole lot of money to be made in providing hobby hardware for enthusiasts. With Arduino, the hardware is probably the least interesting/important part. The software side is more important, providing an easy-to-use IDE and a simplified API and platform abstraction layer to make it super-easy to get started. Then there's the documentation, sample code, and community.

analog31 1y ago
Indeed, at this point, there are possibly hundreds of Arduino compatible boards, and the other pieces of the puzzle are more important. Arduino is the Python of microcontroller development. Come for the odd little microcontroller board. Stay for the community.

pclmulqdq 1y ago

> If you're doing cheap IoT trinkets, you're never going to pay extra for a brand. Except for the Arduino brand. Arduino boards have margins that traditional hardware vendors can only dream of achieving. The only thing carrying that profit margin is the Arduino brand. The software stack is not tied to their hardware, but they make tons of money on hardware.

noobermin 1y ago
If life is so sweet for them, why sell arduino?
- pclmulqdq 1y ago
  Because you have a good income stream but you want more money now? Arduino is a lifestyle business (a good lifestyle, don't get me wrong) much more than a growth business. It's easy to price what the income stream is worth.
  - noobermin 1y ago
    I don't know if you realise it or not but the point you're making is self-contradictory. If they make great margins, that's why qualcomm would want to buy them, but not why they'd want to sell and have to share it. I guess it makes sense if you're saying arduino are suckers
    - sneak 1y ago
      It’s unlikely that Qualcomm purchased them for their revenue or margins, which to Qualcomm’s scale are basically irrelevant.
      - noobermin 1y ago
        So it sounds like again, this purchase makes no sense from anyone's perspective unless arduino are suckers.

vayup 1y ago

There is a whole lot of commerical products built out of what we consider hobby projects (Adruino, Raspberry Pi). Eg: digital displays, industrial equipment controllers etc. All of this is clubbed under the nebulous IoT moniker. My take: Qualcomm hopes to leverage Adriano adoption to expand their IoT share, and also to grow Adruino's footprint to include more smart IoT devices using Qualcomm's chipsets (Eg: Robotics)

riazrizvi 1y ago

Maybe. New people means new perspective. Maybe they see value in an ecosystem of developers who are keen to spend their free time to drum up interesting content, based on their projects and applications. This grassroots interest is what drove Apple to displace Sun Microsystems as the de facto, UNIX system.

mrheosuper 1y ago

>If you're doing cheap IoT trinkets, you're never going to pay extra for a brand. You're going to buy the cheapest wifi / BT chipset out there and make do with that. It's the opposite of that. Hobbyist/low volume maker gonna spend extra money to buy a familar tool, instead of going extra miles finding the cheapest available. Even ESP32 is bad in term of perfomance/features and how much it cost.

Alupis 1y ago

> A decade ago, Intel tried that back in the day with Galileo / Edison, and tellingly, they came up with the same "ideas": IoT / AI. Intel's execution - as usual - was poor and lacking. Both the Galileo and Edison were much more expensive than their Arduino counterparts, and their x86 cpu's were of little value within that space (especially at the time). Neither made it past 5 years without being killed - which is exactly what people feared. A stunning lack of long-term commitment from Intel to develop and grow a community, leaving anyone that actually built products based on their devices holding a useless bag.

userbinator 1y ago
and their x86 cpu's were of little value within that space Intel could've attracted the entire retrocomputing community if they realised that the peripherals around x86 and the PC ecosystem were what got them to where they were in the first place, and made Galileo/Edison actually PC-compatible, but they ended up making a SoC with a 486DX+ core and mostly-incompatible peripherals (one would think they should've learned their lesson with the 80186/88...) and somehow convinced Microsoft to make a special version of Windows(!) for it despite a complete lack of any video output capabilities. "WTF were they thinking!?" is the most concise summary of that fiasco.
vachina 1y ago
Intel Edison/Galileo didn’t work because everything they could do is replaced by purpose built ASICs, much cheaper at scale and energy efficient, important metrics for IoT. They were at best PoC material in the lab.

slightwinder 1y ago

> And if you're doing serious AI, you basically go for a real computer with real computing power, and in that segment, the Arduino brand means nothing. What about cheap AI for toys and gadgets? Maybe the next Furby or some smart Toaster could run on their chips. AI is spreading, moving into casual corners outside of hobbyists and high professionals, maybe they aim to get a foothold there?

hackernewds 1y ago

Not everything in life is about money.

MisterTea 1y ago

> I suspect there was an internal deck saying how this acquisition is going to give them foothold in the hobby community, No. This is to give them a foothold in the "IoT hammer" manufacturing business. They looked at how the Raspberry Pi went from cheap hobby computer running Linux to low effort rapid prototyping embedded platform that can run a full web stack. They want to be part of a full dev pipeline from prototype to product. The real target audience are people building things who don't care how it works as long as it works. So expect 99.9% of these projects to use some sort of Python or JS thing running in a container on the Linux while the microcontroller runs a few lines of c to manipulate IO pin state from the Linux thing. Just like all those abandoned Spin scooters in Seattle that had raspberry Pi's in them. That is the market they are after, not the person who builds a one-off Arduino fish feeder.