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Adafruit: Arduino’s Rules Are ‘Incompatible With Open Source’

437 points by MilnerRoute 10mo ago

deleted 10mo ago
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Animats 10mo ago
"Anything that was open, stays open". Now contemplate open Android and Google Play Services.
- p0w3n3d 10mo ago
  They did a great job. We must recognise experts in this matter. They had help of other companies and hardware producers of course, but still... Or even that they forbid to use different clients for YouTube
  - Y_Y 10mo ago
    > Or even that they forbid to use different clients for YouTube Ineffectively, thank God
- squarefoot 10mo ago
  Was going to quote this exact line. Yes, what was open stays open, but unmaintained, then development/updates/patches are moved to the close(r) alternative until the hassle of running the open old one isn't worth the effort anymore and the need of updated/debugged libraries or board definitions forces the users to migrate. I wonder how doable would be a fork of the whole shebang with the online downloadable content hosted somewhere.
MrJohz 10mo ago
It's a bit odd that most of this article is various claims from one of Arduino's competitors being taken at face value, especially when the EFF spokesperson generally seems to think the new terms broadly make sense, albeit with some criticisms. It sounds like Adafruit are just trying to sow some outrage here.
- malfist 10mo ago
  Adafruit is not an arduino competitor. They sell arduinos
  - sunnyps 10mo ago
    They sell Arduino compatible boards (amongst other things) from what I gather, so yes, they would be competitors.
  - andrewflnr 10mo ago
    I was very confused when the article referred to > Chief microcontroller rival Adafruit Implying that Adafruit makes their own competing microcontrollers, which sure would have been news to me. Edit: sees sibling posted at the same time. Well that would explain it.
    - sho_hn 10mo ago
      Historically neither of them made any microcontrollers. Arduino shipped Atmel and Raspberry Pi chips. Adafruit has boards with a variety of microcontrollers from various brands on them. This is different now that Arduino is Qualcomm-owned and ships Qualcomm silicon, of course.
      - inferiorhuman 10mo ago
        To be fair they're shipping Qualcomm+STM silicon now.
  - rpcope1 10mo ago
    They also sell feather and a bunch of other vaguely similar stuff and have their own "maker" ecosystem (think CircuitPython). I like Adafruit, but they are in many senses competitors to Arduino.
- riedel 10mo ago
  I understand adafruit's take at it. But I guess they are simply plain wrong when saying 'incompatible', at least from a pure license perspective for the HW/firmware. As other pointed out, companies like Google demonstrate, how open source can be used in a rather aggressive commercial strategy. However, I think the good news is that that the open hardware stuff is not rocket science and maintenance hell at this point (without the new Qualcomm bits). I guess it is now for others to step up and make the ecosystem resilient. That is IMHO the power of open source in case it works.
RobotToaster 10mo ago
> our commitment to the open source spirit is unwavering and Arduino’s core mission remains unchanged Running a proprietary SaaS doesn't really show commitment to open source.
- _ache_ 10mo ago
  I agree, but that is nothing new. The original SaaS was already proprietary. And btw, the "reverse engineering" close was already here too. You can check the archive.org of Jan 2025, months before the Qualcomm acquisition. https://web.archive.org/web/20250120145427/https://www.arduino.cc/en/terms-conditions https://web.archive.org/web/20250120145427/https://www.ardui... So this citation, is basically fake news and FUD. The *now* part is false and this hide the fact that the "platform" is only the SaaS. > Phillip Torrone had warned [...] Arduino’s users were now “explicitly forbidden from reverse engineering or even attempting to understand how the platform works unless Arduino gives permission.”
  - RobotToaster 10mo ago
    I feel like the Qualcomm thing has just woken up a lot of people to how Arduino has been enshittifying for years They released their first closed source "pro" boards in 2021 https://blog.adafruit.com/2023/07/12/when-open-becomes-opaque-the-changing-face-of-open-source-hardware-companies/ https://blog.adafruit.com/2023/07/12/when-open-becomes-opaqu...
SV_BubbleTime 10mo ago
After Qualcomm bought them? Who could have seen this coming? Hang on while I get back to arguing with my MSP that I really would prefer ProxMox over HyperV to replace VMWare.
- MomsAVoxell 10mo ago
  Proxmox is awesome, just do it. Ask for forgiveness not permission.
- ocdtrekkie 10mo ago
  I did some evaluating on this option and there's definitely complexity to bear in mind: Proxmox has worse support for my storage and backup solutions, and if the MSP you are working with has a ton of experience on Hyper-V migrations and limited Proxmox experience, the support you get will lack. I will say I'd eventually love to have my day job environment on Proxmox but it isn't quite ready to be there today. No shade to anyone who is able to be there by any means, but I think it's fair to say hypervisors aren't something you want to choose on vibes alone.
  - SV_BubbleTime 10mo ago
    100% nailed my current issue. We need to get off of VMWare as the min license for us is now $15k pre year… from $3k. But the MSP knows the support for ProxMox isn’t there, and they have SLA contracts to uphold. I’m going to have to HyperV which I expect to have the same issues as VMWare soon enough/someday.
    - ocdtrekkie 10mo ago
      IMHO the key thing is to build your ability to switch. VMware did this because nobody has plans to switch their hypervisor. Learn to. If you go to Hyper-V this year, leave yourself the flexibility to move away from it in a couple years. Choose backup solutions and storage solutions which enable flexibility.
      - 10mo ago
arjie 10mo ago
Seems fine. There's a Qualcomm SaaS platform you don't need that they have the boilerplate no-hacking clause on. And Arduinos are the same as always. Considering the EFF and Arduino positions in favour, both of whom have done a lot for open-source stuff, I really can't be bothered that Adafruit is trying to drum up some marketing content.
- vasco 10mo ago
  Agree completely and I was writing arduino libraries almost 20 years ago
  - arjie 10mo ago
    My first Arduino was something like 15 years ago as well, a Duemilanove. I suspect my parents still have it. I'm not saying nothing can change over time, but there's always one controversy after another online these days in software communities and I think rather than trust the latest mob I'm going to trust the guy who's been serving me well for more than a decade. These openness purity tests are really not for me.
    - vasco 10mo ago
      Same story on this side and same feelings. It doesn't matter to the mob, the perception is all. Who cares that there's a website which is not open source, you don't buy an arduino for the website. You buy it because it's cheap and easy to use. Otherwise everyone would still be flashing atmel 8s
    - jack_tripper 10mo ago
      >there's always one controversy after another online these days in software communities and I think rather than trust the latest mob I'm going to trust the guy who's been serving me well for more than a decade. These openness purity tests are really not for me. Thanks you! Sad that HN gets ideologically captured in the same mob behavior instead of thinking logically and practically.
      - 10mo ago
stackghost 10mo ago
These days I don't think Arduinos are meaningfully more accessible than, say, an ESP8266 or ESP32. If I was starting a new hobby project today I'd choose the latter.
- jxdnnd 10mo ago
  Don't the latter require separate board support in the Arduino IDE? That was at least the case in the past
  - Liftyee 10mo ago
    That's only if you're using the Arduino IDE though, and it's so commonplace that instructions are widespread. Many are using MicroPython/CircuitPython which are independent from Arduino.
- xxs 10mo ago
  esp32 with 'free' (built-in) wifi/bluetooth is just so much easier to work with. That was my experience a few years back.
  - askvictor 10mo ago
    The first esp8266 I bought was as a dedicated wifi chip for an arduino (or something) project. I discovered after getting it, that it came with a 'free' MCU (that was default flashed with a UART/AT-command firmware to allow other MCUs to get wifi)
    - xxs 10mo ago
      funny indeed, as the add-on card (esp8266) is a lot more powerful than an Arduino.
chaosprint 10mo ago
I never use Arduino or Arduino IDE anyway; it's incredibly laggy for me, and I hate having these things in the cloud. I mainly use Pico and VS Code now.
- platevoltage 10mo ago
  Yeah their IDE is basically unusable.
  - 1718627440 10mo ago
    And yet that is the only thing, that they actually produce. Everything is else is from someone else.
    - platevoltage 10mo ago
      I am endlessly thankful for the Arduino project as it was one of the major gateways to programming for me, but at the same time, I bought an Arduino R4 and have barely even used it. ESP32, Raspberry Pi, and even 8 bit Atmel chips get way more attention from me. I'm guessing that Renesas chip on the R4 won't be getting too much attention anymore.
