[HN Gopher] Qualcomm to acquire Arduino
___________________________________________________________________
Qualcomm to acquire Arduino
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/10/arduino-retains-its-...
https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/embedded/artic...
Author : janjongboom
Score : 1287 points
Date : 2025-10-07 13:00 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.qualcomm.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.qualcomm.com)
| vluft wrote:
| well, they'll be missed for sure.
| buserror wrote:
| No they won't. I've seen them coming a looooong way. I even re-
| baptised arduidiots [0] quite a while ago. Since the "branding"
| fiasco I've stayed well clear of them.
|
| [0]:
| https://github.com/buserror/simavr/blob/master/examples/shar...
| defraudbah wrote:
| you can't say no on this website, downvoted until you change
| it to `yes, they won't`
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Additionally, they're launching their first joint product, the
| $44 Uno Q SBC, which has a Dragonwing SoC and STM32
| microcontroller on an Uno form factor board[1].
|
| It seems like Arduino will keep their brand, maintain their
| existing product lines, and continue building devices using other
| vendor's chips (besides Qualcomm), etc... but as with all
| acquisitions--I wonder how long that state of affairs will last.
|
| Alternatives like the Pi RP2040/2350 and Espressif's vast
| selection of boards can fill the gaps, but Arduino was what got
| me and many people I know into microcontrollers, so I have a
| special fondness for them!
|
| [1] https://www.arduino.cc/product-uno-q
| c0balt wrote:
| This board has onboard EMMC, wifi/ble and can run a full Linux.
| That is more of an rp 4/5 with an rp2xxx tagged on the side. It
| comes with their own arduino IDE installed too
|
| It is kinda disappointing but I can see why Qualcomm wants to
| use the brand.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| I'm speaking in a broader sense, comparing the variety of
| other Arduino boards like the Uno R3/R4. That wasn't too
| clear in the OP, sorry!
|
| The concern I have with the $44 Q is it has 2GB of RAM and
| 16GB eMMC, and a processor that's probably between a Pi 3 and
| Pi 4 in terms of speed and IO (though 4nm, so probably much
| more efficient).
|
| For $45 I can buy a Pi 5 with it's own built-in GPIO, PCIe,
| and a much faster SoC, though it lacks a few niceties like
| the Q form factor, the more efficient SoC, a realtime
| microcontroller, and a USB-C port with display out
| capabilities (I _really_ wish Pi had that...).
| kcb wrote:
| Shame to still see newly released products using a 13 year
| old core design. How has there been such little progress on
| low power ARM cores that it still makes sense to build a
| Cortex-A53 based soc on a modern node.
| antonvs wrote:
| There's been plenty of progress. There've been three
| newer generations since the A53: the A55, then the A510,
| then the A520.
|
| But what you think of as an old core design is in fact a
| mature, well-understood, well-tested, widely-supported,
| cost-effective core design. It also has some features
| such as in-order execution which none of the newer chips
| have. From an engineering perspective, it still can make
| a lot of sense in the right applications today.
| phoehne wrote:
| To me the benefits of an MCU have to do with latency on
| things like interrupts. A real OS sometimes gets in the
| way, if you're trying to run things on very tight timing,
| or want to go super low power. That's why even though I'm
| drowning in under-used Pis, I'm using Picos to drive the
| lights I'm making. (Trying to coordinate multiple 3w RGB
| LED floods with < 10ms of latency for fancy lighting
| effects - because as a maker - I can do it for as little as
| 10 times the cost of buying it). Also, I would rather
| release the magic blue smoke out of a $5 Pico than a $40+
| RPi. Although the Zeros were nice. We should have another
| round of zeros.
| cyberax wrote:
| There are some advantages to Arduino. Like <100ms boot
| times, you can go from power on to running within a blink
| of an eye.
|
| 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.
| arjvik wrote:
| Curious - how does one achieve this in Linux?
|
| I assume initramfs-only with special purpose pid0 and
| only the modules needed statically compiled into the
| kernel?
|
| What else would it take?
| cyberax wrote:
| The main slowdowns will likely come from device
| initialization and the bootloader.
|
| Bootloaders need to initialize most of the devices and
| load the kernel image. Then they hand the control over to
| Linux which proceeds to re-init these devices again.
|
| The userspace matters, but on recent computers it doesn't
| matter that much. You can get to sub-40ms with
| https://katacontainers.io/ That's a project that uses
| full VMs to run Docker images boot instead of kernel
| namespacing.
| mrheosuper wrote:
| 100ms boottime is very high, in theory they should have
| near instant boottime(placing application code right at
| reset vector)
| my123 wrote:
| The GPU on the RPi is a _lot_ slower
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Yes, this new board is more of a Raspberry Pi replacement
| than an Arduino Uno replacement.
|
| More specifically, I can see it trying to compete with things
| like those funny Chinese boards built around SoCs like
| SG2000. Those embed a Linux capable core, a small NPU, a
| camera interface with ISP and video codecs, and a secondary
| RTOS core for realtime control. Basically built for drones
| and simple robots. The caveat of those boards being: the
| documentations sucks, the SDK is wack, you get 3 example
| scripts and are entirely on your own outside that.
|
| Qualcomm could be trying to branch into drones/robotics/etc
| with this move.
| joezydeco wrote:
| Because Jetson is getting traction?
| nic547 wrote:
| STM32 MCUs are 3V3, not 5V right?
|
| Arduino really isn't great with naming, a Uno can be an AVR or
| ARM based board, now either 3V3 or 5V based and also a SBC
| rather than just a MCU.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| I think to Arduino, Uno just means 'Uno form factor, with
| shield pins in the same place'
| chimpontherun wrote:
| Which is kind of sad, since the Uno pinout is horrible for
| high-speed signals
| geerlingguy wrote:
| FYI the new Q has two 'high speed connectors' on the
| bottom side, for signals like CSI, HDMI, USB 3.1, etc.
|
| Haven't seen any examples of bottom 'high speed' shields
| yet, though. They said there would be some made
| available.
| chimpontherun wrote:
| Well, if all the interesting signals are on the
| mezzanine, what's the point of the Arduino form factor
| and pinout? Just to claim that they're supporting a
| widely used platform? Engineers can see through it.
|
| The more I look at it, the more it sounds like a platform
| designed by M&A team
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Depends on the MCU, but generally STM32 is 1.7-3.6V
| 0x457 wrote:
| STM32 is 3v3 logic.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Not necessarily; see above (Or a datasheet)
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Yes, but many (most?) of them are 5V-tolerant.
| dotancohen wrote:
| That is quite some board! Arduino has certainly progressed, I'm
| still playing around with R3 boards and ATMega chips. Other
| than the form factor, this looks like not only a completely
| different class of product, but a completely different hobby or
| business.
| r4ge wrote:
| ATmega micros are still incredibly useful and the Arduino
| ecosystem (especially the open source libraries, thanks Rob
| Tillaart!) makes it so easy to whip up a firmware. I really
| hope no matter what happens Arduino doesn't go off the rails.
| phoronixrly wrote:
| Were you paid to make this comment? As a youtuber, are you
| partnering with Qualcomm or Arduino and are you positioning
| their brands and products?
|
| Edit: I see you already have a video out about the acquisition
| that looks a lot like an ad as well...
| geerlingguy wrote:
| No, and also no.
| wyldfire wrote:
| I guess I'm replying to you with your own video? But it seems
| interesting and relevant [1].
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfKX616-nsE
| arjvik wrote:
| Almost a "do you know who I am?" moment :)
| kirito1337 wrote:
| Arduino is dead, ESP is better.
|
| They're trying to bring Arduino back from the dead.
| isodev wrote:
| There is also the change of location here. In normal times, it
| wouldn't matter where in the world a company is based but
| moving "entirely to the US" is just not a good look these days.
| kenmacd wrote:
| It is rather unfortunate. I haven't seen them mention moving
| manufacturing or their 'Arduino offices' (have you?), but
| even still I'd rather not support a country threatening to
| annex my homeland.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| I checked: there are board schematics for Uno Q there - but no
| datasheets or SDK or manuals or any documentation whatsoever
| for the QRB2210 SoC itself.
|
| Yep, it's Qualcomm alright.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Take it with a grain of salt, but the rep I've been in
| contact with said they'd be releasing more on the SoC...
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Here's hoping. Qualcomm hardware would be fun to play with
| if it wasn't attached to, you know. The rest of Qualcomm.
| petre wrote:
| And NDAs, licenses. The world has pretty much moved on to
| ESP32, RPi Pico and other boards post pandemic.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Indeed. I think the Arduino people on the sales side will
| be the ones coming off best in this deal.
| nrclark wrote:
| If I had a dollar for every time a Qualcomm rep promised me
| something that never actually happened, I'd be a
| hundredaire.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Wait, does that mean QXDM/QPST on Western Internet without
| complimentary malware?
| phoronixrly wrote:
| Genuine Qualcomm! And u/geerlingguy already has a youtube
| video up promoting the new SoCs...
| aynyc wrote:
| I'm pretty it was sarcasm. Qualcomm is known for shitty
| docs.
| phoronixrly wrote:
| Yeah, and NDA-d documentation and closed-source SDKs. I
| was also being sarcastic.
| cpldcpu wrote:
| At this point in time, the shield headers rather look like a
| trademark than a useful connecter.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Does it have video output? Otherwise, yawn!
| bfrog wrote:
| dragonwing docs are where?
| schappim wrote:
| This reminds me of the Arduino Intel Galileo.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Galileo
| chimpontherun wrote:
| or Samsung Artik. Went nowhere in a hurry
| korhojoa wrote:
| This was cool but the software support from intel was
| terrible.
| jajuuka wrote:
| I don't think Qualcomm bought them to destroy them. I think
| they see Arduino as a gateway. Instead of hoping students will
| learn ARM it's more reasonable to leverage Arduino's simple
| nature to act as an on-ramp for more low level developers. I
| wouldn't be surprised if Arduino IDE saw a revamp to better
| support jumping the gap between the Arduino to Snapdragon.
|
| ST and TI do the same thing with their boards too and it's not
| a bad strategy.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| People are making so much of this when it seems so much
| simpler. Qualcomm likes buying high-margin businesses, and
| Arduino is a high-margin business. Gross margin on their
| boards is over 90% (hence why you can buy a Chinese clone of
| a $30 board for $3) and this trend shows no signs of slowing
| down. The TI equivalent of the $30 Arduino Uno is $5, and
| it's a true gateway product.
| Romario77 wrote:
| clone relies on hardware being designed and software
| written - this takes a lot of money, so you can't just
| count the final price of parts as the price.
|
| Arduino is open sourced in hard and software which allows
| this cheap cloning to exist. It also helps a lot with
| software and docs, which makes it cheaper for them.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| A competent engineer designing a devkit as simple as an
| arduino needs about 1 day of work. Give it a week to
| include debugging. Amortize that cost over a million
| units and engineering time comes out to less than one
| cent per board.
| shadowpho wrote:
| It's not quite that easy, and besides the hard part is
| the SW. arduino spent years writing SW code and still
| does to make it easy to run, debug issues and provide
| support.
|
| Also a million dev kits is unrealistic for vast majority
| of companies 5-20k is more the number I hard.
| drzaiusx11 wrote:
| To be frank, the Arduino ide was a fork of Processing's
| and the compiler suite was GCC. They 'simply' glued the
| pre-existing pieces together. I'm not saying that it's
| trivial to do that but it's also not exactly a herculean
| task. Even the bootloader was a fork of Hernando
| Barragan's pre-existing Wiring project.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| > A competent engineer designing a devkit as simple as an
| arduino needs about 1 day of work.
|
| Hah! I like to underestimate scope as well, but this is
| really something else. Definitely a competent engineer
| could make something like this. But a couple of months
| maybe. You won't even read the documentation for the chip
| in a day.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Have you seen the schematics for these boards? They are
| exceptionally simple. Many devkits are much more
| complicated.
|
| I have actually done embedded engineering in the past and
| I was being generous with "a day." Skimming a datasheet
| is a skill and it certainly will not take a day to get
| the information you need off of it.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| If you mean the HW alone... Still over a day. If you mean
| the software to go along it, a couple orders of magnitude
| more.
|
| Even the simplest peripherals can bite back if you are
| not careful and you don't test the edge cases. AVR's are
| indeed quite simple, but if you try to build stuff other
| people will use, things need to be polished.
|
| I actually do embedded engineering. I'm doing it right
| now! More on the SW side than the PCB design side, and,
| again, this is quite an exaggeration from your side,
| saying you could do it in a day.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| The estimate isn't right, but the direction is right--
| there just aren't that many discrete components on these
| boards. The chips themselves contain capabilities that an
| embedded designer would otherwise need to design. I'm not
| sure there's much further to go, since much of what isn't
| on the chipset is power related.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| I agree. The estimate I was contesting. Also, we somewhat
| were talking past each other because I see these boards
| as an ensemble, HW+SW. So I was thinking about the time
| to make both. I agree that the boards have few discrete
| components and the PCB's are relatively simple.
| mastazi wrote:
| You seem to equate gateway product = affordable but, IMHO,
| a gateway product is something that people who are not in
| the field are likely to stumble upon. I recently saw
| Arduino kits for kids at a small local bookstore, I can
| imagine someone thinking "hey this electronic thingy looks
| cool I'll buy one for my niece's birthday". On the flip
| side, people who don't know anything about microcontrollers
| are not going to look online for Chinese Arduino clones.
| mrheosuper wrote:
| >people who don't know anything about microcontrollers
| are not going to look online for Chinese Arduino clones.
|
| But high chance they will look it up on
| Amazon/Ebay/whatever e-store and buy a clone without
| knowing.
| farixco wrote:
| This has 100% been my experience, even with in-person
| shopping.
|
| You ask for an Arduino, and the follow up question is:
| 'genuine or generic?'.
|
| I don't think the Arduino trademark is that valuable,
| it's already well underway genericization.
| askvictor wrote:
| I think a key part of a gateway product is community.
| That is what Arduino has, and what RPi has. It can also
| exist separate to products (e.g. micropython)
| guerrilla wrote:
| What's the TI equivalent?
| friendzis wrote:
| Various launchpads, on the very low end MSP430
| jacquesm wrote:
| The Raspberry Pi Pico blows the Arduino out of the water in
| terms of computational speed, available RAM and so on, and
| it costs a fraction. I don't remember using an Arduino
| since the Pi Pico came out. And if the Pico isn't enough
| there are the bigger family members waiting in the wings.
| For me Arduino is mostly over. And then there is Espressif
| as well, they make some neat boards.
