5 ms·

I don't think Qualcomm bought them to destroy them. I think they see Arduino as a gateway. Instead of hoping students will learn ARM it's more reasonable to lev

I don't think Qualcomm bought them to destroy them. I think they see Arduino as a gateway. Instead of hoping students will learn ARM it's more reasonable to leverage Arduino's simple nature to act as an on-ramp for more low level developers. I wouldn't be surprised if Arduino IDE saw a revamp to better support jumping the gap between the Arduino to Snapdragon. ST and TI do the same thing with their boards too and it's not a bad strategy.

pclmulqdq 1y ago
People are making so much of this when it seems so much simpler. Qualcomm likes buying high-margin businesses, and Arduino is a high-margin business. Gross margin on their boards is over 90% (hence why you can buy a Chinese clone of a $30 board for $3) and this trend shows no signs of slowing down. The TI equivalent of the $30 Arduino Uno is $5, and it's a true gateway product.
- Romario77 1y ago
  clone relies on hardware being designed and software written - this takes a lot of money, so you can't just count the final price of parts as the price. Arduino is open sourced in hard and software which allows this cheap cloning to exist. It also helps a lot with software and docs, which makes it cheaper for them.
  - pclmulqdq 1y ago
    A competent engineer designing a devkit as simple as an arduino needs about 1 day of work. Give it a week to include debugging. Amortize that cost over a million units and engineering time comes out to less than one cent per board.
    - shadowpho 1y ago
      It’s not quite that easy, and besides the hard part is the SW. arduino spent years writing SW code and still does to make it easy to run, debug issues and provide support. Also a million dev kits is unrealistic for vast majority of companies 5-20k is more the number I hard.
      - drzaiusx11 1y ago
        To be frank, the Arduino ide was a fork of Processing's and the compiler suite was GCC. They 'simply' glued the pre-existing pieces together. I'm not saying that it's trivial to do that but it's also not exactly a herculean task. Even the bootloader was a fork of Hernando Barragán's pre-existing Wiring project.
        shadowpho 1y ago
        >but it's also not exactly a herculean task. To me it sounds like maybe 10 software engineers for a year. You gotta do a bootloader, test it out thoroughly, setup compiler to work, glue all the pieces together, write the missing pieces, test it all some more… It’s expensive…
    - RealityVoid 1y ago
      > A competent engineer designing a devkit as simple as an arduino needs about 1 day of work. Hah! I like to underestimate scope as well, but this is really something else. Definitely a competent engineer could make something like this. But a couple of months maybe. You won't even read the documentation for the chip in a day.
      - pclmulqdq 1y ago
        Have you seen the schematics for these boards? They are exceptionally simple. Many devkits are much more complicated. I have actually done embedded engineering in the past and I was being generous with "a day." Skimming a datasheet is a skill and it certainly will not take a day to get the information you need off of it.
        RealityVoid 1y ago
        If you mean the HW alone... Still over a day. If you mean the software to go along it, a couple orders of magnitude more. Even the simplest peripherals can bite back if you are not careful and you don't test the edge cases. AVR's are indeed quite simple, but if you try to build stuff other people will use, things need to be polished. I actually do embedded engineering. I'm doing it right now! More on the SW side than the PCB design side, and, again, this is quite an exaggeration from your side, saying you could do it in a day.
        shermantanktop 1y ago
        The estimate isn’t right, but the direction is right— there just aren’t that many discrete components on these boards. The chips themselves contain capabilities that an embedded designer would otherwise need to design. I’m not sure there’s much further to go, since much of what isn’t on the chipset is power related.
        RealityVoid 1y ago
        I agree. The estimate I was contesting. Also, we somewhat were talking past each other because I see these boards as an ensemble, HW+SW. So I was thinking about the time to make both. I agree that the boards have few discrete components and the PCB's are relatively simple.
    - 1718627440 1y ago
      I have been modifying Arduino libraries for weeks, there is much more work in them than just a single day. Granted replacing the Arduino IDE with Autoconf took 3 days. (2 and a half of which were spend on analyzing what the IDE does.)
- mastazi 1y ago
  You seem to equate gateway product = affordable but, IMHO, a gateway product is something that people who are not in the field are likely to stumble upon. I recently saw Arduino kits for kids at a small local bookstore, I can imagine someone thinking "hey this electronic thingy looks cool I'll buy one for my niece's birthday". On the flip side, people who don't know anything about microcontrollers are not going to look online for Chinese Arduino clones.