      - 1718627440 10mo ago
        And if you poke a bit around, not even that was really of their own making: http://arduinohistory.github.io/ http://arduinohistory.github.io/ . There also has been some discussion about that here on HN, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46009209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46009209, which was less than a month ago.
- jojobas 10mo ago
  Setting up the toolchain that's not Arduino IDE is a prohibitively high bar for a school child that wants to blink leds.
  - 10mo ago
altaccount2026 10mo ago
[flagged]
- tdeck 10mo ago
  Do you have any links related to this? I did a quick Google and I couldn't find anything relevant.
  - altaccount2026 10mo ago
    https://bsky.app/profile/a.very.sleepy.galactic.furball.discatte.com/post/3m6dimsino22a https://bsky.app/profile/a.very.sleepy.galactic.furball.disc... Unfortunately, it’s not isolated. https://chaos.social/@North/115605819126197877 https://chaos.social/@North/115605819126197877
    - RobotToaster 10mo ago
      Literally everyone involved in this sounds annoying.
    - Dylan16807 10mo ago
      The doxxing listed here is saying a person's first name? I think? Maybe former name? This is hard to follow. It's so deep in arguing about arguing that I can't tell if he's a 1/10 problem or a 9/10 problem. I probably missed some of the cross links but this is a mess. Can you elaborate on "harassing trans people"? From these links at best I can guess at one of them being trans but I can't tell if that's related to the argument; who else is on that list?
      - RobotToaster 10mo ago
        That seems to be literally it. This adds a little more context, but it still seems to be a complete nothingburger. It also looks like the user was harassing adafruit for not condemning the use of AI. https://digipres.club/@discatte/115601133682447929 https://digipres.club/@discatte/115601133682447929
    - 10mo ago
neilv 10mo ago
I'd like to see HN generally take a stance that a hacking-ish education platform like Arduino should be open source and hacking-friendly. (Disclosure: I know the Adafruit founder, but haven't discussed this matter with her.)
- ErroneousBosh 10mo ago
  It is entirely opensource and hacking-friendly. Why do you think it isn't?
drxzcl 10mo ago
As an aside, I have never seen a decent license for user generated content. Either they expose the platform to serious liability, or they come across as incredibly predatory.
- OhSoHumble 10mo ago
  What do you feel is a good approach to licensing user generated content?
  - bigfishrunning 10mo ago
    Allow the user to license the content that they generate. I can write a novel with Microsoft Word, and Microsoft has no claim over it -- why should any IDE tools be different?
- b112 10mo ago
  That's not needed though. No licensing is required. Code is copyright without any licensing. The hardware is not licensed, I don't sign a license or agree to one when buying a car or microwave. You can find edge cases, but the point is no licensing is actually required.
  - notarobot123 10mo ago
    One of the big difference between technology and law is how significant edge-cases are considered to be.
    - 1718627440 10mo ago
      I don't even know which you imply takes edge-cases to be more important.
  - MrJohz 10mo ago
    In this context, the license is for using the Arduino Studio application. This is hosted by Arduino, and therefore needs to take user input, save it and work with it. As I understand it, this puts them in a complex situation: they don't own the code you've written (obviously), but they do need to do things with it like compile it and run it (when you press the button in the IDE). They're also hosting the code and therefore partly legally responsible for it. At the very least, you need some sort of user agreement to specify the things you can do with their content, otherwise you can't really do it because it's their content and you're not allowed to mess with it by default. (Like you said, code is copyrighted by default.) You also need to specify the things that are necessary by law because you are hosting that code and therefore in part responsible for it. You also don't want to make the user sign a new agreement every other week if you add some new feature that they need to agree to use, because the cost of all those legal documents is prohibitive, and it's also very bad UX. Added to this the fact that lawyers are naturally very conservative as a profession (generally only doing things that have been proven successful, rather than avoiding things that have been proven unsuccessful), and it's easy to see why these sorts of agreements tend to be more expansive than they perhaps need to be, in order to ensure the company is fully protected.
7moritz7 10mo ago
> Chief microcontroller rival Adafruit They are PCB brands. The microcontrollers are made by the usual manufacturers like ST, Renesas, Infineon...
- sho_hn 10mo ago
  I agree the writing is imprecise. But of course Arduino historically also didn't make the Atmel or Pico chips, so I can sort of see what they were going for.
  - chrisjj 10mo ago
    The writing is precise. Just inaccurate.
quijoteuniv 10mo ago
Is this another one of those opensource project gone wrong, that when they lose the user base because of this gray(blackish) i would say) “new terms” they apologise and try to come back… often too late?
Surac 10mo ago
I doubt Qualcomm will be able to pressure there rules to the market. They do not own the cpu and making a arduino like board is very easy nowerdays. The have not even the power over the bootloader or the compiler. Library’s are either standard c/c++ or open source. People also do not like the arduino ide because the days of easy setup and run are gone and a real way of debug is needed in most projects. China board makers will never obey any rules and marketplaces like alibaba will still sell clones. Perhaps the ai at Qualcomm told them to buy arduino because it is in a suicide mission. Please excuse my bad English, no native speaker
- robert_foss 10mo ago
  Arduino is a tiny market, and Qcom has left bigger things to die on the vine previously. They dont need Arduino to succeed in any way.
  - blagie 10mo ago
    I, respectfully, disagree with this analysis. Prototyping platforms have tiny markets, but lead to downstream sales. Many a company were brought down by more developer-friendly platforms ignoring the "tiny" userbase of people who want to do unconventional things. Most IC vendors provide free samples and support because of this. That's a market size of close to zero -- electronic engineers -- but leads to a market size of "massive." I can get an application engineer to visit my office for free to help me develop if I want. Arguably, iPhone and Android won by supporting the tiny market of developers, who went on to build an ecosystem of applications, some long-tail, and some unexpected successes. And arguably, x86 won for the same reason. Atmel had shipped 500 million AVR flash microcontrollers, due in large part to the ecosystem created by Arduino. Balmer said "Developers! developers! developers!" Visual Studio was not a major revenue driver for Microsoft; what was developed in it was.
    - jack_tripper 10mo ago
      >Atmel had shipped 500 million AVR flash microcontrollers, due in large part to the ecosystem created by Arduino. How do you know the 500 million sales is due to the Arduino ecosystem? I used to work in embedded for 10+ years and in the 4 companies I worked at so far, none of the products ever featured AVR microcontrollers. The microcontroller of choice for production was always based on the feature/cost ratio for each application, never on the "is it part of the Arduino ecosystem?" question. Tinkering with Arduino at home, and building products for mass production, have widely different considerations.
deleted 10mo ago
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procaryote 10mo ago
The raspberry pico is much nicer to work with, if you're looking for an alternative. It has dual core if you need it, and the fun little IO coprocessors if you want to get really low level. The pico2 even has a risc-v mode The process of getting a binary onto the board is just dragging a file, and on linux at least you can script it with picotool
- schappim 10mo ago
  To "yes, and..." you, the whole RP2040 microcontroller line is great and I would encourage folks to support the smaller maker/OSHW companies on Tindie[1] who use it. [1] https://www.tindie.com/search/?q=rp2040 https://www.tindie.com/search/?q=rp2040
- jack_tripper 10mo ago
  >It has dual core if you need it, and the fun little IO coprocessors I think you're missing the point of what made arduino so popular. It's not the HW itself, it's that you can plug in whatever display, sensor or motor driver out there, and there's ready made templates in the IDE that gets you running immediately, without you having to know anything about how the HW or SW works under the hood. The lack of dual cores or "fun IO coprocessor" whatever fun is in that context, was never an issue for the arduino. There's a virtually unlimited number microcontrollers and boards out there for tinkering or production, that are more powerful and have more features, but they all have a higher technical barrier to entry than the standard Arduino out of the box. I don't wanna have to read datasheets and erratas just to learn how to use a second core, deal with shared memory between cores, or how to configure the GPIO of the "fun IO coprocessor" just to get a LED blinking to work. That's not what fun is to a lot of people. Fun is getting the motor spinning until my coffee finishes brewing and that's where the Arduino ecosystem USP was versus other more powerful platforms.