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| Do you mean the Uno specifically? There are a lot of
| Arduino boards with varying capabilities.
| jacquesm wrote:
| For everything Arduino offers that I've ever used I know
| of a cheaper board with better specs.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Long live Teensy [1]!
|
| I just wanted that someone mentioned these Arduino-likes
| in the comments. I suspect many of you have come across
| them though.
|
| [1] https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/
| Arch-TK wrote:
| The teensy is so weird though. At least back when I
| played with them. They put a secondary chip which let's
| you flash over USB but they cover the debug pins and the
| only way to get serial over the USB port is to have a
| whole USB stack as part of your application. As a
| development board I would rather go with one of those
| STM32 backed boards and a knock off STLink, you need the
| STLink to flash, if you want DFU you can add that
| yourself, and you get a debug adapter.
| neltnerb wrote:
| Could you clarify what you mean about getting serial over
| the USB port in the context of debug pins?
|
| I've been using Teensy devices for over a decade and have
| always had it just recognize the device as if it were a
| USB to serial adapter and I can talk to it as what I'd
| call "serial over the USB port". But that obviously
| doesn't involve what I think software people usually mean
| when they're talking about firmware debug -- which
| usually entails stepping through execution, right?
|
| I'm used to just printing debug statements to the
| Serial.println() function, I learned on the 8051 where
| the best bet was to toggle different pins when code lines
| are passed, so even Serial.println() was a huge step up.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, the Teensy is pretty impressive too. I've used one
| in a project and came away impressed.
| ezconnect wrote:
| It's probably simpler, Arduino knows the market has no
| future and wanted to get out and did a sales pitch to
| Qualcomm and Qualcomm accepted.
| freeopinion wrote:
| Some years back when bluepills ran $2, Arduinos seemed to
| have no point. Today, you can buy an ESP32 dev board with
| wifi for $6. Or an Arduino Uno Wifi for $55.
| brucehoult wrote:
| Note that both Bluepill and ESP32 can be programmed in the
| Arduino IDE, using the Arduino library, and the vast
| library of Arduino sketches and 3rd party libraries (as
| long as they don't use AVR assembly language.
|
| So can the Pi Pico, the Milk-V Duo (one 64 bit Linux core,
| one 64 bit microcontroller core), and many others.
| serbuvlad wrote:
| While that is true, both Espressif and the Pico have
| their own SDKs, and they're really well written too.
|
| The Arduino SDK is the simplest to use, sure, but the
| Pico framework (I don't have experience with the
| Espressif one) is extremely good, and the Pico's PIO is a
| godsend. I used it to implement 3 wire SPI (data
| bidirectional on the same wire) at almost 'real-time',
| which is to say, at half the speed of the hardware SPI
| controller (half the speed because the interface clock is
| put up one cycle and down the next; this also gives
| enough time for data shuffling).
|
| Why does the Arduino SDK necessitate a huge markup on
| Arduino boards, when $0 of every computer I buy to run
| Linux on goes to GCC?
| mietek wrote:
| Just because most of the free software ecosystem relies
| on unpaid volunteer work does not mean it is a desirable
| state of affairs, especially with billion dollar
| companies building on top of said work while hardly
| contributing anything back.
| serbuvlad wrote:
| While that is true, if Espressif and the Raspberry Pi
| Foundation can build their SDKs and still offer cheap
| chips/boards, so could Arduino.
|
| I'm not expecting a $0 markup, but Arduino prices are
| simply unreasonable for what they offer, especially if
| you live in a lower income country.
| freeopinion wrote:
| If you think the price is unreasonable, don't buy. You
| have listed what you seem to think are better options. I
| agree that there are better options. If somebody else
| wants to spend their money in different ways than I do,
| let them. If Arduino thinks they can make money this way,
| let them try. If it works, good for them, I guess. If it
| fails, I guess the joke will be on Qualcomm. Honestly,
| Arduino could slash their price to be $1 less than a
| Milk-V Duo and I'd still by the Duo. If the Arduino was
| $1 less than an ESP32, I'd still by the ESP32. So I'm not
| sure lowering prices wouldn't just hurt them.
| serbuvlad wrote:
| I have never bought an Arduino. I have bought a few
| Picos, a few ESP32s, and a couple Picos. And a clone of
| an Arduino Nano integrated in a system with a Pico for 5V
| logic, specifically, to implement a PS/2 controller. I
| don't see any advantage an Arduino has over an ESP32,
| aside from 5V logic support.
| tredre3 wrote:
| Both Espressif and Raspberry pi (pico) target OEMs who
| will buy millions of their chips. They've both embraced
| the hobbyist market as well, but it's not how they've
| recouped their investment.
|
| Arduino targets the hobyist market where customers will
| buy one (or at best a handful) of their boards. Arduino
| simply has no other way of recouping their investment
| than selling expensive hardware.
|
| So I don't think it's fair to say that Arduino is being
| greedy. Also FWIW, Espressif's official dev boards are
| also pretty expensive. Not Arduino expensive, but several
| times the price of identical "clones" based on the same
| reference design and using the same official esp32
| module.
| kiba wrote:
| Branding power. Precisely why brand drugs continue to
| make money over fist for pharmaceutical companies even
| after patents expire.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Precisely why brand drugs continue to make money over
| fist for pharmaceutical companies even after patents
| expire.
|
| Generics may have the same active ingredient but (vastly)
| different pharmacokinetics - i.e. different absorption
| rates/retention in the body. For basic stuff such as
| painkillers that's one thing, but for more sensitive
| medication such as insulin, antidepressants or anything
| related to the cardiovascular system (heart rate, blood
| pressure and clotting) one has to be _very_ careful when
| switching between brands.
| tredre3 wrote:
| > Some years back when bluepills ran $2, Arduinos seemed to
| have no point.
|
| But you still used the Arduino SDK with the bluepill, so
| clearly Arduino had a point. Unless you were one of the few
| masochist who dealt with the STM32 toolchain directly for
| fun?
|
| The Pi Pico is such a breath of fresh air in that regard.
| Finally a decent-enough toolchain for a decent-enough
| performing ARM MCU!
| whatever1 wrote:
| > Alternatives like the Pi RP2040/2350 and Espressif's vast
| selection of boards can fill the gaps, but Arduino was what got
| me and many people I know into microcontrollers, so I have a
| special fondness for them!
|
| Exactly. For the people who did not follow a structured
| educational program on embedded programming, starting with an
| SMT microcontroller was very hard.
|
| Arduino made this fun and easy with their language & IDE combo.
| Typing some code and _seeing_ the lights on the board reacting
| is a hell of a drug.
|
| Once you mastered the IDE, you could either program other
| microcontrollers in the same IDE, or at some point you hit the
| limits and started digging into the vendor-specific toolchains.
|
| If I started again today, I would again start with an Arduino.
| saidinesh5 wrote:
| Do you happen to know how good the Linux environment is on the
| Dragonwing SoC.
|
| I think their slides say Debian, but didn't mention what binary
| blobs one needs to have for enabling various functionality the
| SoC provides / how much their kernel deviates from mainline
| kernel ...
| webdevver wrote:
| theyre going to push "AI on the edge" and "IoT" nonsense again
|
| absolutely unbelievably cooked. anyone pushing that nonsense,
| short with leverage.
|
| low latency connectivity + goliath data centres will always beat
| on-device inference/training.
| ale42 wrote:
| > low latency connectivity + goliath data centres will always
| beat on-device inference/training.
|
| Except that it's not always an option...
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| privacy is a thing people care about.
| webdevver wrote:
| beyond delusional. imagine unironically saying this in the
| big '25.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> privacy is a thing people care about._
|
| Sadly, it seems that privacy is something that _HN readers_
| care about, but precious few others.
|
| Look at the success of Facebook. The covers have been off
| that stinker for _years_ , yet people still regularly use it;
| often to the exclusion of more traditional media. I have
| quite a few friends that I don't get invited to their
| occasions, because they only advertise them on FB. They
| invite a bunch of randos they've never met, but not those of
| us, they see all the time.
|
| To be fair, if I sit down, and describe exactly what the
| ramifications of the "always on, always open" Facebook
| presence means, people will usually suddenly value privacy,
| but it seems that no one actually ever does that, at a level
| most folks can understand.
|
| Hysterical rantings (even when well-founded), by geeks, don't
| get through to most folks. It needs to be done in the
| vernacular, and via media they actually consume.
| dboreham wrote:
| There's a commercial version of privacy. E.g. Company A
| doesn't want to send their data to Company B (a competitor)
| for processing.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Low latency, low power, portable
|
| pick two.
|
| well actually you can't really, low latency is pretty hard to
| do full stop
| Teknomadix wrote:
| Not necessarily. There are lots of use cases for on device AI
| inference. I run YOLO on an Nvidia Jetson powered Lenovo Think
| Edge, which processes incoming video at full frame rates on
| four channels with recognition and classification for a bespoke
| premises security system. No clouds involved other than the Nix
| package manager etc. Make sure your argument May carry more
| weight when you're talking about ultra low power devices like
| an Arduino running AI inference locally that seems like more of
| a stretch.
| webdevver wrote:
| true, true, very true, but i observe you use a nvidia chip.
| which is perfectly logical. why would you use something that
| is worse in every single way, right? which is exactly what
| qcom offerings are...
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| Is power a single way?
| westpfelia wrote:
| SOOOO buy Qualcomm. The second they start talking about AI-IOT
| stock is gonna sky rocket.
|
| We live in a broken world.
| vachina wrote:
| > "AI on the edge" and "IoT" nonsense again.
|
| I love it when my device stays dumb (or at least connect-local)
| and not become abadonware 6 months after release because the
| cloud provider felt it a chore to keep running.
| healthymomo wrote:
| tf are you on. just look at meta display glasses. it s all on
| board compute
| webdevver wrote:
| its cool... but thats not gonna last long at all. soon theyre
| gonna put their own custom soc into it, just like google did.
|
| especially for such a specific, space/power/thermal
| constrained platform. itd be weird if meta _didnt_ put their
| own custom soc into it.
|
| running a big tech company these days, theres enough custom
| work going around that basically all the big players have
| internal silicon teams. hell, even fintech shops with ~100
| employees are doing tape-outs these days!
| leoedin wrote:
| > low latency connectivity
|
| That's not exactly easy. I doubt on-device training will become
| much of a thing. But on-device inference is desirable in all
| sorts of distributed use cases. We're still a long way off from
| reliable internet everywhere. Especially when you want to start
| pushing large quantities of sensor data down the pipe.
|
| I can't even get reliable internet on my phone in the centre of
| London.
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| Realtime and offline would like a word.
| murillians wrote:
| I only feel dread when I see a Qualcomm story on HN anymore.
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| Yeah, it might as well say "Oracle to acquire $FOO"
| webdevver wrote:
| genuinely, what is the survival story for qualcomm entering the
| next decade?
|
| - completely missed out on AI
|
| - phones become commodity, push for complete vertical
| integration from apple, google
|
| - squeezed by chinese soc vendors from 'below' (mediatek,
| unisoc)
|
| they're cooked, right? there's no way out, surely.
| ivape wrote:
| Cooked hardware companies get bought into it seems. Intel is
| the most egregious example, but AMD is being circled by
| OpenAI now for 10%. Companies like Marvell and even hard
| drive companies are up due to how they fit into the AI
| pipeline.
| fred_is_fred wrote:
| I don't think OpenAI has any plans to buy AMD. That's just
| another moving paper around and we all get rich in the AI
| space - like the nVidia, OpenAI, Oracle circle of funding.
| webdevver wrote:
| But intel being "cooked" was a massive psyop. how was intel
| ever "cooked", when they were still designing, taping out,
| and delivering massive quantities of CPUs to DCs and
| consumer products?
|
| 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?
| BirAdam wrote:
| Intel was in danger because they went from having massive
| amounts of cash on hand to losing billions per quarter
| with no roadmap to retake the market in the face of
| competition from both AMD and ARM. They also didn't have
| competitive GPUs, they lost the automotive market, they
| lost the networking market outside of desktop/laptop
| WiFi, and they'd lost any potential market in
| handhelds/embedded ages ago. Intel is a company that is
| massively capital intensive, and they simply cannot
| afford to be in that position. Looking at the need for
| billions in investment while burning billions per quarter
| and no good pathway to profitability, investors leave and
| the company is forced to make dramatic cuts which
| furthers the death spiral.
| jsheard wrote:
| Apple's vertical integration is formidable but Google are
| still really struggling with their execution, their Tensor
| SOCs are consistently years behind Snapdragon in performance
| and efficiency even after their switch to TSMC this
| generation. Qualcomm is probably safe at the high end of the
| Android market for a while yet.
| webdevver wrote:
| google is competing with a different offering. with a pixel
| you get google's ecosystem. apple is also not neccesarily
| top dog in performance (maybe they are - havne't checked
| lately), nobody buys an iphone because it ranks highly in
| benchmarks. thats some nerd nonsense that 0.1% of the
| audience seriously cares about.
|
| 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.
| Certified wrote:
| Apple A series CPUs and now M series CPUs have
| consistently been top of the benchmarks in single core
| performance for most of the last decade. This even holds
| true when pitted against desktop Intel and AMD chips. For
| someone who works with workloads that struggle to be very
| multithreaded, I do watch this. I must be that 0.1% of
| the audience
| leoh wrote:
| >nobody buys an iphone because it ranks highly in
| benchmarks. thats some nerd nonsense that 0.1% of the
| audience seriously cares about.
|
| This is not true at all. Performance matters because it
| enables exceptional battery life.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| The gap between Google's and Apple's SoCs is insane.
| Current Pixels bench at around a third of what current
| iPhones do.
|
| 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.
| jsheard wrote:
| > with how much Pixels cost you have to ask yourself what
| it is you're paying for.
|
| The average consumer seems to be stuck on the same
| question, judging by Pixel's 3% market share.
| zem wrote:
| as a pixel owner, i'm unfortunately paying for the
| operating system more than anything else. most other
| android phones are infested with unremovable bloatware
| and lack of update guarantees, and iOS is crippled by
| apple. I used maemo when I could, and now that I can't
| pixels are pretty much my only option for a decent phone.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| I have an Xperia as a secondary phone and test device
| which comes with relatively clean Android. Sony is
| wavering on the NA market unfortunately so I may not be
| able to replace it with another Sony when the time comes.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Does this mean you won't even be able to buy new unlocked
| ones on Amazon?
| sofixa wrote:
| Even the low cost Xiaomi and OnePlus models get you a few
| years (6 for the former, IIRC 4 for the latter) of
| Android support.
|
| As for bloatware, any mobile OS comes with stuff
| included. I've used both a Xiaomi and a OnePlus device
| and neither felt too bad, bloat wise.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Exactly the reason I own a pixel.
|
| Pixels get first class support by google in terms of
| software which means I can rock my phone for several
| generations before upgrading.
|
| I've owned a 2, 6, and now 9. Even though the 9 is much
| faster than the 2 or 6, I've reached a point where that
| performance difference simply doesn't matter. I'm not
| being held back by the CPU in any real way. That leaves
| security, software, and battery life as the main reasons
| why I might decide to update my phone.
| zem wrote:
| same here, got six years out of a pixel 3 and hope to get
| another six out of my current pixel 9. if it hadn't been
| for the battery life degrading I might even have hung on
| to the 3 for another year or two.
| sgerenser wrote:
| It's definitely not that bad for the Pixel 10. One
| source[0] shows Geekbench 6 scores of 3701 single core
| and 9460 multicore for iPhone 17 (maybe add 5% more on
| each on the iPhone 17 Pro). While the Tensor G5 in the
| Pixel 10 is at 2345 single/6581 multi. So around 63-70%
| of the speed of the latest iPhone. Still a pretty poor
| showing but a far cry from 1/3 the speed.
|
| [0] https://www.tomsguide.com/phones/iphone-17-vs-
| pixel-10
| fidotron wrote:
| Qualcomm are good at radios and associated signal processing.
| The rest is simply integrations around that.
| ac29 wrote:
| Yeah, there are only a small handful of companies making
| radios for mobile networks that I am aware of - its really
| hard. Qualcomm, Samsung, Mediatek, Apple?
| userbinator wrote:
| There is also HiSilicon (Huawei), Unisoc (formerly
| Spreadtrum) also exists in the ultra-low-end segment
| formerly occupied by Mediatek, and then a bunch of
| miscellaneous ones like Leadcore, Nufront, and Rockchip.
| piltdownman wrote:
| They just won a significant case in its licensing battle with
| Arm, securing rights to use Oryon cores in Snapdragon chips.
| Add in a decent x86 to ARM translation layer, and you have
| the basis of the next generation of handheld gaming. If Valve
| or someone paired with them for the next Steamdeck style
| project, they'd dominate.
|
| At the high-end they announced two new flagship processor
| platforms at its 2025 Snapdragon Summit. The Snapdragon 8
| Elite Gen 5 they claim to be the world's fastest mobile SoC.
|
| Outside of Snapdragon its basically 5G Telecoms atm - iPhone
| 17 Pro Max relies on Qualcomm's Snapdragon X80 Modem for 5G -
| 5G Edge solutions for RAN, presumably harnessing AI - Non-
| Terrestrial 5G Provisioning in their partnerships with
| Thales/Ericsson. - IoT and Wearables - presumably low
| power/footprint modems
| webdevver wrote:
| >They just won a significant case in its licensing battle
| with Arm
|
| 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.
| clarkmoreno wrote:
| facts brother!
| piltdownman wrote:
| So why on earth did ARM sue to stop their release and
| force a clean-sheet redesign? Other than SoftBank being
| Softbank.
|
| //ARM's CEO wrote in a contemporaneous internal message
| that the Nuvia ALA "had left a route to blow a hole in
| [ARM's] revenue plan" because "Qualcomm already ha[d] a
| v9 architecture license" under its own ALA. That
| observation led him to vent that "I'm struggling not to
| be pissed that we set up a route for Qualcomm to collapse
| the payments to Arm," which "feels like in our chess game
| we left ourselves very exposed."
|
| https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-
| courts/delawar...
|
| Re: Handheld gaming - The dedicated Xbox gaming handheld
| was cancelled because AMD required a minimum of 10
| million units in its contract. With Steam Deck only
| selling ~5 million units and ASUS ROG/Lenovo Legion only
| selling 1-2 million MS didn't want to take the risk.
|
| Reduce that BOM, go with ARM, and realise there's an
| incumbent leaving the market, and you have a compelling
| argument for Qualcomm. Particularly given the Nintendo
| Switch 2 sold 1.6M units in June, the highest launch
| month unit sales for video game hardware in US history
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Good luck getting anywhere close to Nintendo Switch sales
| with anything that's not Nintendo Switch.
|
| Valve managing to land Steam Deck within 2 orders of
| magnitude from that? That was already an unlikely feat.
| piltdownman wrote:
| One of the main use-cases of the Steam Deck? Wii-U and
| Switch emulation!
|
| Valve managing to land Steam Deck within 2 orders of
| magnitude on their first handheld hardware launch,
| without some of the largest exclusive gaming IP in the
| world, selling direct to consumer... represent salient
| arguments for its ability to compete at a far greater
| extent when on more equal terms.
| Moral_ wrote:
| Quoting Arm stock prices is hilarious considering that
| there is only 10% float available to be traded and 95% of
| that 10% is owned by institutions already. That stock is
| so heavily manipulated so the big boys can make insane
| profits on options.
|
| On the other topic
|
| >>Outside of Snapdragon its basically 5G Telecoms atm
|
| >seems to be the only thing going for it.
|
| Did you guys forget the $4B a year in auto rev that they
| generate, they essentially captured the entire auto
| market from Nvidia and NXP.
| piltdownman wrote:
| Auto Rev is Snapdragon Digital Chassis based is it not? I
| presumed people were aware of the legacy Snapdragon
| stuff, but maybe not!