  - mrheosuper 1y ago
    >people who don't know anything about microcontrollers are not going to look online for Chinese Arduino clones. But high chance they will look it up on Amazon/Ebay/whatever e-store and buy a clone without knowing.
    - farixco 1y ago
      This has 100% been my experience, even with in-person shopping. You ask for an Arduino, and the follow up question is: 'genuine or generic?'. I don't think the Arduino trademark is that valuable, it's already well underway genericization.
  - askvictor 1y ago
    I think a key part of a gateway product is community. That is what Arduino has, and what RPi has. It can also exist separate to products (e.g. micropython)
- guerrilla 1y ago
  What's the TI equivalent?
  - friendzis 1y ago
    Various launchpads, on the very low end MSP430
- jacquesm 1y ago
  The Raspberry Pi Pico blows the Arduino out of the water in terms of computational speed, available RAM and so on, and it costs a fraction. I don't remember using an Arduino since the Pi Pico came out. And if the Pico isn't enough there are the bigger family members waiting in the wings. For me Arduino is mostly over. And then there is Espressif as well, they make some neat boards.
  - extraduder_ire 1y ago
    Do you mean the Uno specifically? There are a lot of Arduino boards with varying capabilities.
    - jacquesm 1y ago
      For everything Arduino offers that I've ever used I know of a cheaper board with better specs.
  - JKCalhoun 1y ago
    Long live Teensy [1]! I just wanted that someone mentioned these Arduino-likes in the comments. I suspect many of you have come across them though. [1] https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/ https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/
    - Arch-TK 1y ago
      The teensy is so weird though. At least back when I played with them. They put a secondary chip which let's you flash over USB but they cover the debug pins and the only way to get serial over the USB port is to have a whole USB stack as part of your application. As a development board I would rather go with one of those STM32 backed boards and a knock off STLink, you need the STLink to flash, if you want DFU you can add that yourself, and you get a debug adapter.
      - neltnerb 1y ago
        Could you clarify what you mean about getting serial over the USB port in the context of debug pins? I've been using Teensy devices for over a decade and have always had it just recognize the device as if it were a USB to serial adapter and I can talk to it as what I'd call "serial over the USB port". But that obviously doesn't involve what I think software people usually mean when they're talking about firmware debug -- which usually entails stepping through execution, right? I'm used to just printing debug statements to the Serial.println() function, I learned on the 8051 where the best bet was to toggle different pins when code lines are passed, so even Serial.println() was a huge step up.
- ezconnect 1y ago
  It's probably simpler, Arduino knows the market has no future and wanted to get out and did a sales pitch to Qualcomm and Qualcomm accepted.
freeopinion 1y ago
Some years back when bluepills ran $2, Arduinos seemed to have no point. Today, you can buy an ESP32 dev board with wifi for $6. Or an Arduino Uno Wifi for $55.
- brucehoult 1y ago
  Note that both Bluepill and ESP32 can be programmed in the Arduino IDE, using the Arduino library, and the vast library of Arduino sketches and 3rd party libraries (as long as they don't use AVR assembly language. So can the Pi Pico, the Milk-V Duo (one 64 bit Linux core, one 64 bit microcontroller core), and many others.
  - serbuvlad 1y ago
    While that is true, both Espressif and the Pico have their own SDKs, and they're really well written too. The Arduino SDK is the simplest to use, sure, but the Pico framework (I don't have experience with the Espressif one) is extremely good, and the Pico's PIO is a godsend. I used it to implement 3 wire SPI (data bidirectional on the same wire) at almost 'real-time', which is to say, at half the speed of the hardware SPI controller (half the speed because the interface clock is put up one cycle and down the next; this also gives enough time for data shuffling). Why does the Arduino SDK necessitate a huge markup on Arduino boards, when $0 of every computer I buy to run Linux on goes to GCC?
    - mietek 1y ago
      Just because most of the free software ecosystem relies on unpaid volunteer work does not mean it is a desirable state of affairs, especially with billion dollar companies building on top of said work while hardly contributing anything back.
      - serbuvlad 1y ago
        While that is true, if Espressif and the Raspberry Pi Foundation can build their SDKs and still offer cheap chips/boards, so could Arduino. I'm not expecting a $0 markup, but Arduino prices are simply unreasonable for what they offer, especially if you live in a lower income country.

