Super HN

Arduino is open sourced in hard and software which allows this cheap cloning to exist. It also helps a lot with software and docs, which makes it cheaper for them. by Romario77 5 hours ago

So can the Pi Pico, the Milk-V Duo (one 64 bit Linux core, one 64 bit microcontroller core), and many others. by brucehoult 4 hours ago

This _is_ possible with Linux, but not at all trivial and likely impossible with general-purpose distros.

Interrupt handling and (on RP2040) dedicated multicore code is also nice. by cyberax 9 hours ago

Exactly. But my point was that this demographic would today get a more powerful and more accessible platform for their projects by buying a Raspberry Pi. by xg15 10 hours ago

They have to fix their approach to Linux driver development. (and driver development in general).

Qualcomm likes to lob hardware to consumers while spending the minimal amount of time making sure the drivers to support that hardware actually works.

I couldn't imagine someone like Valve leaping at the opportunity to use them. by cogman10 1 hour ago

As an aside, wonder how this will impact Qualcomm's RISC-V plans? They were apparently working on some RISC-V cores, but I wonder whether that was just a play to put pressure on Arm, or are they still planning on bringing those out to market?

(The "Arduino UNO Q" that they're launching now is based on a Cortex A53. One would think if they're serious about RISC-V they would start with this kind of things, as in low-end stuff for tinkerers.) by jabl 13 hours ago

did you notice how ARMs stock jumped 5% after that ruling? that tells you everything you need to know.

not to be reddity but reminds me of that scene from The Social Network, where Zuck's buddy couldn't udnerstand how the the record companies winning was actually a massive L.

all the court proved was its total irrelevance to market forces, thats all. ARM is in NVidia accelerators, in Apple phones, in things of actual relevance.

Where is qcom "in"? theyre competing in... laptops!? i could not think of a worse commodity to be in. low volume, no margins, no added value. NPUs? holy snakeoil. again, this edge inferencing that nobody cares about. theres not even a roadmap for anyone to care about it.

>next generation of handheld gaming. If Valve or someone paired with them for the next Steamdeck style project, they'd dominate.

yeah, a market of what, $50M? jeez louise.

>Outside of Snapdragon its basically 5G Telecoms atm

seems to be the only thing going for it. by webdevver 13 hours ago

In a way this mirrors how people opt for using apps even though a web version exists, because the apps are generally more performant.

I'd argue that ChatGPT is already there. The instant check out feature they've added, along with integrations was that crucial link between recommending and fulfilling a purchase. It turns ChatGPT into something that can very directly assist with typical "life stuff".

As examples: You're having a dinner party, it can set the menu, then buy the ingredients. At christmas, spend a few minutes talking about your kids and then it can make christmas gift suggestions and go and buy it for you, then do it again 12 months later.

Getting between the consumer and their purchases would be highly lucrative, it functionally replaces one of the core functions of advertising and retail. by quitit 10 hours ago

-- Tom Hagen by ferguess_k 9 hours ago

Not that performance matters to all users, but with how much Pixels cost you have to ask yourself what it is you’re paying for. Even if you don’t care for Apple, for a little more you can get a competitor for a Snapdragon. by cosmic_cheese 13 hours ago

for google, pushing 3rd parties out of the supply chain gives them a ton of security and stability concerning pricing and budgeting. its a smart long term move, and i think the industry is going to continue to push towards consolidation and in-housing. by webdevver 14 hours ago

But "decent" is Qualcomm at its absolute best. And Qualcomm at its worst?

I'd rather chew down broken glass than work with Qualcomm. by ACCount37 13 hours ago

AMD briefly gave them a run for their money, but it was nowhere near the catastrophe that bulldozer was, where the company basically needed rescuing. For a brief moment, they weren't a monopolist - that's all that happened, right?

AMD being circled by OpenAI makes sense since AMD makes NVidia knockoffs. that's objectively useful. Harddrive company make sense for storing weights and generative content. Marvell is networking...

what does QCOm present here, that openai or the AI scene at large needs? the only bet is robotics - but why on earth would I put some washed-up adreno into a 40kg man-sized apparatus which would very comfortably fit a H100? by webdevver 14 hours ago

The only thing is to add the ESP32 module on the addons since it doesn't come enabled by default. Arduino isn't good for projects with more than 5 source code files, it is an awful IDE beyond the basic things you can pack on a single source code file.