  - crote 10mo ago
    The RP2xxx also comes with excellent documentation and libraries. If anything, with the drag-n-drop flashing it is even easier to work with than an Arduino.
skybrian 10mo ago
This article doesn’t really explain how the new Arduino stuff works, which makes it harder to judge the impact of these new licenses. I’m used to flashing microcontroller boards over USB, originally from the Arduino IDE, more recently with PlatformIO. I’ve bought boards that have WiFi, but it wasn’t an essential part of the development environment. I did a bit of searching and found some sketchy documentation that just leaves me with more questions. It sounds like Arduino’s new web editor programs boards wirelessly somehow? Does it assume the board has WiFi? What is this new, networked system? What Internet protocols does it use? How do you pair it with the web editor?
- nottorp 10mo ago
  More importantly, do they still allow local development or you're now depending on the "cloud" ?
  - ErroneousBosh 10mo ago
    It's an 8-bit microcontroller programmed directly with a suite of open-source software. It doesn't need to do anything with "the cloud".
    - Beretta_Vexee 10mo ago
      They've been adding lots of stuff to the microcontroller for a long time. https://store.arduino.cc/products/uno-q https://store.arduino.cc/products/uno-q "- All-in-one toolbox: Arduino UNO Q combines the powerful Qualcomm® Dragonwing™ QRB2210 microprocessor (MPU) with a real-time STM32U585 microcontroller (MCU) – no matter what you’re building, it’s your new go-to tool! - AI in a blink: unlock AI-powered vision and sound solutions that react to their environment."
      - ErroneousBosh 10mo ago
        Okay, so if you want to use a microprocessor that isn't targetted by an open-source compiler and assembler, you're going to have to use proprietary stuff. You can just not buy their product.
tete 10mo ago
That has been a long way coming. Only a couple of months ago I was looking at alternatives and "Arduino compatible" products. The reason being simply that so many "for fun projects" are built with it and I wondered what good alternatives there are. I kind of drifted off. So curious about what people here think is the best "Arduino when it still was open source" contender. Preferably something Arduino compatible because of the sheer amount of projects already out there. That said I've heard a fair bit about Adafruit criticism as well, but that's more on the company level and no personal experience there.
rcarmo 10mo ago
Hobbyists don’t get full exposure to this, but the reality is that the embedded space is still very much a binary blob landscape. Even relatively popular SDKs like Expressif and Nordic’s are full of weird proprietary stuff, and it just gets worse as you go into beefier hardware (Rockchip, I’m looking at you). But yeah, Arduino is in a weird place right now. I knew people there (kind of lost track), quite liked their IDE and how accessible it made a lot of things, but the recent turn on events is just… weird.
- embeddedbert 10mo ago
  For Espressif it's only their radio blob. And and community is on a good way for a open source replacement for this. Everything else is top notch open.
  - rcarmo 10mo ago
    You get two blobs if you use ZigBee :)
    - embeddedbert 10mo ago
      Ugh. Haven't touched this yet. But for low power sensor stuff the ESP32 is far away from being my favorite anyway. That's almost all-in Nordic for me.
  - pabs3 10mo ago
    Link: https://github.com/esp32-open-mac/ https://github.com/esp32-open-mac/ Other open firmware: https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware/Open https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware/Open
archerx 10mo ago
>Adafruit’s Torrone had also said Arduino’s new documents “introduce an irrevocable, perpetual license over anything users upload.” Yea that's gonna be a hard pass for me. Thank goodness for the Pi Pico which means I'll never have to use Arduino ever again. On a side note, the new Arduino IDE based on Monaco looked nice but made development so painful I just stopped. I had to keep disconnecting and reconnecting devices all the time to upload sketches when before with the old IDE that was never an issue. Everything Arduino feels like a regression.
londons_explore 10mo ago
This seems dumb from Qualcomms point of view... T&C's preventing reverse engineering of an online platform seems to have no real business value. Serious hackers will ignore the T&C's, whilst serious competitors will not need to do any reverse engineering to build an online compiler.
znpy 10mo ago
I would likely check the open source definition, chances are the changes are actually compatible with open source. Maybe it should all have been free software all the time.
quailfarmer 10mo ago
Adafruit is pretty clearly the front-runner these days in the educational/hobbyist market, Arduino (and even SparkFun) have fallen by the wayside. My only gripe is the focus on micropython these days, it can introduce a barrier later in the learning process when you eventually need to leave the nicely organized sandbox. They still support the “Arduino” C++ libraries, but uPy is the default.
- hellweaver666 10mo ago
  Adafruit actually focus on CircuitPython which is a fork of Micro Python but takes some of the complexity of Micro Python away. I don't personally like coding in C++ as I started my career with Perl then PHP and Javascript. Writing Python in my own choice of text editor instead of the Arduino IDE is much more my style.
  - rahimnathwani 10mo ago
    A couple of weeks ago, I bought a 'sensor kit' from Amazon for my son to use with his Raspberry Pi. It includes some input devices (e.g. button, moisture sensor) and output devices (e.g. LED) that can be plugged onto breadboard. The setup instructions included something to do with CircuitPython. I had not heard of it before then: https://github.com/sunfounder/universal-maker-sensor-kit/blob/docs/docs/source/05_raspberry_pi/raspberry_start/07_install_blinka.rst https://github.com/sunfounder/universal-maker-sensor-kit/blo...
- shevy-java 10mo ago
  Using python makes sense though - it widens the user base. Not everyone is a C++ guru.
  - bathwaterpizza 10mo ago
    In my experience LLMs can code C++ for the Arduino framework pretty well these days. The mistakes they make, like wrong pin numbers, are pretty language agnostic.
  - 10mo ago
seg_lol 10mo ago
There is a lot of shade being thrown against Adafruit in this discussion thread which is disappointing. It is disappointing because it distracts from the discussion around Open Source and Arduino as a long term educational tool. Regardless if that shade is in good faith or not, it distracts from the conversation we should be having.
- moron4hire 10mo ago
  Yeah, let's not forget that Arduino was built on a history of being kinda sheisty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduino#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduino#History And Adafruit has been a stalwart of open hardware advocacy. If it were anyone else, I might entertain the idea that they're "just trying to drum up some marketing." But we're talking about Limor "LadyAda" Fried here. She's good people and always has been. Her opinion should count for a lot.
dev_l1x_be 10mo ago
Could risc-v save opensource hardware?
- Taniwha 10mo ago
  The latest esp32 chips are RISCV meaning you're not paying a licence for the old ESP CPU (which comes from elsewhere). There are also 10c RISCV cores available that people are starting to use I don't think it "saves" it particularly though
MPSimmons 10mo ago
Ever since I got involved with Espressif's ESP32/ESP8266 chips, I haven't even thought about arduinos, except to download the UI, but you don't even need to do that with the right VSCode extensions to make your life better. I do keep meaning to try this though - https://platformio.org/ https://platformio.org/
- cbdevidal 10mo ago
  I use a combination of Adafruit Ampy to copy files, esptool to reflash, picocom for the REPL, and VSCode. Some of those might be redundant and it did take a bit to figure out the syntax. But once that’s determined it’s cake, and all saved in my CLI history. I just Ctrl+R and bring it back.
  - ahoka 10mo ago
    For ESP32? You just install the VS Code extension and it does all the toolchain setup and you can flash with a button.
    - deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
    - cbdevidal 10mo ago
      I don’t think that was available when I was starting and now I am set in my ways lol
- alias_neo 10mo ago
  Last time I used Arduino was probably the late 2000s, as a kid/teenager,student their prices always felt too high to me, so I moved to "compatibles" or "clones" for a while. Once ESP8266 and ESP32 came along (with a detour thanks to Raspberry Pi coming along in the 2010s), there was really no need nor desire to use Arduino anymore and like you I forget about them. Maybe they have a place in education, and maybe in industrial applications, but outside of that, I wouldn't even consider Arduino anymore. PlatformIO by the way is excellent, and I've used it for all ESP8266/ESP32 development in VSCode for some time now, though increasingly I just use ESPHome, as my desire to program microcontrollers at a low level wanes and my desire to simply achieve the task quickly grows.