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| Thank goodness for that $4B a year. It will certainly
| keep the stock valued at a market cap of $182B.
| jabl wrote:
| > They just won a significant case in its licensing battle
| with Arm, securing rights to use Oryon cores in Snapdragon
| chips.
|
| 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.)
| mrheosuper wrote:
| I don't see nothing will affect the RISCV stuff. The
| risc-v will be likely used in some fixed-function
| chip(like TPM or security core inside CPU, pretty sure
| they've done that)
| als0 wrote:
| So they are using RISC-V already for some embedded cores.
| For application cores, they are participating in the
| RISC-V consortium to keep the pressure on ARM and also to
| be ready for the long game.
|
| I do not expect to see Qualcomm made RISC-V application
| cores until Android or Windows is completely ported to
| it, which I think rules out the next several years.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > If Valve or someone paired with them for the next
| Steamdeck style project, they'd dominate.
|
| 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.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| I've been out of the hardware game a minute but Qualcomm was
| a great partner for helping you ship products. Everything
| about them sucks, but they will actually send engineers to
| your office. They always took bug reports seriously and
| pretty much always delivered patches. Also they always had
| ample samples, both in terms of dev boards and software. I
| know of several products that basically shipped the sample
| code with minimal modifications.
|
| If I were a company trying to ship V1 of our first product, I
| would hands down pick Qualcomm. MediaTek et al are great for
| when you know what you're doing with minimal handholding.
|
| I absolutely hated working with them, but at least they were
| a vendor you could work with. Perhaps the cheaper vendors
| have upped their game here but I wouldn't know.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| I heard that Qualcomm _can_ be decent to work with - if you
| are in a company the size of Qualcomm, or can dangle
| "500000 units to ship" in front of them like a carrot.
|
| But "decent" is Qualcomm at its absolute best. And Qualcomm
| at its worst?
|
| I'd rather chew down broken glass than work with Qualcomm.
| gimmeThaBeet wrote:
| I can add a minimal anecdote. I got some support from a
| couple engineers on a telecom project, and it wasn't even
| that big of a thing, but they were more than decent to
| work with. I did say to one guy, "you guys are a lot
| cooler to work with than some of the stuff you see in the
| news" and matter-of-fact he was just like "oh, yeah
| that's legal"
|
| my vision of them is that the engineering side can be
| great to deal with when they want to be (and my personal
| experience is they want to be). but the other part of
| their business is like set the standard, and then enforce
| it.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| To get to the engineers, you need to get through the
| viper pit that is the sales first.
|
| The only time I have seen this incredible feat
| accomplished was in a company large enough that they had
| a department dedicated to dealing with other large
| companies.
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| At least they're up front about it? When I think of a
| vendor I think of sales taking your money and then being
| ghosted by support staff.
| yaro330 wrote:
| Cooked how exactly? - Completely missed out on the LLM boom,
| just like everyone except nvidia. - Apple never used qcom
| SoCs, just their modems, Google doesn't even register on the
| radar of sales, their first foray into SoCs isn't great. -
| Idk where you get that, they still hold the entire market in
| their firm grasp and Nuvia stuff has been nothing but
| outstanding, it's just a shame that MS are cowards and
| dropped the Windows-on-Arm stuff again. - Google are
| partnering with them for the Android on PC projects.
|
| I hope they provide better Linux support for the next gen PC
| grade chips.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Buying random companies they have no use for like Arduino,
| they have firmly entered the Intel era.
| moralestapia wrote:
| >completely missed out on AI
|
| Cheap on-device AI. Qualcomm to the moon, @webdevver BTFO.
|
| If anyone can pull that move, it's them.
|
| You just severely lack imagination, man.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Qualcomm is and will remain patent holding company. They have
| a crazy number patents for all manner of wireless
| communication, and they treat them like their golden geese.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| So they're basically going to become a patent troll, like
| IBM?
| zoobab wrote:
| They are a patent troll for a long time.
| xphos wrote:
| I think the AI bit is overblown. Why does every large company
| have to do everything in technology, AI is horribly over
| valued in the market right now. The other issues are much
| more important as those are threats to Qcom's current profit
| method mostly MediaTek squeezing the lower tier market. It's
| unclear if Qcoms going to be able to dominate upper tier
| where they own like 60% of market share if they don't also
| compete at lower tier where MediaTek has been very successful
| quitit wrote:
| The honest answer is that they see AI interaction as being
| the next human to computer interface, one that will
| function much in the way that super-apps do today, with the
| benefit of accelerating the purchasing pathway.
|
| 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.
| rebolek wrote:
| What a nightmare!
| Gud wrote:
| Why would I want any of this?
| ferguess_k wrote:
| "With the money they earn, they can buy more police and
| political power. Then they come after us. We have the
| unions and gambling, and they're the best things to have,
| but narcotics is the thing of the future. If we don't get a
| piece of that action, we risk everything we have. Not now,
| but in ten years".
|
| -- Tom Hagen
| bgnn wrote:
| just a correction: Mediatek is Taiwanese.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Qualcomm still are the only relevant ones in town who
| actually sell high performance ARM designs to third parties
| and have no political quarrels attached, there's a lot of
| money to be made in that game.
|
| As you said there is competition from Mediatek, but who knows
| how long Mediatek has before the US government sanctions them
| to hell and beyond. Apple doesn't sell to third parties (no
| matter how much one might dream) and so does Google. Samsung
| I haven't ever seen used outside of their own phones and TVs.
|
| The remainder is NVidia's Tegra lineup but other than
| automotive and the Nintendo Switch I haven't seen these in
| third party products either, I doubt they'll even take your
| calls if you are not coming in with millions of units sold of
| demand.
| dsrtslnd23 wrote:
| If you want to use SOTA camera sensors on an embedded system
| Qualcomm is great (in particular compared to NVIDA Jetson).
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| You should feel dread. They're a pretty awful company... one of
| those outfits that seems to employ more lawyers than engineers.
| Basically the Oracle of chips.
|
| I can't begin to guess what motivated them to engage in an
| intentional culture clash of this magnitude.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| "Broadcom to acquire Qualcomm"
|
| Better? :)
| fragmede wrote:
| Would that be BroadQual? ComComm? QualBroad?
| hinkley wrote:
| Could be worse. Could be Broadcom.
| phoehne wrote:
| You can make a low volume product by buying a bunch of Arduinos
| as your controller. You just stick them in the device. There's no
| license issue. While I haven't exhaustively looked, one vendor's
| kit I did look at explicitly stated their boards were not
| licensed for that kind of commercial use. Qualcomm could very
| well make their boards for development, test, and evaluation
| purposes only. And that would be my worry. It wouldn't effect
| tinkering at home or use in a classroom, but would mean you
| couldn't buy a stack of Nanos, flash them, and plug them into
| your project, if it is for a commercial purpose.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > one vendor's kit I did look at explicitly stated their boards
| were not licensed for that kind of commercial use. Qualcomm
| could very well make their boards for development, test, and
| evaluation purposes only.
|
| Under what legal theory?
| geerlingguy wrote:
| The "we have lawyers and lots of money to enforce things that
| are on shaky legal ground and you will likely settle instead
| of fighting in court" legal theory, I presume.
| q3k wrote:
| One way they could do this is grant you a patent license only
| for some kinds of use.
|
| (and eg. make sure their products are useless without some
| patent license for some software driver or algorithm)
| limagnolia wrote:
| Patents are exhausted on first sale. If you sell me a board
| that uses your patent, I can do anything I want with that
| board. At least that is my understanding, IANAL and all...
|
| However, if they are distributing SDKs or something
| separately from the hardware, that software could have its
| own license that forbids commercial use.
| phoehne wrote:
| https://www.st.com/resource/en/evaluation_board_terms_of_use.
| ..
| stephen_g wrote:
| As far as I can tell, if they even attempted that, all they
| could do is deny any kind of warranty claims from you and try
| and stop distributors selling you any more of their brand
| parts.
| Jolter wrote:
| ... which would kill your business, unless you are able to
| source an alternative part. So not entirely harmless.
| e44858 wrote:
| They could claim copyright infringement if you distribute
| their SDK in your firmware without their permission.
| ndiddy wrote:
| > You can make a low volume product by buying a bunch of
| Arduinos as your controller. You just stick them in the device.
| There's no license issue.
|
| Note that the Arduino libraries are LGPL licensed. Unless you
| have a commercial agreement with Arduino, you have to
| distribute your firmware to your customers as object files so
| it can be linked to updated/modified versions of the Arduino
| libraries. This means that I wouldn't use Arduino for a
| shipping product unless you're fine with the firmware on the
| device being publicly available.
| phoehne wrote:
| That's not my reading of https://support.arduino.cc/hc/en-
| us/articles/4415094490770-L.... The LGPL is usually a
| requirement to publish your modifications to the LGPL
| licensed code, but not necessarily your binary blobs. And for
| some low-volume Arduino based products, the software isn't
| the valuable part of the project, anyway.
| ndiddy wrote:
| From that support article:
|
| > 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_.
| rwaksmunski wrote:
| At least it's not Broadcom
| KaiserPro wrote:
| I've not used an arduino for a number of years, I assume this
| means they are not going to use atmel/microchip anymore?
| mrheosuper wrote:
| They has added other vendors for years now. The Uno R4 uses
| Renesas MCU and espressif module.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Arduino wasn't strictly confined to Atmel/Microchip for a while
| now. Their newest mainstream boards roll with Renesas chips.
|
| And Qualcomm itself is not in the business of making mass
| market MCUs. Does Qualcomm want to be?
|
| They can, they already have the kind of dies they could put
| into those. But they would be competing against the likes of
| ST, and they wouldn't have the wide ass margins they're used
| to.
|
| They would also have to be writing public documentation, and
| dealing with hobbyists and small developers. And the impression
| I got from dealing with Qualcomm? They'd rather douse
| themselves in gasoline and set themselves on fire than
| acknowledge that small developers exist.
| tylergetsay wrote:
| Espressif has been eating their lunch, the boards are way more
| capable and much cheaper. Why would anyone pick an Uno over an
| ESP32?
| fidotron wrote:
| The fact we don't have viable western competition for Espressif
| is likely to become far more of a headache than all the angst
| about AI GPU production.
|
| Where can you get a half decent microcontroller with wifi
| integrated on it? Espressif. All the others are flat out bad in
| some very important dimension, which isn't to say the Espressif
| products are perfect, but they fit in the important ways.
| monegator wrote:
| MCHP has been _slowly_ coming up with decent radio devices,
| finally. If you don 't use the radio going bare metal is
| basically effortless, if you need to use the radio the dev
| Tools are actually improving, though they are still nowhere
| as good as IDF in hiding the ugliness.
|
| Of course they are more expensive (not much more, really,
| compared to simillar specced ESPs) but they are _western_ and
| the peripheral actually work as intended. In my projects with
| ESP32 i had to basically bitbang every peripheral that i
| needed to use beyond their simplest mode.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Yea... ST, Nordic etc have been sleeping on the Wi-Fi,
| letting Espressif corner that market. They both now have
| standalone Wi-Fi ICs, but no MCUs still; and it took them a
| while to release the ICs.
| wibbily wrote:
| It's a shame. Nordic's chips blow the ESPs out of the water
| in terms of power consumption. You can get an nRF bluetooth
| dongle to run for months/years off a coin cell, almost
| without trying. Getting an ESP32 to behave is much harder
|
| IIRC their standalone wifi chip is pretty good even... just
| stick them together already c'mon.
| fidotron wrote:
| I think Nordic etc. are resistant to telling people "if
| you want to use Wifi you must use FreeRTOS" or
| equivalent, so they push the two IC solution instead just
| so their Wifi stack is partitioned physically from the
| rest of your system.
|
| It just pushes more integration headaches downstream to
| the customer, in addition to being inherently costlier.
| Espressif had the core right idea there, even if it's not
| the right decision for all designs.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| I think they do this though... but it's Zephyr instead of
| FreeRTOS.
|
| What I want is a Wi-Fi radio that just works like a
| normal part. No RTOS requirement. No framework or
| software libs required. Read the datasheet and go.
|
| For some context: This is how LoRa radios work, and this
| is how Esp-Hosted (Official firmware from Espressif that
| turns the ESP into a radio IC "coprocessor") works.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I thought ESP32 does exactly the same as Nordic
| Softdevice model? It's just that people hardly notice,
| and it's perfectly fine.
| joshvm wrote:
| Built-in no, but the Pi Pico W is decent and inexpensive if
| the form factor isn't an issue. The RP2040/RP2350 are nice
| chips to work with and documentation is good. I can live with
| an external module, and it's certified too.
| fidotron wrote:
| > the Pi Pico W is decent
|
| 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.
| joshvm wrote:
| Yes, I've use them for ESPHome and other small jobs like
| lighting controllers, but not for production. They're
| cheaper than most Arduino or hobbyist breakout boards
| like Feather. I can't comment on battle-tested, but I've
| also bought some pretty shoddy ESP breakouts in the past
| and I've had trouble with unstable WiFi performance when
| I've meshed them. The PIOs are cool, and better
| documented than Beaglebone/TI (maybe that's improved).
| Toolchain is also decent.
|
| I would probably go Atmega otherwise. It's rare I need
| something in the gap between 8-bit and a dedicated
| Raspberry Pi. And I'll take some rough edges to support a
| local company (though for transparency I do hold some
| stock in RPI).
| 15155 wrote:
| - Silicon Labs
|
| - Texas Instruments (soon.)
| phoehne wrote:
| They're more fun. The programming is easier (although you can
| get an Arduino like experience on a ESP32). They have 5V
| options, which make some projects easier without having to add
| additional components. The ESP32 API (and the Pico for that
| matter) are better suited professional programmers.
|
| An Arduino is better if you're doing something and want a
| quick, easy, simple to program controller. It started as a way
| for artists to add MCUs to the projects without having to
| become embedded programmers.
| xd1936 wrote:
| I've only ever used my ESP32s with the Arduino IDE. I don't
| think there's anything "easier" about using an Arduino board
| vs that experience.
| vachina wrote:
| Ain't fun spending $40 for a 'fun' project. ESP32 is like a
| dollar for WiFi and GPIOs. That's fun.
| pcdoodle wrote:
| ESP32 is a dumpster fire IMO.
|
| I prefer to get things done quickly over cheap.
| sschueller wrote:
| How so? I have a product that you can buy that runs on an
| ESP32S3[1]. They work very well and you can even do OTA
| updates. Even my competitor uses an ESP32 :)
|
| [1] https://www.stationdisplay.com/
| void-pointer wrote:
| Did you need to go through CE certification to get your
| product on the market?
|
| I have some ESP-based hardware ideas of my own (which
| include custom PCBs) but the CE certification is
| prohibitively expensive..
| sschueller wrote:
| Yes, regardless if you are using a pre-certified
| module/parts or not you need to CE certify your product
| as a whole. However if you use pre-certified modules the
| testing is cheaper/less complicated.
|
| I do my certification testing in China by a reputable lab
| which is much cheaper than doing it here in Switzerland
| (at least 15k USD). At a minimum expect to spend
| 1000-2000 USD if all goes well.
|
| There is a workaround for CE but it's a bit of a dirty
| trick. If you are not expecting to sell very many and
| your target audience are tinkerers then you can sell your
| device as a kit. There must be assembly that the end user
| has to do but they are then the ones "putting the device
| into the market" and they take on that responsivity of
| CE. That basically means they can't sell it unless they
| get a CE. Such an example is https://www.clockworkpi.com/
| which sell their products a kits.
| monegator wrote:
| peripherals are a dumpster fire. I usually have to resort
| to bit-bang if i want to use the peripherals in a
| slightly different way than intended. Way easier than
| figuring out all the "drivers" thing to see if it's
| actually possible. Also, the couldn't make a decent ADC
| if their life depended on that. I use them for projects
| that require radio and GPIO, or slow PWM, or low accuracy
| ADC, or screens (but only with the preapproved screen
| controllers)
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| That's like the cost of two burritos. Unless you're
| bricking these things on the daily why would $1 vs $40 be
| the deciding factor for a project that is tens of hours at
| a minimum?
| vachina wrote:
| I buy 10s them and throw them around the house. I have a
| couple on AAA batteries and with deep sleep + watchdog
| wake on WiFi they last months.
| umeshunni wrote:
| What kind of projects are you using them for?
| limagnolia wrote:
| 20$ for a burrito? That is like some high-end, premium
| burrito right there! But hey, its your money, spend it
| however it makes you happy.
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| $13-17 plus tax. Closer to two than three, especially by
| TPIR rules.
|
| The $7 burrito era is long gone unless it's a frozen
| burrito or someplace that is extremely sus.