pclmulqdq 1y ago

People are making so much of this when it seems so much simpler. Qualcomm likes buying high-margin businesses, and Arduino is a high-margin business. Gross margin on their boards is over 90% (hence why you can buy a Chinese clone of a $30 board for $3) and this trend shows no signs of slowing down. The TI equivalent of the $30 Arduino Uno is $5, and it's a true gateway product.

Romario77 1y ago
clone relies on hardware being designed and software written - this takes a lot of money, so you can't just count the final price of parts as the price. Arduino is open sourced in hard and software which allows this cheap cloning to exist. It also helps a lot with software and docs, which makes it cheaper for them.
- pclmulqdq 1y ago
  A competent engineer designing a devkit as simple as an arduino needs about 1 day of work. Give it a week to include debugging. Amortize that cost over a million units and engineering time comes out to less than one cent per board.
  - shadowpho 1y ago
    It’s not quite that easy, and besides the hard part is the SW. arduino spent years writing SW code and still does to make it easy to run, debug issues and provide support. Also a million dev kits is unrealistic for vast majority of companies 5-20k is more the number I hard.
    - drzaiusx11 1y ago
      To be frank, the Arduino ide was a fork of Processing's and the compiler suite was GCC. They 'simply' glued the pre-existing pieces together. I'm not saying that it's trivial to do that but it's also not exactly a herculean task. Even the bootloader was a fork of Hernando Barragán's pre-existing Wiring project.
      - shadowpho 1y ago
        >but it's also not exactly a herculean task. To me it sounds like maybe 10 software engineers for a year. You gotta do a bootloader, test it out thoroughly, setup compiler to work, glue all the pieces together, write the missing pieces, test it all some more… It’s expensive…
  - RealityVoid 1y ago
    > A competent engineer designing a devkit as simple as an arduino needs about 1 day of work. Hah! I like to underestimate scope as well, but this is really something else. Definitely a competent engineer could make something like this. But a couple of months maybe. You won't even read the documentation for the chip in a day.
    - pclmulqdq 1y ago
      Have you seen the schematics for these boards? They are exceptionally simple. Many devkits are much more complicated. I have actually done embedded engineering in the past and I was being generous with "a day." Skimming a datasheet is a skill and it certainly will not take a day to get the information you need off of it.
      - RealityVoid 1y ago
        If you mean the HW alone... Still over a day. If you mean the software to go along it, a couple orders of magnitude more. Even the simplest peripherals can bite back if you are not careful and you don't test the edge cases. AVR's are indeed quite simple, but if you try to build stuff other people will use, things need to be polished. I actually do embedded engineering. I'm doing it right now! More on the SW side than the PCB design side, and, again, this is quite an exaggeration from your side, saying you could do it in a day.
        shermantanktop 1y ago
        The estimate isn’t right, but the direction is right— there just aren’t that many discrete components on these boards. The chips themselves contain capabilities that an embedded designer would otherwise need to design. I’m not sure there’s much further to go, since much of what isn’t on the chipset is power related.
        RealityVoid 1y ago
        I agree. The estimate I was contesting. Also, we somewhat were talking past each other because I see these boards as an ensemble, HW+SW. So I was thinking about the time to make both. I agree that the boards have few discrete components and the PCB's are relatively simple.
  - 1718627440 1y ago
    I have been modifying Arduino libraries for weeks, there is much more work in them than just a single day. Granted replacing the Arduino IDE with Autoconf took 3 days. (2 and a half of which were spend on analyzing what the IDE does.)
mastazi 1y ago
You seem to equate gateway product = affordable but, IMHO, a gateway product is something that people who are not in the field are likely to stumble upon. I recently saw Arduino kits for kids at a small local bookstore, I can imagine someone thinking "hey this electronic thingy looks cool I'll buy one for my niece's birthday". On the flip side, people who don't know anything about microcontrollers are not going to look online for Chinese Arduino clones.
- mrheosuper 1y ago
  >people who don't know anything about microcontrollers are not going to look online for Chinese Arduino clones. But high chance they will look it up on Amazon/Ebay/whatever e-store and buy a clone without knowing.
  - farixco 1y ago
    This has 100% been my experience, even with in-person shopping. You ask for an Arduino, and the follow up question is: 'genuine or generic?'. I don't think the Arduino trademark is that valuable, it's already well underway genericization.
- askvictor 1y ago
  I think a key part of a gateway product is community. That is what Arduino has, and what RPi has. It can also exist separate to products (e.g. micropython)
guerrilla 1y ago
What's the TI equivalent?
- friendzis 1y ago
  Various launchpads, on the very low end MSP430
jacquesm 1y ago
The Raspberry Pi Pico blows the Arduino out of the water in terms of computational speed, available RAM and so on, and it costs a fraction. I don't remember using an Arduino since the Pi Pico came out. And if the Pico isn't enough there are the bigger family members waiting in the wings. For me Arduino is mostly over. And then there is Espressif as well, they make some neat boards.
- extraduder_ire 1y ago
  Do you mean the Uno specifically? There are a lot of Arduino boards with varying capabilities.
  - jacquesm 1y ago
    For everything Arduino offers that I've ever used I know of a cheaper board with better specs.
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  Long live Teensy [1]! I just wanted that someone mentioned these Arduino-likes in the comments. I suspect many of you have come across them though. [1] https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/ https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/
  - Arch-TK 1y ago
    The teensy is so weird though. At least back when I played with them. They put a secondary chip which let's you flash over USB but they cover the debug pins and the only way to get serial over the USB port is to have a whole USB stack as part of your application. As a development board I would rather go with one of those STM32 backed boards and a knock off STLink, you need the STLink to flash, if you want DFU you can add that yourself, and you get a debug adapter.
    - neltnerb 1y ago
      Could you clarify what you mean about getting serial over the USB port in the context of debug pins? I've been using Teensy devices for over a decade and have always had it just recognize the device as if it were a USB to serial adapter and I can talk to it as what I'd call "serial over the USB port". But that obviously doesn't involve what I think software people usually mean when they're talking about firmware debug -- which usually entails stepping through execution, right? I'm used to just printing debug statements to the Serial.println() function, I learned on the 8051 where the best bet was to toggle different pins when code lines are passed, so even Serial.println() was a huge step up.
ezconnect 1y ago
It's probably simpler, Arduino knows the market has no future and wanted to get out and did a sales pitch to Qualcomm and Qualcomm accepted.