potato-peeler 10mo ago
Isn’t arduino completely open source including its PCB, firmware, IDE, etc, even accessible for commercial use?
shevy-java 10mo ago
It's sad that they are killing Arduino.
DeepSeaTortoise 10mo ago
IMO too many people come to the conclusion that Qualcomm will in some way screw up the Arduino takeover at the expense of the community. And I think these people are right, but that is not necessary a bad thing. There is just about no reason a giant like Qualcomm would take over something like Arduino for any other purpose but to acquire resources (talent, customers, community, processes, documentation, ...) they can use to teach themselves how to become more open, to what degree they even want to and to have a trusted platform they can take their initial steps in and will get feedback from. And the reality is, that someone with little experience will screw up badly, several times. I mean, look at the current state of the major silicon IP holders, the only reason they dont ship brain-chips with their NDAs that explode the moment you mention the wrong part number infornt of a competitor is because the NDAs for the documentation on how to install the brain-chips would get them stuck in recursion hell. And just as little experience Qualcomm has at making open source a successful business strategy, Arduino has just as little experience at being a corporate Godzilla trying to carefully pet the egg they just adopted. And let's be real: Open source projects OWE it to their community to be financially successful, because it's that financial success that guarantees that the project CAN STAY open and wont force its core maintainers into choosing between their commitment to their community and a fulfilling lifestyle, although for someone like Qualcomm this success can probably be something else but financial in nature (acquiring talent, their products becoming a preferred choice, schools teaching students using Qualcomm products, whatever). Both Arduino and Qualcomm will end up outside of their domain and it'd be surprising if this would not result in major mistakes being made. . Qualcomm has to evaluate whether their new talent at Arduino is doing a good job and are suddenly looking at a giant dumpster fire, wondering what could have possibly caused this since their lawyers aren't even half-done sticking on the "by Qualcomm" labels yet. Right now, instead of trying to pressure Qualcomm into making commitments they do not understand, the community should try to adopt the role of a stakeholder, who prioritizes a long and healthy relationship with a currently struggling contractor over getting the desired product at a reasonable timeline. The community needs to make a cold day in hell happen, calm down, get together and formalize what they think they liked about Arduino up until now, the fundamental requirements that need to be retained or even developed and what would be nice to have.
benbojangles 10mo ago
I have gotten into platformio cli and find it much easier to program an MCU this way
ajsnigrutin 10mo ago
Arduino was the first (and then, the only) simple microcontroller, that you could give to someone, even a child, give them a 5 page tutorial, and they'd be able to blink leds, capture a button press, a potentiometer input and display the results via leds or 7 segment displays. Every other microcontroller needed a special board to program it, you needed a thick book to program it, take care of registers, use some weird windows-only ide and usually none of that was free... arduino was just different, one board, one cable, free software and good documentation. Of course, an ecosystem has grown around that, so you could attach pretty much any popular device (sensor, display, input device,...) to it, and the library was already made for you to simply use it in your project. But now, years later? There are many such controllers, from esp8266/esp32 to rpi pico, with additional features (wifi included) on better boards (displays, buttons, interfaces,...), for even less money. Yes, the original arduino was important.. but if it vanishes overnight, very few people would notice.
- greengrass42 10mo ago
  Thank you for pointing out why Arduino was important.
analog31 10mo ago
I'm a long time user of the Arduino IDE for third party boards such as the Teensy. Recently I've switched to Platformio for coding. So I should be satisfied with never needing Arduino's cloud service. But Adafruit points out a problem, which is that the cloud service is the only available option for students using school-issued Chromebooks. I can confirm that a school-issued Chromebook is likely to be set up to lock out access to any programming tools. We wouldn't want children to learn coding after all, right? I think relying on a corporation to preserve our freedom to code is a bit too optimistic.
- schappim 10mo ago
  > cloud service is the only available option for students using school-issued Chromebooks Perhaps Chromebooks are incompatible with open-source too?
- raxxorraxor 10mo ago
  Chromebooks and iPads are both completely unsuitable for digital education in my opinion. They can be decent tools for education using digital resources, but that is something different. To "force" someone to develop on a Chromebook is like giving someone a bicycle to become a race car driver. That said, I usually flashed my arduinos and used bare metal C. Ironically I think it makes many things easier to learn and understand, provided you have a programming device.
  - AlexeyBrin 10mo ago
    You really can't compare a Chromebook with an iPad. On a Chromebook that I bought and that I fully own I can enable the Linux system and install whatever I want on it (it runs in a VM and it is a full Linux system). The iPad is artificially crippled for programming by Apple.
    - evilduck 10mo ago
      Your personally owned Chromebook isn’t comparable to a school issued Chromebook at all. They’re more locked down and useless than a stock iPad. Kids cannot install Linux on them.
Joel_Mckay 10mo ago
Arduino was always a terrible pseudo-language/IDE, taught bad workmanship, and had problems with fast chip io handling etc. However, it was a "standard" boot-loader, had consistent documentation, and a wide community of users. It encouraged people of all skill levels to play with chips, and that was great. These days a full Linux SoC is often cheaper than most mcu. The age of the Arduino board will just end a little quicker now. Generally, irritating a planet of bored computer engineers does not end well for a business. =3
- saidinesh5 10mo ago
  The problem space a full Linux SoC solves is very different from the problem an MCU solves. (Imagine a lot of real time io, interacting with a lot of peripherals etc....) What's eating Arduino's lunch is the various mcus: risc v, stm32, esp32 etc...
  - Joel_Mckay 10mo ago
    The Arduino 1kHz busy-loop and ISR designs is not real-time or necessarily guaranteed latency. RTLinux or FreeRTOS are guaranteed-latency OS, that can reduce timing jitter. "Real-time" is another term hijacked by people that think it means the same thing. It was a disservice to students, but thankfully FPGA or Raspberry Pico io DMA with mcu parallelism can teach people to understand clock domain crossing. Part of the Arduino appeal, was convincing people the mcu and application SoC problem domains were the same. They are not, and never were... Hence the new Arduino board dual chip layout is twice as bad in some ways. Cheers =3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2y8Sx4B2Sk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2y8Sx4B2Sk risc v -- a new hope, but 20 years too late stm32 -- a solid competitor to Microchip/AVR, but 14 years too late esp32 -- FreeRTOS with hardware flash paging can pose an issue, but at least it already doesn't need Arduino software lol
    - snvzz 10mo ago
      >RTLinux or FreeRTOS are guaranteed-latency OS, that can reduce timing jitter. Unlike seL4[0], neither OS has a guarantee of worst case latency. RTLinux cannot realistically have one, as formal verification is not feasible due to its sheer size. 0. https://sel4.systems/ https://sel4.systems/
kevin_thibedeau 10mo ago
They should team up with Sparkfin and establish a new open platform.
the__alchemist 10mo ago
I feel like Arduino has lost its unique place in all but mindshare 5+ years ago. What I would recommend as a default: - Wi-Fi: Esp Risc-V (C3 etc) - BLE without Wi-Fi (Or ANTD): Nordic. Also a good choice in general for simple devices - General-purpose, including high-performance, low-power, and high I/O: Stm32 Use whichever IDE is suitable for the language you're programming in. (Jetbrains, Zed, VsCode etc). Use the specialty IDEs like Cube for viewing pinouts and configuring hardware as a reference. If using rust, probe-rs + cargo is a "just works" CLI workflow to compile, flash, and debug.
zoobab 10mo ago
Qualcomm is a patent troll, no money for those guys. We need an arduino fork.
matt3210 10mo ago
We knew it would go this way when they were acquired