Always had so many difficulties handling the IDE defects, basically it can crash when starting and every now and then will just refuse to upload the firmware. The other part are libraries, really difficult to setup all the needed libraries for larger code bases.

On that sense, Visual Code with PlatformIO went far beyond. Just open the project there and the libraries are taken care. The connection to boards is more robust. I'm not so sure how to feel with this sale to Qualcomm, it just feels that it is going there to die.

Quite the difference from the early days where Arduino had such energy and the tools would bring almost anyone into microntrollers with such ease. by nunobrito 12 hours ago

Would I have been able to learn assembly with ESP32? Probably not. You couldn't even find proper manuals for ESP8266 back in the day because they either didn't exist, weren't in English or weren't released to the general public... by yatopifo 11 hours ago

Sure, to you and me this may seem trivial, you paste the URL into the prefs, but there are people who will get stumped by this and with an Arduino there is one less step you can forget, not know about or do wrong.

As someone who teaches those things at an University level I can assure you that does make a difference for at least 50% of my students if I let them try to do this unguided. by atoav 11 hours ago

Lots of people don't program.

More people don't know how to program than do know how to program.

In that way, just because I can't imagine it being hard, doesn't mean I understand everything there is to understand.

This creates a gap and opportunity for products to make technology more approachable for the majority, instead of the minority (programmers).

Making things accessible to more people instead of less people seems to increasingly be the way. by j45 9 hours ago

Wasn't Arduino not for developers, but for hobbyists? People who aren't super technical but want to do something neat with basic microcontroller functionality?

You're complaint kinda seems like saying "BASIC isn't great language, it's got a lot of problems when used for enterprise applications." It's not really meant for that. by palmotea 11 hours ago

Without any opportunities for getting bogged down in anything extra at all, they can follow a simple recipe and quickly begin to blink an LED at the rate of their choosing.

The Arduino was developed to be a teaching tool, and it allows for a person to take little baby steps.

(Whether this placement is good or bad for Arduino as a business entity isn't something that I find particularly important.) by ssl-3 13 hours ago

There's also great support for CircuitPython and MicroPython, which makes it trivial to program the devices. by tedivm 13 hours ago

While it's nice to have exposure to PLC programming at an Arduino price point, the IDE, and PLC firmware was VERY rough around the edges. It took lots of resets and fiddling to even get the units connected over their USB serial, and you'd come back the next day and you'd have to repeat the process. Lots of "hold your tongue the right way while pressing this button". The IDE was also very buggy (though it may have improved in the last 12 months), but once you got things going, it did the job. by dfex 12 hours ago

Besides, what's the market? The non-pro hardware is fine for prototypes, but you don't want a bowl of spaghetti in production, so porting it to the pro is pointless. If you want a generic compute board, why not a Raspberry Pi? If you want a PLC, why not go for a proper PLC?

There's perhaps a market for the shadow IT equivalent of electronics projects where an Arduino sketch is suddenly a load-bearing part of the company, but that's about it. by crote 12 hours ago

Another other way is a ~$100 Arduino starter kit. It includes a printed instruction book and enough useful parts to sit down and begin doing stuff immediately. Anyone with a sufficiently-large pocketbook can buy it for themselves (or for someone else).

One of these things is like buying individual Lego bricks, or maybe lumber and fasteners from the hardware store, with a specific goal in mind. It's creative by necessity, and for those who know how to get where they're going then it's really quite lovely to have marketplaces like AliExpress and Ace Hardware available to satisfy our whims.

The other is more like a buying a packaged Lego kit or Meccano or an erector set that includes instructions for building several different things using the included parts. If a person (including a child) doesn't yet have any idea how to get started, then this can help them get the clues they need to go further with building other things.

---

I could buy a Chinese D1 mini dev board and a bag of assorted resistors, LEDs, transistors, and a breadboard and put it all in a nice box and give it to a kid, but I expect that they'll have a hard time figuring out what comes next. ["Now just draw the rest of the owl."]

