8 ms·
The Death of Arduino?
https://archive.ph/05KK2 https://archive.ph/05KK2
- boncester 11mo agoThat's fine, I'll continue to not use it, then it's fine, right?
- nomel 11mo agoWhat's the motivation or "secret"? Is this to stop clones?
- rasz 11mo agoSecret is Qualcomms motto. NDA is us.
- 1718627440 11mo agoDumb question. Do the T&C from the time of buying apply, or always the recent ones?
- itopaloglu83 11mo agoAre they trying to dismantle the entire Arduino franchise? The fact that people can look into the source code and tinker with it made the platform everyone uses and now they're trying to capitalize on it.
- CamperBob2 11mo agoQualcomm is a comically-evil company. It's a giant law firm with a vestigial engineering department. When Larry Ellison looks at Qualcomm, he mutters, "Damn, son," under his breath, and you can't tell if it's envy or horror that made him say it. This is the sort of thing they do. It always has been.
- ptorrone 11mo agohere’s the outline of what changed, pulled directly from their new docs: • fully irrevocable license to all user content arduino now owns perpetual, world-wide rights to modify, translate, redistribute, and commercially exploit anything users upload. including code, libraries, photos, designs, and comments. non-revocable, non-expiring. • surveillance-grade ai monitoring baked into the platform their new “ai policy” explicitly allows arduino/qualcomm to monitor model usage, compute time, storage, logs, and user behavior for “compliance”, “government requests”, and undefined “protection.” • a patent-infringement shield clause users are banned from using the platform to identify or support patent claims against arduino or its affiliates. this is the opposite of open-source accountability. • deletion that isn’t deletion deleted content stays accessible internally, and possibly public, if arduino decides it’s needed for “investigation,” “legal compliance,” or if others interacted with it. • minors’ data deeply fused into the qualcomm ecosystem accounts for users under 18 feed directly into qualcomm’s global data infrastructure. includes identifiers, behavior, project data, classroom data, and device telemetry. • explicit admission of “sale” and “sharing” of identifiers, geolocation, analytics under u.s. disclosures, arduino acknowledges sharing browser data, ip addresses, location, and behavioral inferences with advertising and analytics partners. • five-year public retention of usernames after account deletion forum and project-hub posts stay public with username attached for years before being de-identified. • military and government carve-outs arduino prohibits most military use of its AI tools… except for DARPA, which gets a special exemption. • termination triggers for trivialities sharing login credentials or choosing a username they dislike can get your account wiped. • cross-border data extraction to qualcomm subsidiaries all user data is shared globally across the qualcomm group, processed in multiple jurisdictions. the part that breaks any remaining illusion of “open source community platform” is section 8.2, which forbids translating, decompiling, or reverse-engineering the platform unless arduino explicitly allows it. that was never the arduino ethos. arduino didn’t simply update its terms today. it reflashed itself into a telemetry appliance with proprietary firmware and a smiley sticker. the two documents: https://www.arduino.cc/en/privacy-policy/ https://www.arduino.cc/en/privacy-policy/ https://www.arduino.cc/en/terms-conditions/ https://www.arduino.cc/en/terms-conditions/
- 1718627440 11mo ago> fully irrevocable license to all user content arduino now owns perpetual, world-wide rights to modify, translate, redistribute, and commercially exploit anything users upload. including code, libraries, photos, designs, and comments. non-revocable, non-expiring. I don't understand how that works. So I have an Arduino library that has various Copyright messages including from Arduino and me. The licenses are a mix of MIT, GPL and ad-hoc license messages. How is Arduino able to change rights by updating terms of service? As to my understanding they don't even have the exclusive rights to begin with? > forbids translating, decompiling, or reverse-engineering the platform unless arduino explicitly allows it. that was never the arduino ethos. What does that mean for activities, that are already ongoing? And how can it be "reverse-engineering", when the board layouts are public and "decompiling", when the code is open-source? How is the "Platform" defined? Every repository, that has Arduino in the name? Does Arduino assert ownership about random peoples Github Accounts? Because that is where the official libraries are hosted.
- chrsw 11mo agoI got upvoted then downvoted in the acquisition thread where I suggested this would happen. Anyone who thinks the old Arduino still exists is simply naive.
- chermi 11mo agoDamn. I mean it's was expected I guess. Anyway, back to my Chinese esp32 since they've been better for a while anyway.