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| Taco Bell lists their burrito supreme as $5.59.
| relaxing wrote:
| > someplace that is extremely sus
| s1gsegv wrote:
| For what it's worth, the original ESP32 is actually 5V
| tolerant, semi-officially acknowledged by Espressif. Good
| enough for hobby projects, anyway
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| I'm surprised cheap level shifters with the same pin pitch
| as various dev boards aren't common.
| poly2it wrote:
| Do you know where you can get one?
| phoehne wrote:
| Be a little careful on those. It depends on what you're
| doing. Some of them are not suited to be used with the
| high data rates for I2C, or I2C only at 100khz. I found
| out the hard way with some of the SparkFun level
| shifters, years back.
|
| You need to do a little research. It will usually tell in
| the spec sheet. Which is why the Arduino is useful. You
| don't have to buy a level shifter. You don't have to read
| a level shifter spec sheet.
| Evidlo wrote:
| There's DIP-packaged level shifters that are 0.1"
| SirHumphrey wrote:
| And a lot of dev boards you will use as a hobbyist even
| include level shifters on the board, so you will have a 5V
| pin.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Different tools for different needs.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| Power draw, and 5V.
| chpatrick wrote:
| ESP stuff is so damn cheap and capable now I'm not sure what you
| would use Arduino for these days.
| dotancohen wrote:
| That's probably why these AI-capable Qualcomm boards are being
| introduced.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Community inertia / maker content.
| suyash wrote:
| It used to be that but since Arduino and Pi have both gone
| full commercial, it's not longer viable. I teach kids coding
| and have been looking at alternatives like ESP or other
| boards that are much more cost effective and friendly for
| beginners.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| Exactly. I dunno why you'd ever use anything but an esp for
| "maker stuff" at this point. They are cheaper, more
| capable, and have the same DX (largely, setting aside 3.3v
| vs 5v).
| daemonologist wrote:
| Well you might go Nordic for the power efficiency, but I
| agree capital-A Arduino wouldn't even cross my mind as an
| option these days.
| phoehne wrote:
| Don't look at just the specs. You also need to look at the
| board design and programming environment. I've used the ESP32
| native tools and they are a lot more complex than Arduino. But
| I'm an embedded firmware developer, so it's kind of what I
| expect. But I used an Arduino, with 5V tolerant outputs, to
| light up Halloween costumes for years. I do it in 1 page of
| code that's I write in their IDE. I don't have to set up an
| SDK. And the Arudino API hides all the details I don't care
| about. Especially if I'm really just slinging solder and wiring
| something up quick.
| echoangle wrote:
| You can program the normal ESP32 Devboards with the Arduino
| IDE.
| tedivm wrote:
| Yup- ESP32 is absolutely compatible with Arduino.
|
| There's also great support for CircuitPython and
| MicroPython, which makes it trivial to program the devices.
| skybrian wrote:
| Even if you like the Arduino programming environment (and I
| do), there seems to be little reason to use Arduino hardware
| unless it's for compatibility with other hardware you have?
| For example, there is a very nice unofficial port of Arduino
| for the Raspberry Pi Pico. There are also many fine Arduino-
| compatible single-board computers from Adafruit. The Arduino
| board form factor seems big and clunky in comparison.
|
| I don't even use the Ardiuino IDE anymore; I've switched to
| VS Code using PlatformIO.
|
| It's great that all these microcontroller boards and
| peripheral breakout boards can be programmed using the same
| basic API's, but I don't think it helps Arduino the company
| very much.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| There's a wealth of easy projects that a person can get
| started with using an Arduino.
|
| 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.)
| skybrian wrote:
| Blinking an LED is what you do for "hello world" on every
| microcontroller board I've tried. The Arduino IDE
| supports boards from many different manufacturers.
| itopaloglu83 wrote:
| What do you think about the Arduino professional line? They
| have industrial PLC equipments and other high end boards etc.
| dfex wrote:
| Not the OP, but have had some experience with the Arduino
| Opta around this time twelve months ago (Oct 24) through a
| professional development course I took at my local
| university on industrial control systems programming.
|
| 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.
| crote wrote:
| Doesn't look bad, but the Arduino name is a _serious_
| drawback. It 's a brand focusing on DIY tinkering, how are
| you going to sell that to your boss who only finds a bunch
| of shady hobbyist stuff when he Googles it?
|
| 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.
| sharpshadow wrote:
| Military drones maybe? The trend is now on local AI
| features and they are practically throwaway.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Deeply unserious. Arduino put little real thought into what
| features industrial users would actually find useful. I
| suspect the main market for their "professional" boards is
| hobbyists with money to burn.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| Trouble is, this kind of trivial throwaway application is all
| that Arduino is really good for. _Because_ the framework is
| designed to support thousands of chips, it supports none of
| them well. Any arduino code you write is easily 5x more terse
| than any of the native libraries, but it 's also 10x slower.
| If you don't care, you don't care. But if you do care,
| Arduino is the least appropriate way to make a
| microcontroller go.
|
| Besides that, IMO hiding hardware details from the developer
| is the worst thing about Arduino. The hardware details
| _matter_ and it 's far too easy to get footgunned by some
| implementation detail hidden from you.
|
| But really, esp-IDF isn't that much more complex, nor are
| most of the other native frameworks. It's a bit more verbose,
| but esp-IDF provides helper libraries that replace almost
| everything Arduino provides, but in a way that is actually
| designed for the hardware and doesn't have to do things like
| lookup pin numbers in a giant table for _each and every_ gpio
| call.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| The pin mapping shenanigans are another annoying footgun
| with Arduino. Even in native development you're dealing
| with a physical pin number and the logical assignment (PA5,
| PA6, etc), but now Arduino maps that all _again_ to an
| Arduino board pin number, and it 's all shuffled to ensure
| the peripherals are in the right place to enable I2C, ADC,
| and PWM pins to function as expected.
| nekusar wrote:
| Of course they did that. It's a HAL (hardware abstraction
| library).
|
| That also means that simple projects are abstracted from
| the hardware. Means I can go across a dozen different CPU
| arch and board/pin layouts, and I change nothing in my
| source. I only change my target and it just works.
|
| I did that when I went from a board operating at
| 16MHz/atmel to a STmicro running 50MHz. No change in my
| source. And that's really valuable in rapid prototyping.
|
| Once I settled in on a board and everything, I could do
| it the "right way" aka the old waterfall-gile embedded
| approach and get things tweaked and optimized.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| The problem is that a lot of this abstraction is done at
| _runtime_ , not compile time. Your binaries become
| bloated, your application slow, and you end up using a
| microcontroller with three times the resources you
| actually need just to support all the dead weight.
| bsoles wrote:
| A lot of firmware people consider HAL libraries as
| harmful. In general, microcontroller companies as pretty
| terrible at software.
| abraae wrote:
| Same deal exactly for the various ESP32 boards. With the
| added wrinkle that some of them (like T-Display) have had
| pins swapped in the doc at various stages.
| snitty wrote:
| And yet there is clearly a market for easy-to-program MCUs
| for hobby and educational purposes.
| bschwindHN wrote:
| I would argue the RP2040/2350 fills that niche. Cheap,
| available, easy to program, flexible peripherals, fast
| enough for many projects, good documentation, and good
| community support.
| scottbez1 wrote:
| RPi's toolchain situation is awful for
| beginners/hobbyists. CMake and non-manifest-versioned
| toolchains are a huge barrier to entry. I'd love to use
| the hardware but have given up multiple times because I'd
| rather spend my time writing code than wrestling with
| toolchain setup. And they won't support platformio which
| could make things massively easier for beginners to set
| up.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| While I've written Rpi Pico applications in C++, IMO
| CircuitPython/MicroPython is a far better environment for
| that processor.
| bschwindHN wrote:
| I've never used their toolchain, I use Rust on the RP2040
| and it's a breeze to set up.
|
| But yeah there's also CircuitPython where you literally
| drag and drop a firmware blob onto the volume that shows
| up when plugging in an RP2040 board, and then you're just
| editing a Python-esque script to do stuff. Not sure what
| could be easier when it comes to starting with embedded
| stuff. You can even use the Arduino IDE with RP2040
| boards if you like.
|
| https://learn.adafruit.com/getting-started-with-
| raspberry-pi...
| zargon wrote:
| Arduino was around long before RP2040, therefore RP2040
| shouldn't exist because the niche was already filled.
| 0x457 wrote:
| As a hobby user, RP2040/2350 seems like the best to for
| beginners. As long as it's not battery powered.
| phoehne wrote:
| I'm using the RP2040s with FreeRTOS for a hobby project.
| I think the Pico probe is a much better debugging story
| than buying a Blackmagic (or if you got the dough, a
| Segger), to debug the "modern" Arduinos. I have one of
| the Atmel programmers for the Uno R3/2560/Mega boards and
| that's nice.
|
| But for people getting started, the ability to just plug
| in an Uno R3 and stack a motor controller shield on it,
| is pretty attractive. I like the Cytron break out boards
| for the Picos, but I still think the path from opening
| the box to working thing is still easiest with Arduino.
|
| Once you know what you're doing, (and maybe that's when
| you realize you need a debugger), you move on to
| something else. And with the Pico I can spend the $800 on
| an O-scope instead of the Segger.
| palmotea wrote:
| > Besides that, IMO hiding hardware details from the
| developer is the worst thing about Arduino. The hardware
| details matter and it's far too easy to get footgunned by
| some implementation detail hidden from you.
|
| 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.
| IshKebab wrote:
| IMO Mbed was just as easy for hobbyists but had a far
| better designed API that could support professional work
| as well. Arduino is just badly designed.
|
| Unfortunately the Mbed guys stuck to their crap web-based
| IDE for waaaay too long, and when they finally realised
| it couldn't cut it, they pivoted to Yotto, which was a
| terrible Python based build too. When that failed they
| finally made Mbed Studio which was based on Theia (same
| as Arduino is now) but by then it was too late.
|
| I think they also lacked an obvious "start with this"
| board like the Arduino Duo.
|
| I think if they have blessed one of the Neutrino boards
| (which were incredibly cheap and powerful compared to
| Arduino) with their branding, and switched to Theia like
| 5 years earlier they might have had a chance.
|
| Real shame because it really was a far superior software
| system.
| mrheosuper wrote:
| I really think what killed Mbed is the C++. I don't want
| to poison my codebase with the C++ stuff(and now you have
| to write wrapper for C++ if you want to use them inside
| your C codebase).
| IshKebab wrote:
| You know Arduino is C++?
| kiicia wrote:
| arduino was supposed to be learning opportunity and
| training grounds for people who wanted to work in the field
| in the future, there was small arduino boards (similar to
| pi pico) for integration with actual projects, but still
| arduino was for hobbyists and students in the first place
| crote wrote:
| On the other hand, their competitors haven't been sleeping
| either.
|
| Companies like Adafruit and Sparkfun sell _dozens_ of tailor-
| made dev board variants, and their I2C module system allows
| you to mix & match a whole bunch of peripherals.
|
| The code? A handful of lines of Python, which you can
| drag&drop onto it like it's a flash drive. Or use a browser-
| based IDE if you want one-click library install and serial
| logging.
|
| Arduino's IDE was groundbreaking in 2010, but these days
| there are easier (and cheaper!) alternatives for beginning
| hobbyists, and better alternatives for power users.
| cptskippy wrote:
| This is spot on. Arduino occupies a space that everyone
| else vacated a long time ago.
| structural wrote:
| Good on the Arduino folks for getting acquired, then.
| They still have a niche and a brand with name
| recognition, even if that niche might be stable at best,
| collapsing at worst.
| dangoodmanUT wrote:
| Page of code?
| GenerocUsername wrote:
| About 50 lines... Give or take
| andoando wrote:
| What's hard about programming an ESP32?
|
| I plug the USB in and its the same as an Arudino, can even
| use Arduino IDE, but I prefer VS Code with the PlatformIo
| extension. You can even use the Arduino Library (#import
| <Arduino.h>
|
| And a ESP32C board with wifi/bluetooth is like $8
| https://www.amazon.com/Seeed-Studio-XIAO-
| ESP32C3-Microcontro... (and thats from amazon, on alibaba its
| like couple bucks if that)
|
| As a side note, you can power this with your IPhone's USB C
| which was surprisingly cool.
| nunobrito wrote:
| It is basically the same thing, don't understand either why
| it would harder.
|
| 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.
| kbar13 wrote:
| agree. when arduino ide first came out it was great (for
| the times). and to be fair at that time vscode was not a
| thing. but it's a big ? why arduino did not just go all
| in on vscode once it was clear where the market leader in
| IDE was headed
| spookie wrote:
| Well, it's a bad idea to rely on Microsoft in some manner
| creshal wrote:
| VS Code has enough momentum by now that Microsoft
| couldn't kill it even if it wanted to. And a lot of the
| arduino-side work would involve creating/tweaking LSPs to
| their ideosyncrasies and making IDE-agnostic compilers...
| all of which is IDE agnostic and makes Arduino more
| useful to all users.
|
| And, worst case, they could take it all to IntelliJ or
| other IDE vendors and quickly spin out an Arduino-branded
| IDE that isn't raw sewage.
| nunobrito wrote:
| I'm a java developer coming from a world where the IDE is
| tightly integrated with the language.
|
| For me, VS code always felt like a "jack of all trades
| and master of none". C/C++ are strongly typed languages,
| they aren't different from Java in that regard and yet it
| is so time consuming to navigate code, see if the syntax
| is correct and so forth. Really annoying to only know if
| the code is compiling correctly after pressing the
| compile button and wait about 30 seconds.
|
| These are things that in the Java world nobody really
| thinks about because the IDE does a lot of the heavy
| effort in the background, yet in VS code or C++ it really
| feels like going back to 2005. For Javascript gets even
| worse on VS code whenever one is not using NPM. Needs
| reload the browser to check the console and see if things
| are working as expected. Good luck trying to find
| functions somewhere in the codebase without manual text
| search.
|
| It is not my intention to shade any of those languages
| nor IDE, I just honestly wish that the IDE for those
| languages was as powerful as the ones in Java and C#.
| Arduino had the opportunity to do that since they are
| tightly committed to C/C++ and control everything on the
| build process but their goal was always more focused on
| education level than a more professional development.
| Let's see if with Qualcomm this is now changing into a
| tighter IDE+language integration.
| andoando wrote:
| Also primarily java/intellij hser but for any non static
| languages like Js/Python or even simple text editor VS
| code is lovely. It's very simple to use, looks nice, full
| of features and the plugin system is beautiful anddd it
| just feels astonishingly lightweight.
| creshal wrote:
| Okay, that's cool for Java, but have you ever tried the
| absolute crap pyramid that is arduino's IDE? 2005 Eclipse
| would be a _vast_ improvement in comparison. And Qualcomm
| never cares about anything that doesn 't directly
| increase pforit margin, so "more money for better IDEs"
| with qualcomm in charge is just delusional.
| schlauerfox wrote:
| VSCodium is a de-microsoft'd version available. Still
| missing some of the features that aren't licensed the
| same.
| spookie wrote:
| Missing "some features" is an understatement. I really
| value what those folk are doing, but the lack of
| extensions such as the ones for C/C++ from Microsoft
| really just make it subpar.
| lovehashbrowns wrote:
| As a complete beginner to hardware stuff, I do find the
| Arduino Cloud thing to be pretty compelling. Being able
| to push out updates over the cloud is nice! Buuuut.. once
| I'm mostly done with a project, there's just no need at
| all for it anymore. The Arduino I'm using for a receipt
| printer is just sitting there and now the cloud bit
| doesn't do anything for me.
|
| And the problem I have is that ESP32s aren't much more
| difficult to set up nowadays, are wildly cheaper, and I'm
| soso excited to start messing around with ESP-NOW which I
| don't think Arduino has? But having like 10 ESP32s for
| messing around freely is more valuable than the cloud
| thing for me. And there are some super fun projects for
| ESP32 also like the Cheap Yellow Display thing. I ordered
| what I thought was one display, except it was 3, and I
| thought I would have to provide my own ESP32s but nope,
| they come with them. And these three CYDs were cheaper
| than a single Arduino it's actually crazy.
| nunobrito wrote:
| Yeah, ESPnow is pretty good. I'm using it more than LoRa
| because all ESP32 come with it and is really cheap,
| whereas with LoRa is all the trouble with an additional
| module that costs 3x more than an ESP32.
|
| That yellow display is pretty good. I've built a tiny
| operating system for it, it is an unbelievable hardware
| for the cost of the material.
| numpad0 wrote:
| (psa: Arduino IDE 1.x works flawlessly for tons of non-
| Arduino boards, including Pi Pico, ESP32 devkits, etc. Most
| Arduino users aren't even able to consider processor
| implementation specifics, never signed an NDA in life, and
| don't even know where generated binaries go, so those
| boards are almost "binary compatible" with each others, all
| in _very_ positive sense)
| atoav wrote:
| Well which board do you select then? ESP32 boardfiles do
| not come with the Arduino application per default.
|
| 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.
| andoando wrote:
| I don't quite remember, but I don't think I installed
| anything extra for ESP32.
|
| But PlatformIo with VSCode has it and was extremely easy
| to setup.