437 points by MilnerRoute 10mo ago

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

Animats 10mo ago

"Anything that was open, stays open". Now contemplate open Android and Google Play Services.

p0w3n3d 10mo ago
They did a great job. We must recognise experts in this matter. They had help of other companies and hardware producers of course, but still... Or even that they forbid to use different clients for YouTube
- Y_Y 10mo ago
  > Or even that they forbid to use different clients for YouTube Ineffectively, thank God
squarefoot 10mo ago
Was going to quote this exact line. Yes, what was open stays open, but unmaintained, then development/updates/patches are moved to the close(r) alternative until the hassle of running the open old one isn't worth the effort anymore and the need of updated/debugged libraries or board definitions forces the users to migrate. I wonder how doable would be a fork of the whole shebang with the online downloadable content hosted somewhere.

MrJohz 10mo ago

It's a bit odd that most of this article is various claims from one of Arduino's competitors being taken at face value, especially when the EFF spokesperson generally seems to think the new terms broadly make sense, albeit with some criticisms. It sounds like Adafruit are just trying to sow some outrage here.

malfist 10mo ago
Adafruit is not an arduino competitor. They sell arduinos
- sunnyps 10mo ago
  They sell Arduino compatible boards (amongst other things) from what I gather, so yes, they would be competitors.
- andrewflnr 10mo ago
  I was very confused when the article referred to > Chief microcontroller rival Adafruit Implying that Adafruit makes their own competing microcontrollers, which sure would have been news to me. Edit: sees sibling posted at the same time. Well that would explain it.
  - sho_hn 10mo ago
    Historically neither of them made any microcontrollers. Arduino shipped Atmel and Raspberry Pi chips. Adafruit has boards with a variety of microcontrollers from various brands on them. This is different now that Arduino is Qualcomm-owned and ships Qualcomm silicon, of course.
    - inferiorhuman 10mo ago
      To be fair they're shipping Qualcomm+STM silicon now.
- rpcope1 10mo ago
  They also sell feather and a bunch of other vaguely similar stuff and have their own "maker" ecosystem (think CircuitPython). I like Adafruit, but they are in many senses competitors to Arduino.
riedel 10mo ago
I understand adafruit's take at it. But I guess they are simply plain wrong when saying 'incompatible', at least from a pure license perspective for the HW/firmware. As other pointed out, companies like Google demonstrate, how open source can be used in a rather aggressive commercial strategy. However, I think the good news is that that the open hardware stuff is not rocket science and maintenance hell at this point (without the new Qualcomm bits). I guess it is now for others to step up and make the ecosystem resilient. That is IMHO the power of open source in case it works.

RobotToaster 10mo ago

> our commitment to the open source spirit is unwavering and Arduino’s core mission remains unchanged Running a proprietary SaaS doesn't really show commitment to open source.

_ache_ 10mo ago
I agree, but that is nothing new. The original SaaS was already proprietary. And btw, the "reverse engineering" close was already here too. You can check the archive.org of Jan 2025, months before the Qualcomm acquisition. https://web.archive.org/web/20250120145427/https://www.arduino.cc/en/terms-conditions https://web.archive.org/web/20250120145427/https://www.ardui... So this citation, is basically fake news and FUD. The *now* part is false and this hide the fact that the "platform" is only the SaaS. > Phillip Torrone had warned [...] Arduino’s users were now “explicitly forbidden from reverse engineering or even attempting to understand how the platform works unless Arduino gives permission.”
- RobotToaster 10mo ago
  I feel like the Qualcomm thing has just woken up a lot of people to how Arduino has been enshittifying for years They released their first closed source "pro" boards in 2021 https://blog.adafruit.com/2023/07/12/when-open-becomes-opaque-the-changing-face-of-open-source-hardware-companies/ https://blog.adafruit.com/2023/07/12/when-open-becomes-opaqu...

SV_BubbleTime 10mo ago

After Qualcomm bought them? Who could have seen this coming? Hang on while I get back to arguing with my MSP that I really would prefer ProxMox over HyperV to replace VMWare.

MomsAVoxell 10mo ago
Proxmox is awesome, just do it. Ask for forgiveness not permission.
ocdtrekkie 10mo ago
I did some evaluating on this option and there's definitely complexity to bear in mind: Proxmox has worse support for my storage and backup solutions, and if the MSP you are working with has a ton of experience on Hyper-V migrations and limited Proxmox experience, the support you get will lack. I will say I'd eventually love to have my day job environment on Proxmox but it isn't quite ready to be there today. No shade to anyone who is able to be there by any means, but I think it's fair to say hypervisors aren't something you want to choose on vibes alone.
- SV_BubbleTime 10mo ago
  100% nailed my current issue. We need to get off of VMWare as the min license for us is now $15k pre year… from $3k. But the MSP knows the support for ProxMox isn’t there, and they have SLA contracts to uphold. I’m going to have to HyperV which I expect to have the same issues as VMWare soon enough/someday.
  - ocdtrekkie 10mo ago
    IMHO the key thing is to build your ability to switch. VMware did this because nobody has plans to switch their hypervisor. Learn to. If you go to Hyper-V this year, leave yourself the flexibility to move away from it in a couple years. Choose backup solutions and storage solutions which enable flexibility.
    - 10mo ago

arjie 10mo ago

Seems fine. There's a Qualcomm SaaS platform you don't need that they have the boilerplate no-hacking clause on. And Arduinos are the same as always. Considering the EFF and Arduino positions in favour, both of whom have done a lot for open-source stuff, I really can't be bothered that Adafruit is trying to drum up some marketing content.

vasco 10mo ago
Agree completely and I was writing arduino libraries almost 20 years ago
- arjie 10mo ago
  My first Arduino was something like 15 years ago as well, a Duemilanove. I suspect my parents still have it. I'm not saying nothing can change over time, but there's always one controversy after another online these days in software communities and I think rather than trust the latest mob I'm going to trust the guy who's been serving me well for more than a decade. These openness purity tests are really not for me.
  - vasco 10mo ago
    Same story on this side and same feelings. It doesn't matter to the mob, the perception is all. Who cares that there's a website which is not open source, you don't buy an arduino for the website. You buy it because it's cheap and easy to use. Otherwise everyone would still be flashing atmel 8s
  - jack_tripper 10mo ago
    >there's always one controversy after another online these days in software communities and I think rather than trust the latest mob I'm going to trust the guy who's been serving me well for more than a decade. These openness purity tests are really not for me. Thanks you! Sad that HN gets ideologically captured in the same mob behavior instead of thinking logically and practically.
    - 10mo ago

stackghost 10mo ago

These days I don't think Arduinos are meaningfully more accessible than, say, an ESP8266 or ESP32. If I was starting a new hobby project today I'd choose the latter.

jxdnnd 10mo ago
Don't the latter require separate board support in the Arduino IDE? That was at least the case in the past
- Liftyee 10mo ago
  That's only if you're using the Arduino IDE though, and it's so commonplace that instructions are widespread. Many are using MicroPython/CircuitPython which are independent from Arduino.
xxs 10mo ago
esp32 with 'free' (built-in) wifi/bluetooth is just so much easier to work with. That was my experience a few years back.
- askvictor 10mo ago
  The first esp8266 I bought was as a dedicated wifi chip for an arduino (or something) project. I discovered after getting it, that it came with a 'free' MCU (that was default flashed with a UART/AT-command firmware to allow other MCUs to get wifi)
  - xxs 10mo ago
    funny indeed, as the add-on card (esp8266) is a lot more powerful than an Arduino.

chaosprint 10mo ago

I never use Arduino or Arduino IDE anyway; it's incredibly laggy for me, and I hate having these things in the cloud. I mainly use Pico and VS Code now.