- ge96 11mo agoTeensy, maybe I finally use that stm bluepill I bought, I also have an unopened beagle bone black damn and orange crab
- collingreen 11mo agoI think I know all those words but as an outsider I have no idea what you're saying :D
- ge96 11mo agoJust a bunch of microcontroller providers, the last one is an FPGA, I still haven't learned FPGAs yet or how to design my own PCB but on the list edit: beagle bone black is an SBC apparently
- MayeulC 11mo agoRaspbery Pi Picos are extremely capable for their price as well! It isn't like we are out of options these days.
- ge96 11mo agoI actually have a KB2040 too from Adafruit, they snuck it in there (free) I think from when I ordered 20 of these metal gear servos
- chasd00 11mo agoSounds crazy, but I just get full pi zero 2s for any little hobby projects. It’s just simpler to have everything even if I’m only blinking leds.
- 11mo ago
- ChrisArchitect 11mo agoRelated: New Arduino T&C: "user shall not [...] reverse-engineer the platform" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45971039 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45971039
- jcgrillo 11mo agoEchoing the comments there... this seems like a colossally dumb move on their part. Is there any way this doesn't just end with a hard fork and some new player taking over where Arduino left off?
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- estimator7292 11mo agoThe other option is that Arduino simply fades away. Their hardware doesn't have anything to offer that you can't get on aliexpress or spin yourself for a tenth the cost. The framework is the only arguably valuable thing they offer, but even that's not enough to prop a business up on. Most likely everything will continue exactly as-is: Arduino hardware will become increasingly dated and undesirable, and open source Arduino-compatible libraries will continue flourishing until nobody remembers that Arduino was a hardware platform before it was software framework. I think we've long since passed the point where Wiring will ever go away, but I doubt we'll still be calling it Arduino for too much longer. Arduino is probably dead, and espressif is moving in.
- jcgrillo 11mo agoYeah I personally never really bought into Arduino. I got their Uno back whenever it came out but never really got into their whole IDE experience. Latest projects are on esp32 using embassy which so far has been going great. Interested to check out rp2040 or rp2350 at some point maybe.. There are tons of interesting, easy options out there now
- johnea 11mo agoThanks for the summary, since I avoid LinkedIn like the plague...
- gjsman-1000 11mo agoI used to be interested in Arduino, but the hobbyist movement is nothing like it was in the early 2010s. In part, I think, we had amazing technologies (3D Printing! Arduino! CNC! Raspberry Pi!)… but not really that many amazing ideas on what to actually do with it. What can I build with an Arduino that isn’t better, cheaper, faster, and more complete as a full product on Amazon? Almost nothing. When I’m staring at a screen 8 hours a day as a computer programmer already, my body screams for less screen time, not more. I’d rather learn Spanish or go skiing than start a FOSS project; and I don’t think I’m alone. I understand there’s an artistic expression aspect to it… but I think at this point I’d rather learn photography or painting, actual art, for expression. Something normal people understand and appreciate. It’s too much of the same for me.
- ceejayoz 11mo ago> What can I build with an Arduino that isn’t better, cheaper, faster, and more complete as a full product on Amazon? Almost nothing. I mean, my little hobby project is making the LED strips taped to my skis respond to an accelerometer, so they pulse brighter when I make a good turn. Plus Bluetooth control of the patterns. Not gonna find that on Amazon.
- kvam 11mo agoPlease blog and post about this. I need a how to.
- ceejayoz 11mo agoIf I complete the project! Haha.
- blauditore 11mo agoLove it, and I agree. I've built two "star skies" for kids, using cheap RGB LED lights, programming them to slowly change color, only use warm colors, and turn off more and more stars over time. Nothing super fancy, but very custom to my needs.
- 11mo ago
- 1970-01-01 11mo ago>Qualcomm-owned Arduino That's all you need to know. The old company no longer exists.
- robert_foss 11mo agoQcom is a lawnmower, if you stick your hand in, it'll chop it off.
- seemaze 11mo ago"You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' - lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower." - Bryan Cantrill [0] https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s
- graemep 11mo ago> "You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' - lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower." True for now. Smart devices might well be controlled by people who hate you. Even if they just do not care about you, its very different from a lawnmower not caring about you.