| numpad0 wrote:
| You must have done File -> Preferences... -> Additional
| board manager URL -> OK, and clicked Tools -> Board ->
| Board manager... -> esp32 by Espressif Systems ->
| Install.
|
| And that's like, I think installing VSCode itself can be
| more scary, so...
| estimator7292 wrote:
| If youbuse PlatformIO everthing Just Works out of the
| box. Acquiring board files and such is handled behind the
| scenes
| andoando wrote:
| Yup, youre right I remember that
| yatopifo wrote:
| I got introduced to microcontrollers through the original
| Arduino board. It took me only a year to switch to bare
| metal atmega/attiny (zero external components!), and to
| this day, those are my favourite micros despite all their
| shortcomings. Theyare extremely well documented, and them
| being 8-bit with a simple instruction set makes it very
| easy to learn assembly (or even opcodes). At the same time,
| they are compatible with 5V logic (and can be abused!)
| which makes them almost perfect for beginners.
|
| 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...
| j45 wrote:
| It's not about whether it's hard for you.
|
| 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.
| freehorse wrote:
| Programming an ESP32 using the arduino ide is no harder
| than programming an arduino using the arduino ide. The
| only difference is that you can find an ESP32 for much
| much cheaper.
| osigurdson wrote:
| >> Lots of people don't program.
|
| Cathy Woods says we are all programmers now, so this
| shouldn't be a problem anymore.
| andoando wrote:
| But there really is no difference in difficulty in
| setting it up?
|
| Besides I don't get this argument considering you're
| setting up an arduino/esp32 to program/learn to program a
| microcontroller...
| cptskippy wrote:
| > I've used the ESP32 native tools and they are a lot more
| complex than Arduino.
|
| How so? All of that is abstracted away from the users just
| like it is for Arduinos. In fact you can use the Arduino IDE
| to develop for most ESP32 chips.
|
| If anything Arduino is holding back everyone with their
| horrible IDE. Their Board and Library managers are painfully
| slow and having no way to store configuration with your
| sketch means that you're taking a screenshot of a drop down
| menu if you have to make any changes.
|
| Eventually people want to write their own libraries to make
| their code more manageable and the Arduino IDE makes it
| difficult for someone who knows what they're doing.
|
| > But I used an Arduino, with 5V tolerant outputs, to light
| up Halloween costumes for years.
|
| I have yet to encounter a piece of hardware that doesn't
| respect 3.3v as signal high. All of the neopixel variant's
| data pins work off 3.3v and most people have moved on to 12v
| and even 24v for larger projects while still raw dogging 3.3v
| on the data pin without issue.
|
| Arduino's insistence on 5v logic levels is for maintaining
| backward compatibility which is honestly unnecessary.
| relaxing wrote:
| It's not just backward compatibility -- USB as a convenient
| source of +5V is going to be around for a long time.
| nkozyra wrote:
| I'm an amateur with this stuff and honestly find the ESP
| experience significantly more pleasant than Arduino. I'm sure
| there are footguns I haven't encountered, but I get so much
| more bang for the buck out of random ESP builds + the
| incredible line of various bundled ESP devices that come with
| touchscreens, sensors, etc. for incredibly low prices.
| matthewfcarlson wrote:
| You can make the argument that esp32 supports Arduino but you
| can quickly run into "here be dragons" which sends most
| people for a loop. Arduino has a fantastic reputation for a
| very good reason.
| benterix wrote:
| I had the same opinion several years ago but today it's just
| as easy PLUS you have a bonus of WiFi and all this for a
| fraction of the price.
| mbac32768 wrote:
| May I ask what your go-to battery is for light up wearables?
| gsich wrote:
| ESP32 is also 5V tolerant for input pins.
| conductr wrote:
| I use arduino ide to build esp projects. I have not found it
| much different than the arduino as a beginner, except much
| cheaper and faster. I like not having to do all the shield
| stuff. But will admit, it was helpful to start on arduino as
| its built in pins helped me get going as I tried to avoid
| soldering and breadboarded everything. That only lasted a
| short time before I realized I had to solder some things if I
| wanted to grow the project. I still like the idea of breakout
| boards for specific things but I usually solder them in now.
| Crosseye_Jack wrote:
| I know a million people have replied to you, and while I
| don't want to be jumping on the dog pile, I just want to say
| that along with PlatformIO (which automates the setup of
| ESPIDF and/or Arduino for the ESP, (and it also does it for a
| ton of other micros)) and Expressif having their own Arduino
| Core for their chips with integrates into Arduino's IDE,
| Expressif have also released their own extensions for VSCode
| and Eclipse that greatly aid the end user in getting ESPIDF
| setup and configured.)
|
| You no longer have to break your back going from zero to
| blinking an LED. I remember when I first got into espressif
| chips and it was a right pita back then. But no more!
|
| Personally I'm a fan of PlatformIO because its not just
| because of the wide selection of platforms it supports and
| that it uses VSCode which is my IDE of choice.
| brunosutic wrote:
| I use it for learning and play with my kids. I load the program
| on the board then we wire the components together and get all
| excited about blinking LEDs or a LCD.
|
| The lack of features (notably Wifi on our boards) and somewhat
| larger size are benefits for us.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| The ATMega AVR devices are not cost effective for what they
| deliver. However, the new ATtiny 0/1/2-series devices are
| worthwhile for applications the Cortex-M devices aren't a good
| fit for. The Arduino ecosystem doesn't really acknowledge these
| parts.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| Various ESP dev boards, Arduino, Pi Pico -- any of these are
| good places to get started from on the road towards doing
| useful things with microcontrollers, I think.
|
| Arduino is just a familiar name with a long (~20 year!)
| history. There's a plethora of pre-existing projects that a
| person with no prior programming or electronics experience can
| implement easily to get their feet wet.
|
| Some manner of ESP32 (or STM or MSP or RP2...) may be a good
| choice for a project for someone with some experience, but if
| you put a reasonably-motivated person in a room with a computer
| and an Arduino starter kit then they'll successfully be
| building simple things in no time.
|
| It remains a friendly place to start doing stuff, and that was
| always the primary intent.
| chpatrick wrote:
| You can use the exact same Arduino environment with ESP32 for
| a fraction of the price. A D1 mini dev board with wifi costs
| $5 (!) on AliExpress.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| Yes. That's one way. It works fine if a person knows enough
| to find that board on AliExpress and buy it and is able to
| gather the resources to get themselves started with it. (I,
| myself, typically use cheap no-name dev boards...but I've
| been around the block a few times.)
|
| 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.
| mrheosuper wrote:
| you are comparing apple to orange, Arduino is not MCU. In fact,
| the uno r4 has a variant with esp32 module on it.
|
| It's like saying AMD Cpu is so much better, why do you need
| Linux.
| xkcd-sucks wrote:
| Cheap fun, if you acquired a box of Arduinos from a defunct
| makerspace or startup in the mid 2010s
| potatolicious wrote:
| Yeah I'm kind of puzzled by what Qualcomm is getting out of
| this.
|
| Arduino has so little presence in production devices and is
| largely an enthusiast and hobbyist product. To be clear, this
| is good! Having well-supported high-quality enthusiast products
| is awesome.
|
| But it just doesn't... seem to overlap with the bulk of
| Qualcomm's business, which is large-scale silicon sales to
| consumer and industrial clients.
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| To be selling shovels for the gold rush of AI-enabled
| embedded devices.
|
| Is it going to happen? I don't know. But ollama on an SBC is
| a sandbox I'd play in.
| hadlock wrote:
| The earlier up the product development stream you can place
| your product, the bigger share you'll have down the road.
| There's the saying about planning for 1 year, rice, 20 years,
| trees, 100 years schools. Windows is the leader because most
| kids grow up using windows in elementary school and blindly
| continue on. If you own arduino, maybe they start on ardunio,
| continue on to qualcomm products, and they're already trained
| in the qualcomm ecosystem before they've started engineering
| school. Adobe famously was very lax on closing Photoshop
| cracks in the early 2000s and trained up an entire generation
| on their product with great success.
| atoav wrote:
| I run a medialab at an university. ESP32 is great, but there
| are some downsides that are all not dealbreakers, but can in
| some cases lead me to recommend a classic Arduino-type device:
|
| 1. Lack of 5V tolerant pins. Beginners may or may not be aware
| of the possibility of destroying the device or the need to
| level-shift signals.
|
| 2. Tooling may not work out of the box. As of today the tooling
| step boils down to pasting a URL into a field in the
| preferences, but that is something you need to know. You need
| to select the right uploading options which are much more
| complex than with arduino type devices.
|
| 3. IMO less clear naming of different dev boards, thus also
| harder to find docs.
|
| 4. Examples may not work out of the box, simple Arduino
| examples may fail with hard to debug issues (for beginners)
| where they don't know whether it is a hardware issue, wrong
| board/uploader setup or a pinout issue (e.g. if the onboard LED
| pin differs).
|
| These are all examples of issues students had when they used
| the ESP32 boards without my guidance, so not just my opinion or
| a theory. And as I said none of these are dealbreakers, but
| depending on the patience, stress levels, perceived skill etc.
| of the student this might make me recommend an Arduino over an
| ESP32.
| cameldrv wrote:
| ESP stuff is very cheap and works well, but the Arduino Uno is
| a great board/ecosystem for beginners and simple projects.
| Being 5V is more convenient for a lot of things, and having the
| pin headers already on the board that you can just start
| plugging things in with jumper wires is great.
|
| The Arduino IDE is awesome for an extremely quick setup time.
| You can very easily download libraries and add them to your
| project, you don't have to create a blank source file, you just
| have to fill in setup() and loop(). The Arduino IDE makes it
| very easy to set up a new board and download code to it.
|
| Much of this also applies to the Arduino IDE with and ESP32,
| but what I really appreciate about the whole Arduino ecosystem
| is if you want to do something really simple, like say,
| activate a servo when some sensor reaches a certain value, you
| literally only have to type 5-6 lines of code. You're not
| messing around with SDKs and Makefiles and git cloning
| repositories etc etc etc. You can get kits for $70 that have an
| Arduino clone, and a bunch of different sensors, servos,
| steppers, etc. It's absolutely fantastic for teaching basic
| programming and electronics.
| vdfs wrote:
| With ESP you can do that without even coding, using ESPHome
| it can be done using YAML config, it can also be paired with
| Home Assitante, MQTT or many other thing without any coding
| j45 wrote:
| Arduino is an ecosystem of pushing solutions. This is likely
| what is partially the appeal.
|
| My hope and wish is Arduino sincerely remains accessible as
| it's always been and not solely drift into B2B or enterprise
| spaces.
|
| There is a lot of chip building and delivery capacity being
| aligned this year.
| leptons wrote:
| "Arduino" is more a framework than it is a specific piece of
| hardware. You can run "Arduino" the framework on an ESP32. Not
| that I would, I don't recommend it as ESP-IDF is way better,
| but you can run "Arduino" code on an ESP32.
| bhaktatejas922 wrote:
| this. esp 32 supermini is $3 and has wifi and bluetooth.
| Arduino stopped being useful many years ago
| pbandhoney wrote:
| It's not the hardware but the ecosystem, libraries and support
| which is available. Sure there are alternatives like platformio
| but when you're learning most of the stuff out there eg youtube
| use Arduino IDE and libs. And just try and get an LLM to
| produce code based on Espressif libraries not Arduino lols...
| oxxoxoxooo wrote:
| If you ever wondered, how Arduino came about: The Untold History
| of Arduino (https://arduinohistory.github.io/).
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Arduino has always been a naked cash grab disguised as a
| "hacker-friendly nonprofit." The gross margin on their boards
| is >90%, and yeah, the software is mostly a ripoff of wiring.
| crumpled wrote:
| The software was based on Processing. It was never a secret,
| just open source working as intended. It doesn't look the
| same any more.
|
| A non-profit is still a business. Success is necessary for
| existence.
|
| Think about the number of companies that have been created to
| make, or heavily specialize in Arduino clones and accessories
| without having to pay Arduino a cent because the designs were
| intentionally open-sourced. It doesn't sound like a naked
| cash grab to me.
| theon144 wrote:
| I have troubles calling something a "cash grab" when it's
| been arguably the single most influential project in the
| hacker/maker/DIY electronics space.
|
| I don't doubt the boards could've been sold cheaper, but they
| clearly were doing something right given how much it changed
| the hobbyist landscape
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Great businesses can still be cash grabs. In fact, many of
| them are. Very few of those dress themselves up as a
| nonprofit (aside from Arduino and OpenAI).
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Fucking hell.
|
| Qualcomm is one of the worst vendors out there to deal with if
| you're a small hardware developer - let alone the kind of
| hobbyist who wants to use Arduino boards.
|
| In a perfect world? Qualcomm would use Arduino to bring some of
| their chipsets and devices to public, and have the Arduino team
| open them up to small developers. Essentially doing what Pi
| Foundation is doing for Broadcom - package their unpalatable ICs
| into something that people actually use.
|
| But we're not in a perfect world. We're in the kind of world
| where Qualcomm exists in the first place.
|
| The pessimist in me fully expects Qualcomm to make Arduino worse
| rather than Arduino to make Qualcomm better.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Okay, IIRC the sum wasn't disclosed. I wonder what was the ask.
| phantom32 wrote:
| Interesting how Arduino is now planning to release a SBC, while
| Raspberry Pi also has a microcontroller lineup. Now using a RPi
| or an Arduino board in a project won't mean much when their
| products are nearly the same.
| chimpontherun wrote:
| This is desperation and I think it will go nowhere good.
|
| Arduino has neither technical (standards, form-factor, pinouts),
| nor mindshare among developers that can be useful for high-speed,
| modern and upcoming AI-on-the-edge applications.
|
| It sounds like Qualcomm is making a belated move towards
| robotics, but acquiring these assets is only going to distract
| them from becoming a successful player.
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| call me cynical but I can't imagine this ending very well. Even
| if qualcomm does nothing to alter the operations at Arduino, what
| happens if they go belly-up in a decade?
| oytis wrote:
| IDK, what kind of innovation we need from Arduino now? Arduino
| IDE exists and is open source. Arduino Uno exists and is open
| source. Arduino cores, both from Arduino itself and third-party
| exist and are open source. Not sure how they made money
| recently, I hope they are up to something good with Qualcomm.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| > Not sure how they made money recently,
|
| That's an easy riddle to answer: Nothing sold by Arduino is
| particularly inexpensive. They've got room for profit margin.
| It's easier to make money when the things are several times
| more expensive than the competitors.
|
| To pick an example: I can get a sketchy-feeling ESP32 board
| that was manufactured by some nameless entity and sold by a
| company that calls themselves "QQQMFXFDCX" or something.
| It'll probably generally work, but the pins will be in
| whatever order, labeled however, and I might have to spend
| some time documenting its unknown [mis]features. It will cost
| me a few dollars.
|
| Or, I mean: I can get one from Arduino with their name on it
| (and with a ublox-branded module) in their Nano form-factor
| for ~$20. It will work fine. The pins will be [mostly] in
| numeric order, and labeled on both sides of the board. It
| will cost me about $20.
|
| There's a lot more potential profit margin in a $20 sale than
| there is in a $3 sale.
|
| (Do they add enough value to make me want to spend $20
| instead of $3? Not necessarily, but I'm pretty cheap.)
| silvanocerza wrote:
| Arduino wasn't in the best shape some months ago to be fair,
| quite some people took offers to lower their working hours with
| a lower salary too.