platevoltage 10mo ago
Yeah their IDE is basically unusable.
- 1718627440 10mo ago
  And yet that is the only thing, that they actually produce. Everything is else is from someone else.
  - platevoltage 10mo ago
    I am endlessly thankful for the Arduino project as it was one of the major gateways to programming for me, but at the same time, I bought an Arduino R4 and have barely even used it. ESP32, Raspberry Pi, and even 8 bit Atmel chips get way more attention from me. I'm guessing that Renesas chip on the R4 won't be getting too much attention anymore.
    - 1718627440 10mo ago
      And if you poke a bit around, not even that was really of their own making: http://arduinohistory.github.io/ http://arduinohistory.github.io/ . There also has been some discussion about that here on HN, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46009209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46009209, which was less than a month ago.
jojobas 10mo ago
Setting up the toolchain that's not Arduino IDE is a prohibitively high bar for a school child that wants to blink leds.
- 10mo ago

altaccount2026 10mo ago

[flagged]

tdeck 10mo ago
Do you have any links related to this? I did a quick Google and I couldn't find anything relevant.
- altaccount2026 10mo ago
  https://bsky.app/profile/a.very.sleepy.galactic.furball.discatte.com/post/3m6dimsino22a https://bsky.app/profile/a.very.sleepy.galactic.furball.disc... Unfortunately, it’s not isolated. https://chaos.social/@North/115605819126197877 https://chaos.social/@North/115605819126197877
  - RobotToaster 10mo ago
    Literally everyone involved in this sounds annoying.
  - Dylan16807 10mo ago
    The doxxing listed here is saying a person's first name? I think? Maybe former name? This is hard to follow. It's so deep in arguing about arguing that I can't tell if he's a 1/10 problem or a 9/10 problem. I probably missed some of the cross links but this is a mess. Can you elaborate on "harassing trans people"? From these links at best I can guess at one of them being trans but I can't tell if that's related to the argument; who else is on that list?
    - RobotToaster 10mo ago
      That seems to be literally it. This adds a little more context, but it still seems to be a complete nothingburger. It also looks like the user was harassing adafruit for not condemning the use of AI. https://digipres.club/@discatte/115601133682447929 https://digipres.club/@discatte/115601133682447929
  - 10mo ago

neilv 10mo ago

I'd like to see HN generally take a stance that a hacking-ish education platform like Arduino should be open source and hacking-friendly. (Disclosure: I know the Adafruit founder, but haven't discussed this matter with her.)

ErroneousBosh 10mo ago
It is entirely opensource and hacking-friendly. Why do you think it isn't?

drxzcl 10mo ago

As an aside, I have never seen a decent license for user generated content. Either they expose the platform to serious liability, or they come across as incredibly predatory.

OhSoHumble 10mo ago
What do you feel is a good approach to licensing user generated content?
- bigfishrunning 10mo ago
  Allow the user to license the content that they generate. I can write a novel with Microsoft Word, and Microsoft has no claim over it -- why should any IDE tools be different?
b112 10mo ago
That's not needed though. No licensing is required. Code is copyright without any licensing. The hardware is not licensed, I don't sign a license or agree to one when buying a car or microwave. You can find edge cases, but the point is no licensing is actually required.
- notarobot123 10mo ago
  One of the big difference between technology and law is how significant edge-cases are considered to be.
  - 1718627440 10mo ago
    I don't even know which you imply takes edge-cases to be more important.
- MrJohz 10mo ago
  In this context, the license is for using the Arduino Studio application. This is hosted by Arduino, and therefore needs to take user input, save it and work with it. As I understand it, this puts them in a complex situation: they don't own the code you've written (obviously), but they do need to do things with it like compile it and run it (when you press the button in the IDE). They're also hosting the code and therefore partly legally responsible for it. At the very least, you need some sort of user agreement to specify the things you can do with their content, otherwise you can't really do it because it's their content and you're not allowed to mess with it by default. (Like you said, code is copyrighted by default.) You also need to specify the things that are necessary by law because you are hosting that code and therefore in part responsible for it. You also don't want to make the user sign a new agreement every other week if you add some new feature that they need to agree to use, because the cost of all those legal documents is prohibitive, and it's also very bad UX. Added to this the fact that lawyers are naturally very conservative as a profession (generally only doing things that have been proven successful, rather than avoiding things that have been proven unsuccessful), and it's easy to see why these sorts of agreements tend to be more expansive than they perhaps need to be, in order to ensure the company is fully protected.

7moritz7 10mo ago

> Chief microcontroller rival Adafruit They are PCB brands. The microcontrollers are made by the usual manufacturers like ST, Renesas, Infineon...

sho_hn 10mo ago
I agree the writing is imprecise. But of course Arduino historically also didn't make the Atmel or Pico chips, so I can sort of see what they were going for.
- chrisjj 10mo ago
  The writing is precise. Just inaccurate.

quijoteuniv 10mo ago

Is this another one of those opensource project gone wrong, that when they lose the user base because of this gray(blackish) i would say) “new terms” they apologise and try to come back… often too late?

Surac 10mo ago

I doubt Qualcomm will be able to pressure there rules to the market. They do not own the cpu and making a arduino like board is very easy nowerdays. The have not even the power over the bootloader or the compiler. Library’s are either standard c/c++ or open source. People also do not like the arduino ide because the days of easy setup and run are gone and a real way of debug is needed in most projects. China board makers will never obey any rules and marketplaces like alibaba will still sell clones. Perhaps the ai at Qualcomm told them to buy arduino because it is in a suicide mission. Please excuse my bad English, no native speaker

robert_foss 10mo ago
Arduino is a tiny market, and Qcom has left bigger things to die on the vine previously. They dont need Arduino to succeed in any way.
- blagie 10mo ago
  I, respectfully, disagree with this analysis. Prototyping platforms have tiny markets, but lead to downstream sales. Many a company were brought down by more developer-friendly platforms ignoring the "tiny" userbase of people who want to do unconventional things. Most IC vendors provide free samples and support because of this. That's a market size of close to zero -- electronic engineers -- but leads to a market size of "massive." I can get an application engineer to visit my office for free to help me develop if I want. Arguably, iPhone and Android won by supporting the tiny market of developers, who went on to build an ecosystem of applications, some long-tail, and some unexpected successes. And arguably, x86 won for the same reason. Atmel had shipped 500 million AVR flash microcontrollers, due in large part to the ecosystem created by Arduino. Balmer said "Developers! developers! developers!" Visual Studio was not a major revenue driver for Microsoft; what was developed in it was.
  - jack_tripper 10mo ago
    >Atmel had shipped 500 million AVR flash microcontrollers, due in large part to the ecosystem created by Arduino. How do you know the 500 million sales is due to the Arduino ecosystem? I used to work in embedded for 10+ years and in the 4 companies I worked at so far, none of the products ever featured AVR microcontrollers. The microcontroller of choice for production was always based on the feature/cost ratio for each application, never on the "is it part of the Arduino ecosystem?" question. Tinkering with Arduino at home, and building products for mass production, have widely different considerations.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

procaryote 10mo ago

The raspberry pico is much nicer to work with, if you're looking for an alternative. It has dual core if you need it, and the fun little IO coprocessors if you want to get really low level. The pico2 even has a risc-v mode The process of getting a binary onto the board is just dragging a file, and on linux at least you can script it with picotool

schappim 10mo ago
To "yes, and..." you, the whole RP2040 microcontroller line is great and I would encourage folks to support the smaller maker/OSHW companies on Tindie[1] who use it. [1] https://www.tindie.com/search/?q=rp2040 https://www.tindie.com/search/?q=rp2040
jack_tripper 10mo ago
>It has dual core if you need it, and the fun little IO coprocessors I think you're missing the point of what made arduino so popular. It's not the HW itself, it's that you can plug in whatever display, sensor or motor driver out there, and there's ready made templates in the IDE that gets you running immediately, without you having to know anything about how the HW or SW works under the hood. The lack of dual cores or "fun IO coprocessor" whatever fun is in that context, was never an issue for the arduino. There's a virtually unlimited number microcontrollers and boards out there for tinkering or production, that are more powerful and have more features, but they all have a higher technical barrier to entry than the standard Arduino out of the box. I don't wanna have to read datasheets and erratas just to learn how to use a second core, deal with shared memory between cores, or how to configure the GPIO of the "fun IO coprocessor" just to get a LED blinking to work. That's not what fun is to a lot of people. Fun is getting the motor spinning until my coffee finishes brewing and that's where the Arduino ecosystem USP was versus other more powerful platforms.
- crote 10mo ago
  The RP2xxx also comes with excellent documentation and libraries. If anything, with the drag-n-drop flashing it is even easier to work with than an Arduino.