- hoistbypetard 11mo agoFor anyone else who can’t get to LinkedIn right now: https://archive.ph/05KK2 https://archive.ph/05KK2
- analog31 11mo agoHow's this affect the Arduino IDE and libraries? At this point those seem more important than Arduino-branded hardware.
- seanw444 11mo agoWhy not just use whatever IDE you prefer and upload via the CLI?
- giantg2 11mo agoCertainly an option. The IDE is nice for beginners, which seemed like a major point to Arduino.
- andoando 11mo agoGet VSCode and install PlatformIO extension. Its way better
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- giantg2 11mo agoI'll give it a try. Even if it is better, that's might not help noobs since there are tons of tutorials using the Arduino one. That could change over time though.
- andoando 11mo agoGetting started is really easy. https://docs.platformio.org/en/latest/integration/ide/vscode.html https://docs.platformio.org/en/latest/integration/ide/vscode... And esp32 can use the same Arduino library.
- seanw444 11mo agoThat's fair.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- JohnFen 11mo agoThe new terms are entirely unacceptable for any use. It was nice while it lasted. RIP, Arduino.
- hughdangus 11mo agoYou really shouldn’t be using Arduino over STM32. Low end STM boards that are price matched with Arduino are not only more powerful by almost a magnitude, but also have an excellent debugging IDE. The only thing to watch out for are 3V3 vs 5V but then again if you’re doing anything worthwhile you’ve got a stash of buffers, op amps and MOSFETs.
- cattown 11mo agoDoesn’t this only really affect actual Arduino brand products. There’s tons of just-as-good cheap knockoffs available. See Elegoo kits easily found on Amazon for example. The IDE is open source with the AGPL license. Can’t we just cut Qualcomm out of the supply chain and keep going as normal without too much disruption? Doesn’t even feel like a hard fork is needed. Just don’t buy Qualcomm’s crap.
- wmf 11mo agoThe goal is probably to prevent any knockoffs of the next generation products.
- duskwuff 11mo agoNot that anyone's even bothered knocking off their current generation products. The majority of Arduino clones are still using AVR or occasionally SAMD processors - Arduino's newer boards were never really accepted by the community. Some makers have even gone another direction entirely - ESP32-based development boards are popular, and there's a compatibility layer for using the Arduino IDE with those.
- F7F7F7 11mo agoSounds great in theory. But this would put a serious dent in the Arduino opensource community and fragment support. Arduino is the unifying umbrella that keeps everything together. With that gone the platform will surely lose.
- andoando 11mo agoEsp32 is just as big if not bigger.
- aaronblohowiak 11mo agoI wish there was a esp32 board with optically isolated 24v level shifters and screw terminals…
- ahepp 11mo ago> users are now explicitly forbidden from reverse-engineering or even attempting to understand how the platform works unless Arduino gives permission. I briefly looked at their IDE and CLI repos and GitHub claims they're AGPL and GPL 3 respectively. I didn't see a CLA when I looked at their contribution guide. Am I missing something here? What basis do they have to restrict users' rights to reverse engineer the software?
- reactordev 11mo agoThis is Legal Team not doing their due diligence. Just throwing a blanket terms of service update across all “properties”.
- adfm 11mo agoArduino is as influential as it is controversial and has been from the beginning. https://arduinohistory.github.io https://arduinohistory.github.io https://hackaday.com/2016/03/04/wiring-was-arduino-before-arduino/ https://hackaday.com/2016/03/04/wiring-was-arduino-before-ar...
- scuff3d 11mo agoJesus, they just ripped it off whole sale and claimed it was their own.
- nobodyandproud 11mo agoThanks. I have no qualms about seeing Arduino getting “ripped off” then.
- ahurmazda 11mo agoReally appreciate the link. I simply had no idea about this history. Just the sheer intellectual dishonesty is mind-boggling.
- rramadass 11mo agoYou should submit Hernando Barragan's story as a top-level post on HN. Many people do not know of this and he certainly deserves all the recognition he can get. I have a special kind of hatred for people who steal other folks work (even if it is freely given) without any acknowledgement. It would be just desserts if Barragan teamed up with some high profile lawyers and went after Qualcomm/Arduino like the Winklewoss twins went after Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.
- flockonus 11mo agoCan we please avoid the clickbait meta of "Death of" / "Is __ Dead?" for things that are obviously not? The news describe an important shift, but just describe that it is, no need for "youtubefication" of titles here.