Or, I could buy an packaged Arduino starter kit for a kid and have a reasonable expectation that they'll soon be telling me all about the neat -- if simple -- stuff they've done with it. They might not even realize the things they've learned along the way, but it'll stick with them well-enough if they want it to. And then they can move on to using VS Code with PlatformIO and start hammering out RP2040 PIO assembler when that time comes. If that's something they choose to be interested in, then they'll have a good foundation for the independent projects that may come later.

The whole is sometimes greater than the sum of its parts. by ssl-3 6 hours ago

What actually happened was that our management very quickly started telling the people who came along with the acquisition that they were doing everything wrong. The salespeople were selling wrong, the marketing people were marketing wrong, the customer support people were supporting customers wrong. Everything that the company we acquired did differently was seen as a problem.

Within about a year, anyone they hadn't pressured to adopt our practices had left and been replaced with a transplant from the Mothership. Another year later, the customers we picked up in the acquisition were rapidly leaving for other vendors. They simply couldn't work with us in a way that worked for their business anymore. Last I heard, pretty much the only remaining vestiges of the company we acquired were trademarks, and we were back to only having very large customers. by bunderbunder 10 hours ago

No they can't. That's like suggesting "the aircraft carrier could simply turn around." The cheap and simple way for a multi-billion-dollar secretive semiconductor manufacturing behemoth that doesn't know how to write a contract for less than a million dollars or to publish documents for the public is not to just change that. It's to write a contract for millions of dollars to buy someone else that can already do that. by LeifCarrotson 11 hours ago

I wouldn't minimise the effect of people just googling around and finding the name Arduino all over the place. It would be very hard for an entirely new platform to get critical mass while esp32 is not standing still. by abraae 9 hours ago

Other than that, Broadcom never really had any community involvement, nor any involvement in the Raspberry Pi Foundation that runs it. However, some broadcom engineers were part of the foundation, which isn't quite the same. by delfinom 11 hours ago

Instead of analogRead, you need to write your own busy loop watching certain bits in a register (or ISR), you need to twiddle bits in several registers to set up the ADC the way you want it, etc.

Serial.write? Nope, gotta read the docs, twiddle some bits again, and then you actually do get to use printf.

Those two right there are big hurdles to someone new to microcontrollers. In fact, they're a hurdle to me and I've read AVR datasheets for fun. by BenjiWiebe 6 hours ago

I'm not saying it's not a real or an easy problem, just that I wonder if it truly is the reason Arduino is "bad" by theon144 9 hours ago

I prefer to get things done quickly over cheap. by pcdoodle 13 hours ago

IIRC their standalone wifi chip is pretty good even… just stick them together already c’mon. by wibbily 12 hours ago

Have you tried it? It's simply not in the same league of battle tested as the ESP one is, and I will happily agree almost everything else about the RP based ecosystem is superior. by fidotron 10 hours ago

However, if they are distributing SDKs or something separately from the hardware, that software could have its own license that forbids commercial use. by limagnolia 11 hours ago

> Last but not least, you need to comply with article 4.d of the LGPL license which has specific and very technical requirements. Complying with such requirements, which derive from the LGPL being used in the Arduino core, is usually a matter of providing end users with some documentation and binary files.

Article 4d of the LGPL requires library users to either:

> 0) Convey the Minimal Corresponding Source under the terms of this License, and the Corresponding Application Code in a form suitable for, and under terms that permit, the user to recombine or relink the Application with a modified version of the Linked Version to produce a modified Combined Work, in the manner specified by section 6 of the GNU GPL for conveying Corresponding Source.

> 1) Use a suitable shared library mechanism for linking with the Library. A suitable mechanism is one that (a) uses at run time a copy of the Library already present on the user's computer system, and (b) will operate properly with a modified version of the Library that is interface-compatible with the Linked Version.

Because the Arduino code is statically linked to your application to create the firmware binary, you're required to use option 0 (distribute your application's object files so it can be relinked with the Arduino library).

> And for some low-volume Arduino based products, the software isn't the valuable part of the project, anyway

That's definitely true! That's why I said I wouldn't use Arduino for a shipping product unless you're fine with the firmware on the device being publicly available. by ndiddy 12 hours ago