skybrian 10mo ago

This article doesn’t really explain how the new Arduino stuff works, which makes it harder to judge the impact of these new licenses. I’m used to flashing microcontroller boards over USB, originally from the Arduino IDE, more recently with PlatformIO. I’ve bought boards that have WiFi, but it wasn’t an essential part of the development environment. I did a bit of searching and found some sketchy documentation that just leaves me with more questions. It sounds like Arduino’s new web editor programs boards wirelessly somehow? Does it assume the board has WiFi? What is this new, networked system? What Internet protocols does it use? How do you pair it with the web editor?

nottorp 10mo ago
More importantly, do they still allow local development or you're now depending on the "cloud" ?
- ErroneousBosh 10mo ago
  It's an 8-bit microcontroller programmed directly with a suite of open-source software. It doesn't need to do anything with "the cloud".
  - Beretta_Vexee 10mo ago
    They've been adding lots of stuff to the microcontroller for a long time. https://store.arduino.cc/products/uno-q https://store.arduino.cc/products/uno-q "- All-in-one toolbox: Arduino UNO Q combines the powerful Qualcomm® Dragonwing™ QRB2210 microprocessor (MPU) with a real-time STM32U585 microcontroller (MCU) – no matter what you’re building, it’s your new go-to tool! - AI in a blink: unlock AI-powered vision and sound solutions that react to their environment."
    - ErroneousBosh 10mo ago
      Okay, so if you want to use a microprocessor that isn't targetted by an open-source compiler and assembler, you're going to have to use proprietary stuff. You can just not buy their product.

tete 10mo ago

That has been a long way coming. Only a couple of months ago I was looking at alternatives and "Arduino compatible" products. The reason being simply that so many "for fun projects" are built with it and I wondered what good alternatives there are. I kind of drifted off. So curious about what people here think is the best "Arduino when it still was open source" contender. Preferably something Arduino compatible because of the sheer amount of projects already out there. That said I've heard a fair bit about Adafruit criticism as well, but that's more on the company level and no personal experience there.

rcarmo 10mo ago

Hobbyists don’t get full exposure to this, but the reality is that the embedded space is still very much a binary blob landscape. Even relatively popular SDKs like Expressif and Nordic’s are full of weird proprietary stuff, and it just gets worse as you go into beefier hardware (Rockchip, I’m looking at you). But yeah, Arduino is in a weird place right now. I knew people there (kind of lost track), quite liked their IDE and how accessible it made a lot of things, but the recent turn on events is just… weird.

embeddedbert 10mo ago
For Espressif it's only their radio blob. And and community is on a good way for a open source replacement for this. Everything else is top notch open.
- rcarmo 10mo ago
  You get two blobs if you use ZigBee :)
  - embeddedbert 10mo ago
    Ugh. Haven't touched this yet. But for low power sensor stuff the ESP32 is far away from being my favorite anyway. That's almost all-in Nordic for me.
- pabs3 10mo ago
  Link: https://github.com/esp32-open-mac/ https://github.com/esp32-open-mac/ Other open firmware: https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware/Open https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware/Open

archerx 10mo ago

>Adafruit’s Torrone had also said Arduino’s new documents “introduce an irrevocable, perpetual license over anything users upload.” Yea that's gonna be a hard pass for me. Thank goodness for the Pi Pico which means I'll never have to use Arduino ever again. On a side note, the new Arduino IDE based on Monaco looked nice but made development so painful I just stopped. I had to keep disconnecting and reconnecting devices all the time to upload sketches when before with the old IDE that was never an issue. Everything Arduino feels like a regression.

londons_explore 10mo ago

This seems dumb from Qualcomms point of view... T&C's preventing reverse engineering of an online platform seems to have no real business value. Serious hackers will ignore the T&C's, whilst serious competitors will not need to do any reverse engineering to build an online compiler.

znpy 10mo ago

I would likely check the open source definition, chances are the changes are actually compatible with open source. Maybe it should all have been free software all the time.

quailfarmer 10mo ago

Adafruit is pretty clearly the front-runner these days in the educational/hobbyist market, Arduino (and even SparkFun) have fallen by the wayside. My only gripe is the focus on micropython these days, it can introduce a barrier later in the learning process when you eventually need to leave the nicely organized sandbox. They still support the “Arduino” C++ libraries, but uPy is the default.

hellweaver666 10mo ago
Adafruit actually focus on CircuitPython which is a fork of Micro Python but takes some of the complexity of Micro Python away. I don't personally like coding in C++ as I started my career with Perl then PHP and Javascript. Writing Python in my own choice of text editor instead of the Arduino IDE is much more my style.
- rahimnathwani 10mo ago
  A couple of weeks ago, I bought a 'sensor kit' from Amazon for my son to use with his Raspberry Pi. It includes some input devices (e.g. button, moisture sensor) and output devices (e.g. LED) that can be plugged onto breadboard. The setup instructions included something to do with CircuitPython. I had not heard of it before then: https://github.com/sunfounder/universal-maker-sensor-kit/blob/docs/docs/source/05_raspberry_pi/raspberry_start/07_install_blinka.rst https://github.com/sunfounder/universal-maker-sensor-kit/blo...
shevy-java 10mo ago
Using python makes sense though - it widens the user base. Not everyone is a C++ guru.
- bathwaterpizza 10mo ago
  In my experience LLMs can code C++ for the Arduino framework pretty well these days. The mistakes they make, like wrong pin numbers, are pretty language agnostic.
- 10mo ago

seg_lol 10mo ago

There is a lot of shade being thrown against Adafruit in this discussion thread which is disappointing. It is disappointing because it distracts from the discussion around Open Source and Arduino as a long term educational tool. Regardless if that shade is in good faith or not, it distracts from the conversation we should be having.

moron4hire 10mo ago
Yeah, let's not forget that Arduino was built on a history of being kinda sheisty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduino#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduino#History And Adafruit has been a stalwart of open hardware advocacy. If it were anyone else, I might entertain the idea that they're "just trying to drum up some marketing." But we're talking about Limor "LadyAda" Fried here. She's good people and always has been. Her opinion should count for a lot.

dev_l1x_be 10mo ago

Could risc-v save opensource hardware?

Taniwha 10mo ago
The latest esp32 chips are RISCV meaning you're not paying a licence for the old ESP CPU (which comes from elsewhere). There are also 10c RISCV cores available that people are starting to use I don't think it "saves" it particularly though

MPSimmons 10mo ago

Ever since I got involved with Espressif's ESP32/ESP8266 chips, I haven't even thought about arduinos, except to download the UI, but you don't even need to do that with the right VSCode extensions to make your life better. I do keep meaning to try this though - https://platformio.org/ https://platformio.org/

cbdevidal 10mo ago
I use a combination of Adafruit Ampy to copy files, esptool to reflash, picocom for the REPL, and VSCode. Some of those might be redundant and it did take a bit to figure out the syntax. But once that’s determined it’s cake, and all saved in my CLI history. I just Ctrl+R and bring it back.
- ahoka 10mo ago
  For ESP32? You just install the VS Code extension and it does all the toolchain setup and you can flash with a button.
  - deleted 10mo ago
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  - cbdevidal 10mo ago
    I don’t think that was available when I was starting and now I am set in my ways lol
alias_neo 10mo ago
Last time I used Arduino was probably the late 2000s, as a kid/teenager,student their prices always felt too high to me, so I moved to "compatibles" or "clones" for a while. Once ESP8266 and ESP32 came along (with a detour thanks to Raspberry Pi coming along in the 2010s), there was really no need nor desire to use Arduino anymore and like you I forget about them. Maybe they have a place in education, and maybe in industrial applications, but outside of that, I wouldn't even consider Arduino anymore. PlatformIO by the way is excellent, and I've used it for all ESP8266/ESP32 development in VSCode for some time now, though increasingly I just use ESPHome, as my desire to program microcontrollers at a low level wanes and my desire to simply achieve the task quickly grows.

potato-peeler 10mo ago

Isn’t arduino completely open source including its PCB, firmware, IDE, etc, even accessible for commercial use?

shevy-java 10mo ago

It's sad that they are killing Arduino.