- skylurk 11mo agoArduino's hackability was its unique selling point. When it is no longer hackable, what is left (of the company)?
- nocman 11mo agoI don't think in this case that most people who know what Arduino is would be at all mislead by the title. Being "dead" doesn't have to mean that a company ceases to exist. There are plenty of what I would call "dead" companies that still make money every year. "Dead" can be used figuratively. In this case, meaning that though the company continues to exist, the reason for which many people bought their products is now gone.
- fidotron 11mo agoThis is not good. Qualcomm are [expletives] anyway, but we need more activity in the connected microcontroller space in the west. Never have been a fan of the programming style encouraged by the Arduino SDK/API, so hopefully this demise will allow someone to enter the space with something that is actually competitive with the Espressif devices. Have a decent API and connectivity, at the same time, unfathomable stuff. The Picos are closest, but the connectivity situation is a mess.
- aDyslecticCrow 11mo agoEspressif was just handed the whole market on a platter. Unless raspberry can significantly expand their market but I doubt it. Year of the RISK V?
- fidotron 11mo agoIt's one of those things you need a benevolent billionaire to bootstrap which will probably never make money. The CPU cores aren't the problem (just use Hazard3) - it's all the rest, particularly the WiFi.
- aDyslecticCrow 11mo agoThere are other vendors of Wifi chips. I could see Nordic seeing this being a great collaboration to further capture marketplace for IoT connectivity beyond Bluetooth.
- fidotron 11mo agoThe brilliance of the ESP devices is not needing anything not included on a basic dev board for a huge raft of applications. The peripheral design is positively wonky, but they do just work.
- aDyslecticCrow 11mo agoMaking the reference design into a fully usable product in its own right at a very competitive price, gives Espressif a massive advantage over its real competitors. Espressif isn't really in the same market as Arduino, they just happened to intersect. Arduino is an education and hobby electronics brand. Espressif is a chipset vendor that made its reference design board so complete, cheap and flexible it became valuable as a product on its own. Other chipset vendors sell reference design boards for development, with the expectation that you will change it and produce it yourself to fit your needs. Espressif operate the same way, but if the dev board fit your needs, you don't need to produce squat; you just ship. Espressif is a massive time saver in product design. Before the first cirquitboard has left the prototype factory, it i already proven to work with a bunch of hardware because you could strap up a bunch of dev boards with a cookie platter of interfaces and prototype from day one, bought from a hobby electronics shop with 1 day shipping.
- tuetuopay 11mo agoWelp Qualcomm gonna Qualcomm. It was expected, but I did not expect it to be that blunt. It takes a serious pair to "forbid reverse-engineering" on a platform aimed at tinkerers.
- RyJones 11mo agoI could tell you a long, boring story about that; however, it would be long, and boring.
- Y_Y 11mo agoDon't threaten me with a good time
- RyJones 11mo agoOne of my friends, Matt, owned Seattle's Metrix Create:Space. He had a pick and place and a problem: Qualcomm had nice chips, but he couldn't buy them on tape, and he couldn't get data sheets. The CEO of QCA? QCE? Don't remember. Was coming up to Seattle to rub elbows; there was to be a Q&A session afterwards. I told my friend Joe that if none of the employees would ask any hard questions, I would. They didn't and I did: you talk about open source, you talk about how important getting hardware into the world is, but my pal Matt can't get open data sheets or parts on tape. WHO DO I TALK TO? He gave me someone, after many weeks of going around, they pointed me to the multi-thousand dollar IoT dev kits as the best option. Minimum order was like 1000 units.
- markus_zhang 11mo agoPlease do
- RyJones 11mo agoOK. One OEM (I don't remember who, they make TVs and the like) took our BSP and just... sent it out. To millions of devices. Tens of millions of devices. However many TVs there are. We had just added a TURN implementation to AllJoyn and set up a dev server. Not literally a small machine under someone's desk, but basically that. Maybe a two vCPU VM. The DDoS was _very_ distributed. The DNS requests knocked Qualcomm off the air. So we made that an opt-in compile-time feature for all BSPs going forward.