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| With their goal of 50/50 handset/non-handset revenue split by
| 2030, and their recent acquisitions pointing in the same
| direction, it stands to reason that they will do a lot of high
| capex investments into things like chiplet/chiplet communication
| for datacenters, automation/automotive, as well as edge AI. We
| can also observe they're baking in a lot of fpga-style
| configurability into a lot of these product lines - the
| connectivity fabric they acquired along with alphawave semi,
| their hexagon dsp, nuvia(oryon which they won the legal case for
| recently), etc,. which is another hint for the type of market
| they're targeting.
|
| My opinion is that they should productize ESP [1] (no, not that
| one) which will be super harmonious with their goals.
|
| Arduino acquisition, IMO, is putting one foot into manufacturing
| automation/automotive/sensors field. They have done similar in
| the past, arriver was an ADAS compute thing.
|
| Personally I don't believe they will take the execution risk and
| scale up on _all_ of these things. They will probably wait for
| the right time and chop off a few of these things and focus on
| whatever looks like it 's going to be a cash cow.
|
| Finance wise, there will be near term margin pressure but long
| term (IMO) they will execute superbly on a portion of their bets.
|
| The main problem is the clock is ticking, handsets becoming
| commodified leading to vertical integration, licensing losing
| value, etc. Apple modem agreement running out soon too, and 6G
| modems too will not be as high margin due to diminishing
| improvements in telecom tech, even operator uptake at this point
| is looking unlikely after the 5G... debacle.
|
| Which explains the very diverse bets they have made.
|
| Will be interesting to see what they execute in this limited
| timeframe.
|
| [1] https://www.esp.cs.columbia.edu/
| xinayder wrote:
| I hope they don't enshittify Arduino. Please keep it open
| hardware and open source.
| silvanocerza wrote:
| I heard the rumor quite some months ago but it was mostly
| speculation, altough it made sense after they acquired Edge
| Impulse.
|
| I'm not sure whether to be happy or not to be fair. Main issues
| with Arduino while I was there was the leadership lack of vision
| and the unwillingness to support projects coming from the
| engineers. It was a company kinda coasting and unsure where to
| go.
|
| If they replace leadership with people that have an clear vision
| and focus this might be good.
|
| My greatest hope is that people with stocks don't get screwed
| over though, they used to distribute them quite "easily" at a
| certain point to avoid raising salaries.
| magtux wrote:
| This is a recipe for disaster. Arduino is great for
| education/tinkering. Qualcomm won't sell you anything even if you
| are ready to commit to buying 1000s. I tried to source some
| Qualcomm chips for a startup @ 10k qty and was told there would
| be no information or support. Qualcomm can have a much bigger
| market if they simply open up some product lines for distribution
| like MediaTek do.
|
| China has a way more vibrant, innovative hardware industry simply
| because you can source everything made by Chinese firms.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| 10k? Sorry, pal! We're in QualcommLand, and you need to be at
| least 100k units tall to ride this ride!
|
| But if you are a small developer, there are options for you!
| Have you tried to: eat shit? And die? So that you don't insult
| our PRECIOUS FUCKING TIME by IMPLYING that a MERE 10K would be
| ENOUGH for THE GREAT QUALCOMM to ACTUALLY CARE?
|
| The optimist in me wants to believe that this acquisition is a
| sign of Qualcomm actually trying to be better than that. But
| realistically? Yeah no. It's Qualcomm. They wouldn't have let
| it get this bad if they ever cared.
| nrclark wrote:
| afaik, Raspberry Pis move around 7M units annually.
|
| Based on their first announced product
| (https://www.arduino.cc/product-uno-q), I think Qualcomm is
| trying to get into that space, and they bought Arduino for
| the brand name.
|
| You're right that Qualcomm isn't in the business of small
| business. But maybe they expect that the market is big enough
| that it's worth their while to pay a subsidiary (Arduino) to
| do it.
| joezydeco wrote:
| _Arduino is great for education /tinkering_
|
| Arduino has been trying out a new "pro" line for about a year
| now, making PLC-level devices to be used in automation but
| hopefully attracting developers by letting them use the same
| family of tools as the educational line.
|
| https://store-usa.arduino.cc/collections/pro-family
| Neywiny wrote:
| Yep. Same here but dramatically lower quantities. Was told
| basically we'd have to pay for a partner's support. Not that
| I'm expecting better from Arduino, but the community makes up
| for it. You Google "dragonwing stackoverflow" and there are 604
| results, but even the first few aren't remotely relevant.
| "Atmega328p stackoverflow" is over 14k and relevant. Arduino is
| 52 million. It's a nonstarter
| Moral_ wrote:
| This is the exact reason why they bought Arduino... So now
| startups have a way to buy say 1,000 devices for prototyping.
| Qualcomm gets used to supporting smaller
| developers/startups/tinkerers and will hopefully push different
| types of chips into the Arduino product lines.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > This is the exact reason why they bought Arduino... So now
| startups have a way to buy say 1,000 devices for prototyping.
| Qualcomm gets used to supporting smaller
| developers/startups/tinkerers
|
| For this, Qualcomm does not have to buy Arduino for a big
| amount of money: Qualcomm could simply offer this option on
| their own and save the acquisition cost.
|
| Addendum: For the acquisition cost, Qualcomm could do a lot
| of marketing of their offering towards makers.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| > _Qualcomm could simply offer this option on their own and
| save the acquisition cost._
|
| 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.
| warmwaffles wrote:
| > the aircraft carrier could simply turn around.
|
| Pretty sure it can turn 180 degrees fairly quickly.
| ndnsnddn wrote:
| What a strange analogy O_o aircraft carriers (and all
| warships for that manner) well known for being
| exceptionally nimble for such huge craft
|
| Evasive maneuvers are a thing
| mrguyorama wrote:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/WarshipPorn/comments/140oahc/jap
| ane...
|
| You picked an unfortunate analogy.
|
| More importantly, if Qualcomm management is just unable
| to do this, why would they suddenly be able to do this
| with a different brand under their umbrella?
| dimatura wrote:
| Seems like a corporate version of the "buy vs build"
| question. If it's true that the goal is to become more
| approachable to students and hobbyists (which personally I
| think would be a good idea) - then Qualcomm must've
| evaluated both options and decided "buy".
| chrsw wrote:
| > Qualcomm gets used to supporting smaller
| developers/startups/tinkerers
|
| I'll believe it when I see it
| estimator7292 wrote:
| It's cheaper and easier to just spin your own boards at that
| point. Arduinos are _not_ complex or special in any way. Even
| if you did need a ton of off the shelf boards, there are
| countless clones that will sell you as many as you want for
| next to nothing.
|
| Plus the market you're implying exists is so small as to be
| utterly worthless to Qualcomm. They are in _no way_
| interested in individuals or small businesses
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Seems like a similar play to what Broadcom did with Raspberry
| Pi-- create a new entity/brand that could resell their chips
| on hobby boards and be stewards of a "community" support
| framework but largely without distracting the company from
| its enterprise customers or risk cannibalizing those
| relationships.
|
| That said, interesting that Qualcomm would buy twenty years
| of Arduino legacy for this rather than launching something
| new in the space.
| delfinom wrote:
| Broadcom wasn't really a driver behind Raspberry Pi. They
| acquiesced and let them have chips, once the product took
| off, they continued supplying chips for the Pi. And of
| course supported the community by refusing to supply non-
| propriety firmware blobs to this day ;)
|
| 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.
| abraae wrote:
| > interesting that Qualcomm would buy twenty years of
| Arduino legacy for this rather than launching something new
| in the space
|
| 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.
| blastersyndrome wrote:
| Qualcomm did not need to buy Arduino in order to do that.
| numpad0 wrote:
| The problem is that massive semiconductor companies like
| Qualcomm rarely follow through. They want their lottery
| ticket to be included in the next smartphone revolution but
| won't care about random under 5k unit Kickstarter. Everyone
| knows that those are two sides of the same coin, but they
| always choose to wait for the bankruptcy trustees to show up.
| magtux wrote:
| The issue is that their corporate culture does not support
| it. Arduino will be too small to matter. This is the same
| issue as with Coral, the Google TPU. They are not refreshed
| as they are too small. They are too small cause they are not
| updated or supported widely.
|
| People need mainline kernel support and regular refreshes to
| reliably build projects based on it. This will require some
| level of building their BSPs in open and providing APIs for
| people to take advantage of the QCOM specific features. A
| QCOM that won't talk to anyone without an NDA cannot adapt to
| this.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| This was very much my experience going through an
| acquisition like that. I was working at a company that
| served big customers. We bought a smaller company, with one
| of the goals being to expand to serving smaller customers.
|
| 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.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| Here's how I like to think about it. Tech salesmen
| (especially enterprise software salesmen) are just like
| car salesmen. Now which commission would you like to
| receive: mattel matchbox car or BMW? This makes sense,
| because it's often the same sales effort per-sale for
| each possibility.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| As other have pointed out, that doesn't make any sense.
| Qualcomm doesn't want anyone buying their products at 1k
| quantities for prototyping. They want huge customers that
| place huge orders consistently. The return for supporting
| those small orders is miserable and doesn't align with their
| business objectives
| wallaBBB wrote:
| Qualcomm has bought plenty of companies that serviced small
| customers, and what happed is exactly what the person you're
| replying to described. You can't even get a quote many times.
|
| What I expect short term is what happened to Eagle in the PCB
| space when Autodesk bought it (best thing that happened to
| kicad).
|
| Longterm Arduino goes into the periphery of the maker market,
| similarly to beaglebone.
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| From the presser:
|
| > Entrepreneurs, businesses, tech professionals, students,
| educators, and hobbyists will be empowered to rapidly prototype
| and test new solutions, with a clear path to commercialization
| supported by Qualcomm Technologies' advanced technologies and
| extensive partner ecosystem.
|
| At the least the official line is to remedy this situation.
| Could be embrace/extend/extinguish but tech companies spend all
| kinds of money on getting students and smaller businesses into
| their monolithic ecosystems.
|
| The data center AI race was won by nvidia, embedded AI might
| still be up for grabs and it helps to have developer adoption.
| jovial_cavalier wrote:
| I had the same knee-jerk reaction, but the optimist in me wants
| to say "isn't that the point of the acquisition?" Another
| comment linked to the Uno Q, which looks like a Qualcomm dev
| kit by Arduino. Perhaps Qualcomm is trying to get better at
| exactly the kind of thing you're talking about.
| bangaladore wrote:
| Yeah, I was going to say this is like the worst-case scenario
| for the average user.
|
| One of the benefits of the main Arduino line is it was very
| simple to convert to your own design. Companies like Broadcom
| and Qualcomm won't sell (many of) their chips on normal
| distributer sites.
|
| Same reason why Raspberry PIs kind of suck in my opinion. Great
| you've come up with a neat thing you want to build with it; you
| are forced to utilize either their compute modules which may
| not be sufficient for your task, or might be out of stock, or
| XYZ.
| hart_russell wrote:
| Yet another example of how corporate consolidation in America
| is hurting the consumer. FTC needs Lina Khan back to break up
| the oligopolies.
| beembeem wrote:
| s/1000/10,000,000/
| ferguess_k wrote:
| My first instinct to this piece of news is a five-char word
| starting with 'S'.
|
| But reading through the news, it seems to be fine?
|
| > Arduino will preserve its open approach and community spirit
| while unlocking a full-stack platform for modern development--
| with Arduino UNO Q as the first step.
|
| > The new Arduino UNO Q is a next-generation single board
| computer featuring a "dual brain" architecture--a Linux Debian-
| capable microprocessor and a real-time microcontroller--to bridge
| high-performance computing with real-time control.
|
| Looks like they want to use the brand to push out their own
| stuffs, which seems to be reasonable. As long as they don't touch
| the education/OSS part I guess it will benefit both.
| dessimus wrote:
| Yeah, and nothing was going to change when IBM acquired Red
| Hat.
| bilekas wrote:
| > Looks like they want to use the brand to push out their own
| stuffs, which seems to be reasonable. As long as they don't
| touch the education/OSS part I guess it will benefit both.
|
| Given the current market for Qualcomm, it honestly wouldn't
| surprise me if in a few years they drop that education and OSS
| platform in favour of a paid approach. Recent Slack news doing
| the same has tainted my confidence.
|
| 33 Million audrino users, you can guarantee they want a piece
| of their wallets.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| OK that makes sense, but I guess educational arduino stuffs
| doesn't have a deep moat, so it was already copied else where
| and can be done further.
| mrheosuper wrote:
| Just like when Broadcom bought VMware. Great stuff /s.
| mtlynch wrote:
| > _My first instinct to this piece of news is a five-char word
| starting with 'S'._
|
| Am I the only one who can't figure out the word?
|
| Did you mean four characters? Or are you including a null-
| terminator? Extra 'e' if you're British?
| ferguess_k wrote:
| Yes! Including a null-terminator '\0'
|
| :P thought someone is going to ask but great that people on
| HN figured it out already
| dimal wrote:
| Whenever a VC backed company is acquired, the press release
| says "nothing will change, except for all these wonderful new
| things that the parent company will let us now do". A year
| later, things start to change. Two years later, the situation
| is unrecognizable. Qualcomm has no immediate financial
| incentive to support the education/OSS portion, and so they'll
| let it die. That's how these things always go.
|
| Arduino is over. In reality, as soon as they took VC funding,
| it was over.
| greatgib wrote:
| Just wait for a few years and then you can forget everything
| about open or open source about Arduino. And maybe in 2030, you
| will only be able to run the Arduino IDE on Windows with a
| specific driver to ensure that you only flash a firmware to a DRM
| controlled authentic Arduino device.
|
| It is a nightmare when such an acquisition happen.
| yaro330 wrote:
| Qcom is one of the few SoC manufacturers in the Android space
| to do all their thing out in the open and properly honouring
| the GPL-v2 licences.
| userbinator wrote:
| That's pretty useless when they won't release the
| documentation for their SoCs.
| yaro330 wrote:
| https://docs.qualcomm.com/ is pretty open.
| greatgib wrote:
| I don't know your definition of open, when I reach this
| page, the only thing that I can see is a signup form
| because a "qualcomid" is needed...
| fragmede wrote:
| It doesn't seems unreasonable for them to want an email
| address before giving you PDFs of their stuff. They do
| want additional verification to get more detailed docs,
| but on the spectrum between available on the open
| Internet to all as a 1, vs only available on a hardwired
| line on a LAN on a military base at a 10, I'd give
| Qualcomm, I dunno, maybe 4?
| userbinator wrote:
| In contrast, Microchip (and Atmel before it was acquired)
| made the datasheets for the MCUs used by Arduinos truly
| publicly available.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| Basically everyone openly publishes their datasheets.
| It's normal and expected
| yaro330 wrote:
| So make one.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Arduino made a lot of their boards closed source a while ago
| IIRC. I was surprised this one is supposedly going to be open
| source.
| 8cvor6j844qw_d6 wrote:
| Hope good things come out of it.
|
| My favorite thing from Arduino was the UNO R3, highly versatile
| for "hardware" stuff at way back then.
|
| I heard Espressif / ESP32 was its spiritual "successor".
| leoh wrote:
| This does not bring joy
| yalogin wrote:
| Can someone explain why Arsuino is attractive to Qualcomm? I mean
| is it a gateway drug to Qualcomm chips?
| BizarroLand wrote:
| The brand. All of their other stuff is essentially open, so
| they're just going to start adding new features that aren't
| open to force people to use their brand and probably claim
| ownership of any code that is published through their app or
| something, or make it so that builds will only work on their
| qualcomm chips.
|
| Oh, and likely there will be telemetry and user data
| acquisition in the arduino app so they'll probably also get
| some juicy user data to sell along the way.
|
| They'll sell a few more chips while they're at it.
|
| I'm glad there's nothing I need to do that an ESP32 or ESP8266
| can't do.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Currently, no. But currently, the only gateway drug to Qualcomm
| chips is being a large enough company that your company can
| beat Qualcomm into submission.
|
| Qualcomm may want to change that? But if Qualcomm's treatment
| of small developers remains the usual Qualcomm scorn, they'll
| get nowhere.
| babl-yc wrote:
| To anyone at Arduino/Qualcomm reading --
|
| If you're looking to make Uno Q SBC a gateway to more companies
| building on Qualcomm SoCs, please also release:
|
| - Affordable HQ camera modules, with drivers, tuned ISP support
| for the board
|
| - Low volume SoC purchases on Mouser/Digikey so we can move from
| evaluation board to prototypes
|
| - Reference schematics
|
| - High quality documentation and maintained Yocto layers for
| embedded linux development
|
| - Ability to use SoC features like AI acceleration / ISP without
| huge headaches
| mtoner23 wrote:
| Why would any large corporation need Arduino for strategic
| pruposes. They could simply and easily create any board they
| want. I guess they just want to take and slowly destroy the brand
| estimator7292 wrote:
| Shame to see Arduino go, but honestly how relevant are they
| anymore? The Arduino framework is one of the worst ways possible
| to write firmware for any slightly serious use, and their
| hardware is... quaint in the era of Espressif and the Cambrian
| explosion of devboards with any number of highly advanced
| features.
|
| Arduino was a great way to get into microcontrollers back when
| the only alternative was vendors' native libraries in straight
| undocumented C and wiggling CPU registers manually. But that's
| not really a niche anymore, there's plenty of other, better
| designed, frameworks and libraries. Arduino has always been the
| worst, slowest framework available.
|
| Honestly it's high time to replace Arduino with something else
| that doesn't instill such awful habits in new engineers.
| ricw wrote:
| Curious what the better frameworks are these days? Are they
| tied to specific hardware like arduino was? And what language
| do they use?
| bschwindHN wrote:
| FreeRTOS is pleasant to use.
|
| I've recently been getting into Rust + Embassy + Probe-rs and
| in my opinion it's been the best embedded experience by far.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| Broad support for many different chips is precisely why
| Arduino is so bad. It has to check pin numbers against a
| gigantic table for every gpio call.
|
| You _want_ chip-specific libraries. When the software is
| designed _for the hardware_ everything works better.
|
| The native AVR and esp-IDF frameworks are very good. There's
| also micropython and circuit python. I've heard good things,
| but I don't partake in Python.
|
| Personally I think attempting to provide a cross-platform
| library for microcontrollers is an enormous mistake. This is
| not x86, you can't rely on _any_ CPU feature existing, which
| results in awful branching code in places that in a sane
| framework is a single instruction updating a CPU register
| theon144 wrote:
| I feel like this has to be a toolchain issue, there's no
| reason the pin number -> register table couldn't be
| resolved at compile time, similar with conditionally
| compiling certain things based on the CPU features.
|
| 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"
| estimator7292 wrote:
| It _could_ and _some_ cores do. Many do not and you get a
| runtime lookup unless you explicitly call
| digitalWriteFast which is also _supposed_ to resolve to a
| single inline instruction. It usually does not and
| instead emits a function call in assembly.
|
| The gpio thing is really just my personal pet peeve.
| There are a lot of things like this though. For example,
| the arduino core will consume several milliseconds doing
| something in between calls to your main function. I2C and
| similar drivers are typically not well designed and
| either use too much memory or just operate not-quite-
| right.
|
| Which brings up another point, the Arduino ecosystem is
| _not at all_ unified. If you use a chip that is not
| popular enough to be mainlined, you have to go out and
| find an Arduino core that supports it and try to plug
| that into your compiler. Such cores frequently are not
| API compatible and have slightly different behaviors. It
| 's all a big mess.
|
| There are a lot of features that are compile time
| conditional based on CPU, but the actual implementation
| of this is horrible. I once had to modify someone else's
| custom Arduino core to tweak some low level behavior and
| despite the change being very minimal, it took three days
| to find all the places and all the conditionals that
| needed tweaking.
|
| But really my main complaint is that Arduino is
| incredibly slow and hides far too much from you. Firmware
| developers _should_ know about CPU registers and hardware
| features. This is very important for understanding the
| machine! A lack of awareness of the machine and what its
| doing is (IMO) one of the major factors in how _awful_
| modern programs are.