DeepSeaTortoise 10mo ago

IMO too many people come to the conclusion that Qualcomm will in some way screw up the Arduino takeover at the expense of the community. And I think these people are right, but that is not necessary a bad thing. There is just about no reason a giant like Qualcomm would take over something like Arduino for any other purpose but to acquire resources (talent, customers, community, processes, documentation, ...) they can use to teach themselves how to become more open, to what degree they even want to and to have a trusted platform they can take their initial steps in and will get feedback from. And the reality is, that someone with little experience will screw up badly, several times. I mean, look at the current state of the major silicon IP holders, the only reason they dont ship brain-chips with their NDAs that explode the moment you mention the wrong part number infornt of a competitor is because the NDAs for the documentation on how to install the brain-chips would get them stuck in recursion hell. And just as little experience Qualcomm has at making open source a successful business strategy, Arduino has just as little experience at being a corporate Godzilla trying to carefully pet the egg they just adopted. And let's be real: Open source projects OWE it to their community to be financially successful, because it's that financial success that guarantees that the project CAN STAY open and wont force its core maintainers into choosing between their commitment to their community and a fulfilling lifestyle, although for someone like Qualcomm this success can probably be something else but financial in nature (acquiring talent, their products becoming a preferred choice, schools teaching students using Qualcomm products, whatever). Both Arduino and Qualcomm will end up outside of their domain and it'd be surprising if this would not result in major mistakes being made. . Qualcomm has to evaluate whether their new talent at Arduino is doing a good job and are suddenly looking at a giant dumpster fire, wondering what could have possibly caused this since their lawyers aren't even half-done sticking on the "by Qualcomm" labels yet. Right now, instead of trying to pressure Qualcomm into making commitments they do not understand, the community should try to adopt the role of a stakeholder, who prioritizes a long and healthy relationship with a currently struggling contractor over getting the desired product at a reasonable timeline. The community needs to make a cold day in hell happen, calm down, get together and formalize what they think they liked about Arduino up until now, the fundamental requirements that need to be retained or even developed and what would be nice to have.

benbojangles 10mo ago

I have gotten into platformio cli and find it much easier to program an MCU this way

ajsnigrutin 10mo ago

Arduino was the first (and then, the only) simple microcontroller, that you could give to someone, even a child, give them a 5 page tutorial, and they'd be able to blink leds, capture a button press, a potentiometer input and display the results via leds or 7 segment displays. Every other microcontroller needed a special board to program it, you needed a thick book to program it, take care of registers, use some weird windows-only ide and usually none of that was free... arduino was just different, one board, one cable, free software and good documentation. Of course, an ecosystem has grown around that, so you could attach pretty much any popular device (sensor, display, input device,...) to it, and the library was already made for you to simply use it in your project. But now, years later? There are many such controllers, from esp8266/esp32 to rpi pico, with additional features (wifi included) on better boards (displays, buttons, interfaces,...), for even less money. Yes, the original arduino was important.. but if it vanishes overnight, very few people would notice.

greengrass42 10mo ago
Thank you for pointing out why Arduino was important.

analog31 10mo ago

I'm a long time user of the Arduino IDE for third party boards such as the Teensy. Recently I've switched to Platformio for coding. So I should be satisfied with never needing Arduino's cloud service. But Adafruit points out a problem, which is that the cloud service is the only available option for students using school-issued Chromebooks. I can confirm that a school-issued Chromebook is likely to be set up to lock out access to any programming tools. We wouldn't want children to learn coding after all, right? I think relying on a corporation to preserve our freedom to code is a bit too optimistic.

schappim 10mo ago
> cloud service is the only available option for students using school-issued Chromebooks Perhaps Chromebooks are incompatible with open-source too?
raxxorraxor 10mo ago
Chromebooks and iPads are both completely unsuitable for digital education in my opinion. They can be decent tools for education using digital resources, but that is something different. To "force" someone to develop on a Chromebook is like giving someone a bicycle to become a race car driver. That said, I usually flashed my arduinos and used bare metal C. Ironically I think it makes many things easier to learn and understand, provided you have a programming device.
- AlexeyBrin 10mo ago
  You really can't compare a Chromebook with an iPad. On a Chromebook that I bought and that I fully own I can enable the Linux system and install whatever I want on it (it runs in a VM and it is a full Linux system). The iPad is artificially crippled for programming by Apple.
  - evilduck 10mo ago
    Your personally owned Chromebook isn’t comparable to a school issued Chromebook at all. They’re more locked down and useless than a stock iPad. Kids cannot install Linux on them.

Joel_Mckay 10mo ago

Arduino was always a terrible pseudo-language/IDE, taught bad workmanship, and had problems with fast chip io handling etc. However, it was a "standard" boot-loader, had consistent documentation, and a wide community of users. It encouraged people of all skill levels to play with chips, and that was great. These days a full Linux SoC is often cheaper than most mcu. The age of the Arduino board will just end a little quicker now. Generally, irritating a planet of bored computer engineers does not end well for a business. =3

saidinesh5 10mo ago
The problem space a full Linux SoC solves is very different from the problem an MCU solves. (Imagine a lot of real time io, interacting with a lot of peripherals etc....) What's eating Arduino's lunch is the various mcus: risc v, stm32, esp32 etc...
- Joel_Mckay 10mo ago
  The Arduino 1kHz busy-loop and ISR designs is not real-time or necessarily guaranteed latency. RTLinux or FreeRTOS are guaranteed-latency OS, that can reduce timing jitter. "Real-time" is another term hijacked by people that think it means the same thing. It was a disservice to students, but thankfully FPGA or Raspberry Pico io DMA with mcu parallelism can teach people to understand clock domain crossing. Part of the Arduino appeal, was convincing people the mcu and application SoC problem domains were the same. They are not, and never were... Hence the new Arduino board dual chip layout is twice as bad in some ways. Cheers =3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2y8Sx4B2Sk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2y8Sx4B2Sk risc v -- a new hope, but 20 years too late stm32 -- a solid competitor to Microchip/AVR, but 14 years too late esp32 -- FreeRTOS with hardware flash paging can pose an issue, but at least it already doesn't need Arduino software lol
  - snvzz 10mo ago
    >RTLinux or FreeRTOS are guaranteed-latency OS, that can reduce timing jitter. Unlike seL4[0], neither OS has a guarantee of worst case latency. RTLinux cannot realistically have one, as formal verification is not feasible due to its sheer size. 0. https://sel4.systems/ https://sel4.systems/

kevin_thibedeau 10mo ago

They should team up with Sparkfin and establish a new open platform.

the__alchemist 10mo ago

I feel like Arduino has lost its unique place in all but mindshare 5+ years ago. What I would recommend as a default: - Wi-Fi: Esp Risc-V (C3 etc) - BLE without Wi-Fi (Or ANTD): Nordic. Also a good choice in general for simple devices - General-purpose, including high-performance, low-power, and high I/O: Stm32 Use whichever IDE is suitable for the language you're programming in. (Jetbrains, Zed, VsCode etc). Use the specialty IDEs like Cube for viewing pinouts and configuring hardware as a reference. If using rust, probe-rs + cargo is a "just works" CLI workflow to compile, flash, and debug.

zoobab 10mo ago

Qualcomm is a patent troll, no money for those guys. We need an arduino fork.

matt3210 10mo ago

We knew it would go this way when they were acquired