- lemonwaterlime 11mo agoI was never a fan of the Maker Movement. While it did get people to tinker, there was always this massive gap between lighting up an LED and using EEPROM, JTAG debugging, interrupts, and even designing some of the more intricate circuit designs to pull of intermediate projects. I found that there were people who knew how to do that stuff and the rest just trying to get by. The last time I used Arduino, I ended up just coding the bare metal out of necessity for the things I was trying to do. Some functionality of the chips was literally not accessible unless you break out of the sandbox. But then I wondered why we didn't just get people set up without shielding them so much from what it actually takes to do embedded development. Ultimately, the failure of the Maker Movement to me is that there is not an upgrade path. You start blinking LEDs and then what? Thus, lots of people end up being eternal beginners, which I don't think is helpful.
- jdc0589 11mo agoyou aren't a fan because some people never built anything advanced with it? thats a pretty wild take.
- lemonwaterlime 11mo agoI'm not a fan because, pedagogically, the structure of how it played out never allowed or helped people actually advance in the craft of it. There are better ways to build a tinker culture where people actually improve over time towards what an experienced EE and such can do. I rarely saw that progression. What happens as a result of this is that someone spends a lot of time tinkering and then they think they know what they are doing. With that confidence, they might apply for a job or take on a more dangerous project. The job will say they don't actually have the skill, even though they have been putting in the time. And the overconfidence could lead to trying to do more dangerous things than they should on projects. A tinkering culture is fine, but it needs to have safety and skill progression as its foundation. Most Maker Spaces I have been to have done a good job trying to keep things safe, but ultimately, people are people.
- nocoiner 11mo ago
- physarum_salad 11mo agoTeensy is the best imo...would love to see that expand into more boards/specific use cases.
- MegaDeKay 11mo agoMuch more expensive though.
- JKCalhoun 11mo agoAre they? $24 for a Teensy 4.0 over at Sparkfun. That seems reasonable to me. I do miss the older Teensy 3's and 2's.
- MegaDeKay 11mo agoI should have said "Much more expensive though compared to something like an ESP32 or RPi Pico". You can get something like an ESP32 Wemos D1 Mini on Ali for $4 to $5 USD, and besides solid performance and I/O, you get integrated WiFi and Bluetooth. Not to mention a community that is likely substantially larger than that built up around the Teensy.
- grumbel 11mo agoESP32, STM32 or Pico can be found for $2-3.
- physarum_salad 11mo agoDepends which model. Arduino Mega retails in Europe for around 50 euro.
- JKCalhoun 11mo agoWas looking for this comment. Long Live Teensy!
- adhoc32 11mo agoTeensy 4.1 is a beast, also quite power efficient.
- kvam 11mo agoWhat are the alternatives for aspiring tinkerers now? My wife (cybernetics engineer) and I are buying a 3D printer and planned getting an Arduino as an entry point. What should we do instead? What are the best communities and resources?
- radeeyate 11mo agoI first got into Raspberry Pi Picos, but I've also been experimenting with Esp32's and some of the nRF chips. I mostly do CircuitPython on them but Arduino is a supported platform on those I believe.
- swsieber 11mo agoI got a couple of RP2040 boards recently and I'm amazed at how easy it is to just get stuff done. Between the native usb support and the circuit python support it's been a breeze. I just got a couple of boards up and running uart in a daisy chain. It was intimidating, but the circuitpython docs made it relatively simple.
- whynotmaybe 11mo agoESP32. I'm using ESP32 with platformio which has a dedicated community https://community.platformio.org/tag/espressif32 https://community.platformio.org/tag/espressif32 I've used devkit from M5stack, waveshare and adafruit. (M5Stack has a full line of products for tinkering with many sensors & controllers) You can also find many cheaper no-brand devkit anywhere but quality & docs can be unreliable.
- doph 11mo agoESP32 - quite a range of dev boards and places like Seeed and Adafruit have a nice selection of accessories. Adafruit develops CircuitPython which is IMO the lowest barrier to entry for programming MCUs. Adafruit even has CircuitPython sketches on their site for how to interface with the components they sell. Rust on ESP32 is still a bit early - the HAL crate is still pretty unstable, but the toolchain is quite nice and I'm able to be productive enough that I never reach for C or C++.
- 11mo ago
- PaulHoule 11mo agoIt's like Verizon buying Tumblr and suddenly realizing they bought a porno site.
- giancarlostoro 11mo agoTumblr died around 2013 ~ a lot of the key people I joined for were long gone. Last I logged in (yesterday actually) a lot more people I follow deactivated their accounts. Tumblr was a great platform that was not managed correctly, even the new owners aren't really scratching the original itch of Tumblr.
