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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 mar
by 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 agoclone 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 agoA 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 agoIt’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 agoTo 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 agoHave 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 agoIf 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 agoThe 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 agoI 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 agoI 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 agoYou 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 agoThis 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 agoI 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 agoWhat's the TI equivalent?
- friendzis 1y agoVarious launchpads, on the very low end MSP430
- jacquesm 1y agoThe 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 agoDo you mean the Uno specifically? There are a lot of Arduino boards with varying capabilities.
- jacquesm 1y agoFor everything Arduino offers that I've ever used I know of a cheaper board with better specs.
- JKCalhoun 1y agoLong 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 agoThe 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 agoCould 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 agoIt'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.