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| I agree with you, with the caveat that the awful software
| that's written by an inexperienced programmer ends up
| getting used, and the perfect efficient well-tuned
| software I want to write never gets finished (or even
| started, usually). It's so much more work.
| mrheosuper wrote:
| If you want a "framework", Zephyr is the only thing i can
| think of, that is somewhat hardware agnostic, have great
| software packages, and fairly widely used.
| bobsomers wrote:
| What frameworks would you recommend for new people learning
| about embedded systems?
| mrheosuper wrote:
| Why care about framework, just use whatever vendor HAL for
| your MCU and be good with it
| babl-yc wrote:
| There's still relevance in making it stupidly easy to make an
| LED blink and make basic apps on circuit boards. Education +
| weekend hardware hackers might look for something different in
| a framework than a professional.
|
| But certainly for pro use cases the hardware specific
| frameworks are way more powerful (but also complex).
|
| I wrote up a bit on Arduino vs ESP-IDF here
| https://bitclock.io/blog/esp-idf-vscode
| danhor wrote:
| > There's still relevance in making it stupidly easy to make
| an LED blink and make basic apps on circuit boards. Education
| + weekend hardware hackers might look for something different
| in a framework than a professional.
|
| This group is has been moving to circuitpython, which is much
| less performant, but even easier to use. The more serious
| cross-platform development environments, like Zephyr, have
| also become much better.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| The native AVR libraries are really good. It's not quite as
| idiomatic as Arduino, but it's really not all that different.
|
| Beginners _can_ learn frameworks more complicated than
| Arduino and I think they should. Before Arduino, beginners
| were expected to write plain C or assembly, and the industry
| got along just fine. There were still countless hackers and
| weekend tinkerers. They just had to learn more, which is
| _not_ a bad thing
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| If by native AVR, you mean avr-libc, it's nothing at all
| like Arduino.
|
| 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.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| I think these things are entirely reasonable for a
| beginner to learn about. It teaches you about the
| machine, about the very real cost of a UART write. That
| saves you from inevitably spending hours and days to
| figure out that too many printf is what's making your
| program slow.
|
| A beginner should be introduced to the processor, not C++
| or python abstractions. Those abstractions are good and
| useful in the general sense, but you really should be
| aware of what your abstractions actually do to the
| physical processor.
| rramadass wrote:
| This is exactly right.
|
| Nobody has done embedded MCU programming as simple as
| Arduino. There is so much open source code libraries in
| the Arduino Ecosystem to do almost anything that much of
| your programming becomes plug-and-play and accessible to
| all. You can then ship it as long as your
| power/performance budgets are met.
|
| A few years ago they went professional with their
| "Arduino PRO" industrial hardware and a good Cloud IoT
| platform. Again they gave you a simple software interface
| to easily program your nodes and add them to your own IoT
| application/services.
|
| I think Qualcomm has a winner on their hands here _if_
| they can encompass all their offerings within the Arduino
| Software Ecosystem so any hobbyist
| /maker/developer/professional can easily develop
| applications/systems.
| dzonga wrote:
| used arduino for my robotics classes. for beginners its probably
| the best platform. get the board, add a couple of sensors and
| motors then boom.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Seems natural as both Qualcomm and Arduino feel like companies
| that have struggled to keep up in markets they previously were at
| the forefront of. Maybe they can work better together.
| zoobab wrote:
| Let's fork Arduino, Qualcomm is a patent troll.
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| What's Arduino's IP look like?
| drivers99 wrote:
| They have the PCB files and schematics linked from here:
| https://store-usa.arduino.cc/products/arduino-uno-rev3 It
| says "Arduino Uno is open-source hardware! You can build your
| own board using the following files"
|
| Found some licensing info here:
| https://support.arduino.cc/hc/en-
| us/articles/4415094490770-L...
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| Thanks! That doesn't seem like a tempting target for patent
| trolling (which wasn't your assertion).
| relaxing wrote:
| There's plenty of forks already. See Adafruit, Sparkfun, and
| tons of others.
| elAhmo wrote:
| Sad day for education. I would be surprised to find any user who
| is happy about this.
| codingclaws wrote:
| RIP Arduino
| antirez wrote:
| I'm not sure how it is possible to compete against the
| RP2040/RP2050 at this point: quality, great programming
| environment, awesome hardware specs, cheap.
| wrigby wrote:
| Yeah, I just did a project at work with an RP2040 and was
| really impressed with the Pico SDK. It hits a sweet spot in
| between ST's insanity and Arduino's easy-but-not-powerful
| tradeoff.
|
| No crazy code generation, going from 0 to blinky is quick, but
| also going from blinky to DMA's and interrupts is also a
| breeze.
|
| I will say that I think the hardware peripherals in STM32's are
| miles ahead, and PIO's don't necessarily make up the
| difference.
| antirez wrote:
| Yep the STM32 has certain advantages, even if they are
| usually complicated to program. With the Flipper Zero I
| programmed a low level timer interrupt and had to setup don't
| know how many registers... And the documentation is lacking.
| Also I love the fact that the STM32 comes in 5v variants that
| are great to interface it directly with things like a
| Commodore 64 or a Spectrum.
| blastersyndrome wrote:
| My takeaway from this announcement is that are going to ruin
| Arduino's current IDE and replace it with... something called
| Arduino App Lab? They didn't go into specifics as to what this
| is, other than it will integrate AI, somehow.
|
| The other thing they announced is that they are going to sell at
| least one of their SBCs under the Arduino brand. That's kind of
| cool, I guess.
|
| This announcement was very difficult to read. The whole thing
| sounds like it was written by chatGPT and it and it really shows.
| It took them roughly four pages to announce these two things and
| nothing else. I can't help but feel there is some level of malice
| to this, like they are taking out of Microsoft's playbook of
| "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish".
| cuttothechase wrote:
| The title says - "Qualcomm to Acquire Arduino--Accelerating
| Developers' Access to its Leading Edge Computing and AI"
|
| Didn't have it on my bingo card that running AI on a
| microcontroller is what people are salivating for!
|
| Not sure if the strategy is to cram AI into every little shoe box
| out there and keeping fingers crossed for the stock price to
| trend upwards!?
| 05 wrote:
| You can actually run TFlite Micro models on esp32-s3 reasonably
| fast, and it has a csi camera connector.
|
| https://github.com/espressif/esp-tflite-micro
| protocolture wrote:
| IIRC some of the ESP boards are "AI Optimised" but its like,
| facial and license plate recognition, not necessarily LLM
| stuff.
| consp wrote:
| Is that what we call DSPs now?
| pcdoodle wrote:
| The brain/CPU of the new Arduino uses a QRB2210 CPU which is not
| available on digikey or mouser.
|
| Hopefully we get something along with this to integrate into
| custom designs?
| coupdejarnac wrote:
| Professional embedded developer and Arduino afficionado here: the
| amount of misinformation and hot takes here is astounding. First,
| Arduino is aimed at making technology usable for non-engineers.
| The ease of use makea them a breeze for engineers though. There's
| nothing wrong with making something serious with Arduino as long
| as the project fits within the confines of Arduino.
|
| Arduino refers to a company as well as a hardware and software
| platform. It doesn't only mean an ATMega based board. You can
| have an ESP32 based Arduino board.
|
| Arduino boards aren't designed for high performance or very high
| speed signal integrity.They are designed to be easy to use by non
| technical people.
|
| I see people saying stuff like the ESP IDF and FreeRTOS are easy
| enough to use for most people. First, Arduino on ESP32 is built
| on the FreeRTOS based IDF, so people who would rather use
| FreeRTOS don't exactly know what they are talking about. Second,
| anyone who thinks FreeRTOS is easy enough to use for Arduino's
| core audience is delulu.
|
| Use the proper tool for the job. Arduino is for beginners, non-
| technical people, and for projects with undemanding requirements.
| Stop pretending that it's a half baked solution for engineers;
| that completely misses the point of Arduino.
| vollbrecht wrote:
| You also now who misses the point? Qualcomm. Why? Well just
| read the headline qualcomm itself provides.
| keyboards wrote:
| I love making random IOT things with the UNO R4 Wifi. I hope this
| means that Arduino will around (and as fun and easy) for years to
| come. But dang...Temo que...
| st3fan wrote:
| Let the enshitification and cease and desists towards clones
| start ...
|
| I am very very skeptical of this being a good thing for Arduino
| and their community.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| Came here to post this word. Sums it all up.
| MountDoom wrote:
| The problem is that there just isn't a whole lot of money to be
| made in providing hobby hardware for enthusiasts. Every time a
| big player gets involved, they think they can change this. A
| decade ago, Intel tried that back in the day with Galileo /
| Edison, and tellingly, they came up with the same "ideas": IoT /
| AI.
|
| If you're doing cheap IoT trinkets, you're never going to pay
| extra for a brand. You're going to buy the cheapest wifi / BT
| chipset out there and make do with that.
|
| And if you're doing serious AI, you basically go for a real
| computer with real computing power, and in that segment, the
| Arduino brand means nothing.
|
| I suspect there was an internal deck saying how this acquisition
| is going to give them foothold in the hobby community, but if
| they wanted that, there's a million better ways. Starting with
| making documentation, SDKs, and toolchains accessible and easy to
| use. There's a reason why you see Microchip, STM, RPi, and
| Espressif chips in every other DIY project.
| TheJoeMan wrote:
| I think it might be related to them charging say $100 instead
| of $5 for the device and providing "lifetime" (read:
| "indefinite") access to their IoT Cloud. Except there are no
| guarantees on the duration of that access.
|
| As a side note, I don't get why they can't find the NPV of
| actually lifetime cloud compute. Compute costs are decreasing
| rapidly, so a $5/yr perpetuity has a NPV of $185 assuming 2.7%
| inflation?
| xg15 wrote:
| I wonder if even inside the hobbyist space, Arduino got
| obsoleted by the Raspberry Pi and its clones/compatible
| devices.
|
| Basically, if you already got the skills to work with "bare"
| microcontrollers, you won't need all the simplification and
| handholding that Arduino provides and you can just buy the
| individual chips and fully utilize the tiny form factor and low
| power requirements.
|
| If you want to learn programming microcontrollers, then locking
| yourself into Arduino's abstractions is probably
| counterproductive.
|
| On the other hand, if you do want to just combine different
| ready-made modules, focus on programming and don't want to
| worry too much on the low-level stuff, you will probably use a
| raspberry pi or similar: The form factor is only slightly
| larger than an arduino, but you get a full-fledged PC instead
| of a microcontroller.
|
| So I don't really see a niche there.
| MountDoom wrote:
| > Arduino got obsoleted by the Raspberry Pi and its
| clones/compatible devices.
|
| Not entirely. Arduino was always targeted at the "casual DIY"
| segment - artists, school robotics clubs, and other folks who
| wanted automation without a steep learning curve. This was a
| notch below the "serious hobbyist" tier where you could save
| a lot of money by just buying a bare-metal version of the
| same chip and write some code in C (or Rust). Or the pro
| tier, where there's way you're paying $20+ for a glorified
| breakout board.
|
| Casual DIY always had a ton of inertia. It's also the reason
| why every other design for an analog guitar pedal or whatever
| is using components that are 50 years old: ancient designs
| are just copied-and-pasted forever. So I don't think Arduino
| is dead there, although other platforms are definitely eating
| some of their lunch.
| DamonHD wrote:
| I designed a consumer product based on a respun Uno, that
| has sold >500k units. The toolchain and hardware remains
| pretty capable, and can run super low power with care (~1
| microamp most of the time).
| MountDoom wrote:
| But why? You can have the same chip for much less. The
| "toolchain" is just a bit of syntactic sugar around
| existing languages and tools, but more to the point,
| nothing stops you from using it with your own hardware.
|
| I'm not doubting you, just sincerely curious.
| DamonHD wrote:
| That design started ~10Y ago. If I was starting again I
| might pick something different.
| michaelt wrote:
| If they've done 500k units, "based on a respun Uno"
| almost certainly means "there's a atmega328p on the PCB,
| a 16MHz crystal, and some points granting access to the
| serial and reset pins"
| DamonHD wrote:
| ATMega328p, 32768Hz xtal, in a smart radiator valve. See
| OpenTRV (for the open part of the s/w and h/w) and Radbot
| for the commercial product.
| relaxing wrote:
| That's a cool product! I wish I could put something like
| that on my hydronic (hot water) radiators, but they don't
| have individual valves.
| xg15 wrote:
| > _Not entirely. Arduino was always targeted at the "casual
| DIY" segment - artists, school robotics clubs, and other
| folks who wanted automation without a steep learning
| curve._
|
| 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.
| petsfed wrote:
| This is true up until it really REALLY isn't.
|
| The main strength of microcontroller-based hobby boards
| (I hesitate to say "bare-metal", but something like that)
| is that tuning them for long operation on a small pouch
| cell is pretty straightforward. There is no such easy
| path to prolong battery life on a Raspberry Pi (not
| including the RPI Pico). After that, with
| microcontrollers, you have direct visibility into most
| interrupts you may need to use. You do not have that in
| the standard Raspbian linux distro.
|
| They are foundationally different items, and it does not
| take a tremendously complicated project to reach the
| boundary between them. Need a robust wifi stack or to run
| a camera? You need something with at least an RTOS (like
| an ESP), or an actual operating system. Need to service a
| rapidly spinning rotary encoder without missing clicks
| _or_ blocking other operations? You need a
| microcontroller.
|
| Its certainly true that you can make a Raspberry Pi do
| everything an arduino can (and mostly vice versa), but in
| terms of what's accessible to a early-intermediate
| hobbyist, they are different tools for different tasks.
| mrheosuper wrote:
| They are entirely different. By Arduino, i assume you
| mean Arduino hardware ? They are usually just a breakout
| board for a given MCU.
|
| Raspberry pi, is a full ledge computer, with boottime
| measured in seconds
| harrall wrote:
| Let's see... use the Arduino IDE, plug it in via USB, and
| press Upload. Your program starts on boot, every time,
| reliably and quickly.
|
| OR buy an SD card, learn what the heck "writing images"
| is, find a spare keyboard and monitor so you can see the
| RPi, learn how to use Linux for your first time, figure
| out how to copy files between your Macbook and Linux,
| figure out how to setup Wi-Fi, figure out how to run a
| program, then restart your RPi to find that your program
| didn't start on its own, then figure out the million
| different ways in Linux to start a program on boot, only
| to find it takes forever before your program starts when
| you plug the RPi back in, then it turns out Linux screws
| up your timings so your LED art project doesn't even
| work...
| wat10000 wrote:
| Getting a full-fledged PC is an anti-feature for a small
| project. I don't want to fart around with a Linux install
| just to set the thing up. I don't want to worry about SD card
| longevity or power supply compatibility. And I definitely
| don't want to spend $50+. I'll buy a cheap Arduino-compatible
| board that will immediately run whatever code I load it with.
| I've built several Arduino projects and RPi would have been
| more annoying and much more expensive.
|
| The RPi Pico looks great for this, but that's pretty much an
| Arduino equivalent. You can even used the Arduino IDE with
| it.
| solsane wrote:
| Perspective: Former college robotics team member a while ago
| (2022) (IEEE SoutheastCon)
|
| I definitely see niches for both. Even if you've got some
| experience an Arduino uno or mega is just an atMEGA with good
| software support and IO headers.
|
| We'd usually use an RPI and Arduino - connect our 'out of the
| box' modules to the pi, pi to arduino via uart serial, and
| wire arduino to the meat and potatoes. The RPI's IO was
| generally not as good in terms of latency but also if the
| wrong wire gets crossed suddenly we'd have a dead Pi but the
| Arduino would shrug it off.