- jsheard 11mo agoIt was Yahoo who bought them, but yeah.
- giancarlostoro 11mo agoVerizon bought them out eventually.
- PaulHoule 11mo agoI think Yahoo was a patsy for more bad acquisitions than anyone. It seemed so bad I wonder if the point was that if you were a well connected teen and had a dad who worked in private equity you could get your dad to pull some favors to get Yahoo to buy your startup to frame yourself as a successful founder in an act of "achievement laundering"
- aeve890 11mo ago>The most striking addition: users are now explicitly forbidden from reverse-engineering or even attempting to understand how the platform works unless Arduino gives permission. Damn, like that's ever stopped the very people that like to reverse engineer things.
- ACCount37 11mo agoIt doesn't stop much, but it sure is a bad sign. When Qualcomm got its hands on Arduino, the best case scenario was that Arduino influence would encourage Qualcomm to be more open to small developers, and the worst case scenario was that Qualcomm would devour Arduino and its degenerate lawyer culture would ruin all that's good about it. This is an update towards the latter.
- chaosprint 11mo ago> The risk is that moats like that are made of trust. If, 12 months from now, people see licenses tightening, non-Qualcomm boards lagging, or Arduino tooling getting tied to Qualcomm accounts, the same community that cheered UNO Q will call it a takeover. Right now the messaging is working — “we stay open, we just get more powerful” — but the community is watching. (facebook.com) https://entropytown.com/articles/2025-10-07-qualcomm-to-acquire-arduino/ https://entropytown.com/articles/2025-10-07-qualcomm-to-acqu... Only a month...
- boredumb 11mo agoI thought this was going to be an article about the ESP-32s
- egypturnash 11mo ago"the press release seems like it was made by ChatGPT when you put it through those AI detectors?" so does the image at the end of your post, guys, I'm an artist who's bought blinky stuff from Adafruit in the past and this makes me sad.
- nerdsniper 11mo agoNot even “seems like”. That image is AI generated beyond any reasonable doubt.
- lnxg33k1 11mo agoI’ve been a supporter of refunds over change to terms and conditions for this specific reasons
- FpUser 11mo agoWell, China will supply XiDuino in no time.
- alnwlsn 11mo agoNot sure if you're joking, but of course they already have: https://www.seeedstudio.com/xiao-series-page https://www.seeedstudio.com/xiao-series-page
- SkyeCA 11mo agoI can't speak to all their products, but their nRF52840 offering is very good for those who want to build BLE based devices.
- FpUser 11mo agoHalf joking. Point is there is enough alternative offerings, including ones from China. Personally I've never used Arduino and their IDE. Was doing C/C++ on Teensy and some other MCUs and that worked just fine for my projects
- jajuuka 11mo agoAll they had to do was leave it alone and bridge the gap between Arduino and Snapdragon boards and they would have a good thing going. Was a waste of money to buy up Arduino and ruin it.
- Mr_Eri_Atlov 11mo agoRaspberry Pi Pico and ESP32 will have to be my new toolbox mains
- johndubchak 11mo agoTime for a large industry shift to RISC-V?
- johndubchak 11mo agoDoes this mean we might see an industry shift to RISC-V?
- 0x457 11mo agoEarly Arduino were all AVR 8-bit, at the time it was already on the way out. There were no shifts in industry to those chips. People who got Arduino, either: - blinked some LEDs and forgotten about it - switched to esp32 and/or stm32 - esp32 and esp8266 move is funny because people started buying esp8266 to add Wi-Fi to their arduinos and then realized that they can just throw away arduino all together. - switched to cheap clones that offer more - quick connect for that not only want to blink LEDs, but also have some cool graphs to look at (like temperature and humidity) - boards that specifically designed for their use case (i.e. battery and eInk connectors and circuitry required) Arduino is inconsequential to industry as whole or even to hobbyist using it.
- bityard 11mo agoAs a maker, I've been following Adafruit since they sold a handful of products, probably assembled and boxed on Limor's dining room table. Adafruit has forked microcontroller libraries and toolchains before, and a huge chunk of their success has been directly due to Arduino and related things. So it will not surprise me if they are gearing up to announce their brand-spanking new Arduino-compatible devices, software, and ecosystem. They could call it Adaduino.