freeopinion 1y ago

Some years back when bluepills ran $2, Arduinos seemed to have no point. Today, you can buy an ESP32 dev board with wifi for $6. Or an Arduino Uno Wifi for $55.

brucehoult 1y ago
Note that both Bluepill and ESP32 can be programmed in the Arduino IDE, using the Arduino library, and the vast library of Arduino sketches and 3rd party libraries (as long as they don't use AVR assembly language. So can the Pi Pico, the Milk-V Duo (one 64 bit Linux core, one 64 bit microcontroller core), and many others.
- serbuvlad 1y ago
  While that is true, both Espressif and the Pico have their own SDKs, and they're really well written too. The Arduino SDK is the simplest to use, sure, but the Pico framework (I don't have experience with the Espressif one) is extremely good, and the Pico's PIO is a godsend. I used it to implement 3 wire SPI (data bidirectional on the same wire) at almost 'real-time', which is to say, at half the speed of the hardware SPI controller (half the speed because the interface clock is put up one cycle and down the next; this also gives enough time for data shuffling). Why does the Arduino SDK necessitate a huge markup on Arduino boards, when $0 of every computer I buy to run Linux on goes to GCC?
  - mietek 1y ago
    Just because most of the free software ecosystem relies on unpaid volunteer work does not mean it is a desirable state of affairs, especially with billion dollar companies building on top of said work while hardly contributing anything back.
    - serbuvlad 1y ago
      While that is true, if Espressif and the Raspberry Pi Foundation can build their SDKs and still offer cheap chips/boards, so could Arduino. I'm not expecting a $0 markup, but Arduino prices are simply unreasonable for what they offer, especially if you live in a lower income country.