- ptorrone 11mo agoFruitDuino was taken
- jsheard 11mo agoAdafruit already sells own-brand Arduino clones. They have a whole line of Uno-shaped boards with various microcontrollers, some drop-in compatible with the original Uno, and others with more modern chips. https://www.adafruit.com/category/818 https://www.adafruit.com/category/818
- bityard 11mo agoI know, I'm talking about the rest.
- jononor 11mo agoAdafruit also created and maintains CircuitPython, which is targeted very much at the same audience as Arduino. Very beginner friendly, great for quick prototyping/one-offs, but serious enough that one can ship small scale projects with it. And Python is a much better language for that than C++ (which is what Arduino users do not really realize they are using).
- yapyap 11mo agoThe fact that they added some AI generated image to this is the cherry on top.
- Dig1t 11mo ago>integration of all user data (including minors) into Qualcomm’s global data ecosystem. Military weird things and more. Would be very curious to learn what "Military weird things" means exactly..
- theknarf 11mo agoThat didn't take long. RIP Arduino.
- cushychicken 11mo agoDidn’t everyone kind of migrate to more capable chips like ESP32 and STM32 in the intervening decade since Arduino got big and commercial?
- Fokamul 11mo agoOh my god, we are forbidden from reverse engineering Arduino SW. That's it, forbidden, we cannot literally do it, because some C-suit buffoon said so. See, open their SW in Ghidra or IDA and see for yourself, big pop-up and blank PE decompilation. "By Qualcomm CEO buffoon, you cannot reverse engineer my software, muhahaha." Qualcomm should sell this idea, VMProtect and others will go broke over night.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- idiotsecant 11mo agoAs usual, the answer to this headline's question is no.
- ggerules 11mo agoSo how the heck does the change in TOS work for the processing.org environment? That was an IDE that wraps around Java and a bunch of libraries. Arduino came along and borrowed the processing IDE put in an older gcc crosscompiler for the fleet of Arduino chips. They are the same IDEs but with different backends. If you can't reverse engineer the Arduino IDE, it was already borrowed from the processing people and open sourced. So are the processing people in danger of TOS violation? Or is it the reverse?
- egonschiele 11mo agoesp32 already exists, so there's a hardware alternative. What's the primary issue -- is it the lack of competition to the Arduino IDE? I have dabbled in Arduino but don't know enough to understand, but my impression was on the hardware side there are already alternatives that are better. Obviously not discounting what a huge blow this is (and right when I was planning to explore Arduino more), but practically speaking, what can we do to help?
- IshKebab 11mo agoProbably not a bad thing. Arduino have been resting on their laurels for at least a decade.
- analog31 11mo agoWhen talking among engineers about Arduino, I find that it always requires a bit of explanation, because there's Arduino, but then there's Arduino. "Arduino" is the name of the original, humble little microcontroller board. It's a brand name for a series of boards ranging from simple and cheap, to quite elaborate. It's a ecosystem of firmware development tools and libraries that revolve around the Arduino API, that has attracted a large community of participants including hobbyists and students but also third party developers. Adafruit and PJRC (Teensy) are exemplars. This may be its most valuable part, at the present time. I've been developing with microprocessors since around 1984, when I hand-assembled 6502 code for an Apple II. I wrote my own assembler for an early microcontroller, and built my own device programmer. As tooling evolved, I stayed a step behind the most advanced commercial developers, for instance by using a free vendor-supplied assembler, and then following that vendor when they switched to C. I got one of the original Arduino boards and started playing with it. To be honest, I've always preferred tools that were favored by hobbyists and students, including 8-bit BASIC, Turbo Pascal, HyperCard, Visual Basic, and now Python. For anybody who's familiar with the Python ecosystem, "Arduino" is like that today. It's grown way beyond its original implementation, but I think you have to experience both the technology and the community to fully appreciate it. I believe the original humble board, and bare bones IDE, still deserve a place, because there's such a huge amount of tutorials and easy designs that use them. They're still a good place for a hobbyist to get started.
- robotguy 11mo agoHere's the chance for the Basic Stamp to make a comeback!
- manchoz 11mo agoArduino official response - https://blog.arduino.cc/2025/11/21/the-arduino-terms-of-service-and-privacy-policy-update-setting-the-record-straight/ https://blog.arduino.cc/2025/11/21/the-arduino-terms-of-serv...