| dimatura wrote:
| I feel like the raspberry pi pico is more of a competitor to
| the arduino than the raspberry pi - there's quite a few
| applications where having a whole linux operating system is a
| hindrance compared to running on bare metal, especially
| anything that needs real time control of signals. (Although
| you can get around this on the pi by connecting peripherals
| via USB/serial/i2c which themselves might use MCUs).
|
| Then again, one of the more accessible (IMO) ways of using pi
| picos is with the arduino environment, or its cousin
| platformio. I do think that even if in some ways the arduino
| abstractions can be limiting in some ways, in practice it's
| often a big timesaver for more casual (and not so casual)
| applications. It gives you easy access to a large ecosystem
| of libraries across a lot of hardware platforms.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| > If you want to learn programming microcontrollers, then
| locking yourself into Arduino's abstractions is probably
| counterproductive.
|
| Arduino isn't a pipeline from zero to professional embedded
| dev. It's a stepping stone, and a crucial one at that. I'd
| know. I'm an embedded firmware engineer. Got my first Arduino
| when I was 11.
|
| Arduino's success comes from the legibility of their API and
| the simplicity of their tooling. It allows kids or a novice
| to get comfortable with core principles of the trade (GPIO,
| other basic peripherals, limited memory, etc) without the
| cognitive overhead of makefiles and JTAG adapters. You aren't
| getting "locked in" by anything, you're building skills that
| you'll need for the next step.
|
| If all you're doing is twiddling some GPIOs, as is the case
| with most beginner/educational projects, RPi isn't teaching
| you any skills that translate to industry. So there's one
| niche: Arduino is a practical educational tool.
|
| That simple tooling and API also make Arduino great for small
| side projects that don't demand a sophisticated uC. Once that
| project is finished, you can plop an ATMega328 onto a piece
| of perfboard with a crystal and a couple caps, and your
| Arduino is free to use on whatever your next project will be.
| Can't do that with a Pi.
|
| Also, I'd much rather just plug an Arduino into my PC and
| throw some code on it, than clear off half my desk to make
| way for a monitor and keyboard for the Pi. Point Arduino.
| petra wrote:
| I agree. The Arduino brand isn't for professionals.
|
| But let's say tomorrow they come together with
| bundle/partnerships to create a new, great dev environment,
| very easy, that a mechanical engineer can prototype a great
| robot for a niche use case,and continue to use that chip and
| code, with some changes in V1 production ?
|
| Is there value to the Arduino brand and community than ?
| bluGill wrote:
| Arduino is used by many professionals. It is cheap enough
| that you can buy it on your corporate cards and you boss
| won't ask many questions. As such many products start with an
| Ardunio based demo, and if/when the demo is a success it
| moves to a real company project with a real budget.
|
| The question though is does this add value for the owners of
| Arduino? All too often when a project moves from the demo to
| real engineering (making a demo something you can sell is
| typically about ten times harder than the demo) you select
| all new hardware.
| kovac wrote:
| When professionals use Arduinos for such use cases, do they
| use the Arduino software platform or do they use the chio
| verndors' toolchains? Just curious how the professionals
| work with these things.
| carlgreene wrote:
| From what I've heard (primarily in the music hardware
| space) is that it depends. Some use Arduino's software
| and language while others use the lower level toolchains.
|
| This is prototyping mostly so I'm not sure if any of the
| Arduino code actually gets shipped with production
| devices.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| It depends, really. Mostly on who does the project.
|
| Some people hail from hacker town and will use whatever
| they have at hand. Some learned on vendor tooling, and
| would want it to be "proper", and would always try to use
| a vendor SDK with a vendor IDE. Some learned on vendor
| tooling and prefer not to use vendor tooling for
| "familiarity breeds contempt" reasons.
|
| As a degenerate case: I've seen software for an ESP32
| board that was prototyped entirely in Arduino IDE, and we
| almost shipped it that way. Because the prototype team
| cooked, and when the "make it an actual product team"
| tried to remake it in ESP-IDF, they ended up with less
| features and more bugs. They got it together eventually
| though.
| kovac wrote:
| Thank you for sharing. As a hobbyist with a devotion to
| the field, I'm fascinated by how the actual professionals
| work. It's a very challenging domain.
| mrheosuper wrote:
| We use the whole Arduino software
| packages(IDE/toolchain/flashing tool). It's fast and
| proven to work.
|
| For ex, we want to prototype a new mux switch, and need
| to toggle some gpio from computer. We finished in 1
| evening, with arduino and python on host.
| agloe_dreams wrote:
| I mean, if you have seen RasPi prices lately, I'm not so sure
| this is true. Seems like a really profitable biz..granted, I
| wouldn't pay their absurd prices for such underpowered
| hardware. Virtually nobody should buy their $200 CM5 product
| for example.
| bluescrn wrote:
| > The problem is that there just isn't a whole lot of money to
| be made in providing hobby hardware for enthusiasts.
|
| With Arduino, the hardware is probably the least
| interesting/important part. The software side is more
| important, providing an easy-to-use IDE and a simplified API
| and platform abstraction layer to make it super-easy to get
| started. Then there's the documentation, sample code, and
| community.
| analog31 wrote:
| Indeed, at this point, there are possibly hundreds of Arduino
| compatible boards, and the other pieces of the puzzle are
| more important. Arduino is the Python of microcontroller
| development.
|
| Come for the odd little microcontroller board. Stay for the
| community.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| > If you're doing cheap IoT trinkets, you're never going to pay
| extra for a brand.
|
| Except for the Arduino brand. Arduino boards have margins that
| traditional hardware vendors can only dream of achieving. The
| only thing carrying that profit margin is the Arduino brand.
| The software stack is not tied to their hardware, but they make
| tons of money on hardware.
| noobermin wrote:
| If life is so sweet for them, why sell arduino?
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Because you have a good income stream but you want more
| money now? Arduino is a lifestyle business (a good
| lifestyle, don't get me wrong) much more than a growth
| business. It's easy to price what the income stream is
| worth.
| noobermin wrote:
| I don't know if you realise it or not but the point
| you're making is self-contradictory. If they make great
| margins, that's why qualcomm would want to buy them, but
| not why they'd want to sell and have to share it. I guess
| it makes sense if you're saying arduino are suckers
| sneak wrote:
| It's unlikely that Qualcomm purchased them for their
| revenue or margins, which to Qualcomm's scale are
| basically irrelevant.
| noobermin wrote:
| So it sounds like again, this purchase makes no sense
| from anyone's perspective unless arduino are suckers.
| etiennebausson wrote:
| They bought a brand with a positive reputation. That's
| it, volumes are irrelevant here.
| modo_mario wrote:
| Why are you so adamant that they must be suckers? Don't
| these kind of purchases happen all the time? Let's say
| you want at least ....10 years of fat profit worth for
| you to sell your business. Could be more since it's
| sustainable, has high margins, etc but let's pick the
| round number. Big company comes along and offers you 11
| years of profit worth of money. You sell. They know it's
| going to take a bit longer for the purchase to pay for
| itself but they also want to transform the business a bit
| to funnel in developers to popularize their main products
| and take wind out of the sails of competitors which they
| project will bring in the equivalent of at least 3 years
| of your business's profit over time along with some other
| stuff....so they're happy to overpay for your business
| since it'll probably cover the lil bit of extra risk
|
| In that case everyone's a winner...except maybe us as
| customers.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| They did say:
|
| > you want more money now
|
| But honestly, on HN, no one should have to explain why
| founders seek exits.
|
| Just like any other founder, if the vast majority of
| their net worth is tied up in the company, they'd like to
| have an exit to take some chips off the table and
| diversify their investments.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| They're not suckers, they're just getting older and want
| to retire (as far as I can tell, this may actually be
| their motivation), so $10 million today sounds a lot
| better than $1 million every year for the next 15 years.
| vayup wrote:
| There is a whole lot of commerical products built out of what
| we consider hobby projects (Adruino, Raspberry Pi). Eg: digital
| displays, industrial equipment controllers etc. All of this is
| clubbed under the nebulous IoT moniker.
|
| My take: Qualcomm hopes to leverage Adriano adoption to expand
| their IoT share, and also to grow Adruino's footprint to
| include more smart IoT devices using Qualcomm's chipsets (Eg:
| Robotics)
| riazrizvi wrote:
| Maybe. New people means new perspective. Maybe they see value
| in an ecosystem of developers who are keen to spend their free
| time to drum up interesting content, based on their projects
| and applications. This grassroots interest is what drove Apple
| to displace Sun Microsystems as the de facto, UNIX system.
| mrheosuper wrote:
| >If you're doing cheap IoT trinkets, you're never going to pay
| extra for a brand. You're going to buy the cheapest wifi / BT
| chipset out there and make do with that.
|
| It's the opposite of that. Hobbyist/low volume maker gonna
| spend extra money to buy a familar tool, instead of going extra
| miles finding the cheapest available.
|
| Even ESP32 is bad in term of perfomance/features and how much
| it cost.
| Alupis wrote:
| > A decade ago, Intel tried that back in the day with Galileo /
| Edison, and tellingly, they came up with the same "ideas": IoT
| / AI.
|
| Intel's execution - as usual - was poor and lacking.
|
| Both the Galileo and Edison were much more expensive than their
| Arduino counterparts, and their x86 cpu's were of little value
| within that space (especially at the time). Neither made it
| past 5 years without being killed - which is exactly what
| people feared. A stunning lack of long-term commitment from
| Intel to develop and grow a community, leaving anyone that
| actually built products based on their devices holding a
| useless bag.
| userbinator wrote:
| _and their x86 cpu 's were of little value within that space_
|
| Intel could've attracted the entire retrocomputing community
| if they realised that the peripherals around x86 and the PC
| ecosystem were what got them to where they were in the first
| place, and made Galileo/Edison actually PC-compatible, but
| they ended up making a SoC with a 486DX+ core and mostly-
| incompatible peripherals (one would think they should've
| learned their lesson with the 80186/88...) and somehow
| convinced Microsoft to make a special version of Windows(!)
| for it despite a complete lack of _any_ video output
| capabilities.
|
| "WTF were they thinking!?" is the most concise summary of
| that fiasco.
| vachina wrote:
| Intel Edison/Galileo didn't work because everything they
| could do is replaced by purpose built ASICs, much cheaper at
| scale and energy efficient, important metrics for IoT. They
| were at best PoC material in the lab.
| slightwinder wrote:
| > And if you're doing serious AI, you basically go for a real
| computer with real computing power, and in that segment, the
| Arduino brand means nothing.
|
| What about cheap AI for toys and gadgets? Maybe the next Furby
| or some smart Toaster could run on their chips. AI is
| spreading, moving into casual corners outside of hobbyists and
| high professionals, maybe they aim to get a foothold there?
| hackernewds wrote:
| Not everything in life is about money.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > I suspect there was an internal deck saying how this
| acquisition is going to give them foothold in the hobby
| community,
|
| No. This is to give them a foothold in the "IoT hammer"
| manufacturing business. They looked at how the Raspberry Pi
| went from cheap hobby computer running Linux to low effort
| rapid prototyping embedded platform that can run a full web
| stack. They want to be part of a full dev pipeline from
| prototype to product.
|
| The real target audience are people building things who don't
| care how it works as long as it works. So expect 99.9% of these
| projects to use some sort of Python or JS thing running in a
| container on the Linux while the microcontroller runs a few
| lines of c to manipulate IO pin state from the Linux thing.
| Just like all those abandoned Spin scooters in Seattle that had
| raspberry Pi's in them. That is the market they are after, not
| the person who builds a one-off Arduino fish feeder.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| Guess the corporate development team needed to justify its
| existence. We've been through many dubious acquisitions in the
| tech sector for the last 5 years or so.
| calibas wrote:
| Arduino offered tiny, inexpensive, easy-to-program computers and
| dominated the hobby space at first. This lasted for a few years,
| but then they started getting competition. The ESP8266 offered
| comparable performance at a fraction of the price, while the
| Raspberry Pi was about the same price as an Arduino but way
| better performance. Hard to compete when other companies are
| selling better hardware for a lower price.
| guywithahat wrote:
| It's still one of the best boards if you want to do stuff on
| "bare metal". While I agree they missed a few product
| innovations, it's still a product that is in demand and gets
| used by industry for real products.
| giobox wrote:
| > while the Raspberry Pi was about the same price as an Arduino
| but way better performance
|
| If you are cross shopping a full single board computer (Pi)
| with a microcontroller (arduino/esp32 etc) for a project, it's
| almost always a sign you don't know what you are doing. With
| the exception of the recent Pi Pico, non of the raspberry pis
| are Arduino/microcontroller competitors - they are typically
| full blown linux computers with all the benefits and drawbacks
| that provides.
|
| While you can absolutely solve microcontroller-style problems
| with full blown computers, it's rarely the best/cheapest
| option.
| calibas wrote:
| True from an industry perspective, but they're very much
| competitors in the hobby market.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Counterpoint: prototyping and low volume production runs.
| Hardware is cheap - development time is expensive.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Right but if you're a hobbyist, "cheap" isn't the priority. I
| mean, what's the harm of using a $40 SBC instead of a $10 one
| if you're going to be spending hundreds of dollars and dozens
| of man-hours on it?
|
| The bigger concern is the overhead of the Linux OS in terms
| of interacting with it vs just flashing a microcontroller...
| but linux lets you run an SSH and FTP servers and wifi and a
| debugger on the thing easily.
|
| So you get easier access to remotely playing with the
| programming of your gizmo, but you have the OS in the way of
| just talking to hardware in real-time. I haven't done
| projects like that since my undergrad, does it really make
| that much difference?
|
| To me the big deal-breaker would probably be if the thing I
| was building was battery-powered.
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| If you're a hobbyist making IoT stuff though, you might
| want 10 of them. And then the price per piece starts
| mattering.
| agloe_dreams wrote:
| FWIIW - The new Uno Q is exactly the midpoint of your comment
| - a linux based computer WITH a STM32 coprocessor to confuse
| the heck out of everything.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Which is also exactly what a mega-flop Intel Galileo was.
| finaard wrote:
| For a long time I did a lot of Arduino stuff because you could
| get Nano clones for less than 1 EUR - which pretty much makes
| them throwaway, if you mess up.
|
| I recently was doing a few projects with the Arduino Every,
| which is a nice board - but it's just too expensive. I did fry
| a few - so now I'm just using them as development board (the
| additional UARTs help a lot there), and for the actual project
| still use Nanos where I no longer care about the serial debug
| output, and therefore am fine with just the one serial port.
| slipnslider wrote:
| Am I only the only one who finds ESP better in almost every
| way? Once I discovered ESP8266 and 32, I basically haven't
| touched an Arduino board
| e-khadem wrote:
| The ADCs are almost useless. But yeah otherwise for most
| applications they are much better in every regard.
| ozguroz wrote:
| Curious if anyone's seen actual numbers on the acquisition
| Gelob wrote:
| this is bad, qualcomm hides their documentation and its not
| accessible unless you pay and enter into a contract
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Well that seems like a worst case scenario. Qualcomm not known
| for open source legacy.
| beambot wrote:
| End of an era...
| lastdong wrote:
| Arduino is an open-source platform -- both its hardware and
| software are open to everyone, right?
|
| The first Arduino I built cost me just $5. I assembled all the
| parts on a breadboard, and it worked perfectly with the Arduino
| IDE, just like the ESP32 does nowadays.
|
| Is Qualcomm basically paying for the brand? I didn't even realize
| Arduino was a brand at first.
| nekusar wrote:
| Arduino lost the narrative when official Arduino boards were $35,
| and a clone was $5, if that.
|
| Arduino Megas? $110 official, $12 on Ali. Extra $10 gets you a
| RAMPS 1.4 board for full 3d printer platform. Yeah, a whoile
| Marlin-capable 3d printer board for $20. Id argue that THIS is
| what caused the 3d printer boom.
|
| Arduino nano? Officially? Who knows. I bought them in bulk $1.40
| and were pin compatible, and breadboardable.
|
| And this was all true back in 2012 and up. Even their "Motor
| Shield" official driver was a pile of crap. Used an LM298 iirc. I
| would just go buy an a4988 stepper driver for a whole $.99 and
| run steppers.
|
| They made the ecosystem, but they haven't properly stewarded or
| oversaw it. And now that Qualcomm is now owner, eh, fuck it.
| Stick with clones or ESP. (And for those who've had the
| displeasure of dealing with Qualcomm, yeah, just dont.)
| drzaiusx11 wrote:
| I moved to using Arduino compatibles due to the "two Arduino
| companies" drama a while back. I don't even recall how they
| resolved that dispute (or even if they did), but luckily I don't
| have to care as long as compatibles still work in the dev
| environment (or some fork thereof)
| kazinator wrote:
| This is like Arduino checking into a hospice.
| bfrog wrote:
| Uno Q... zero docs available for this dragonwing part from
| qualcomm, I'd say I'm shocked but... par for the course.
|
| I wonder how this will effect Arduino moving forward.
| synergy20 wrote:
| I wonder if another big gun will swallow raspberry pi someday.
| the embedded field is getting more exciting these days.
| Aleklart wrote:
| rpi is owned by broadcom since the begining the moment they
| stop selling them their closed source firmware's cpu, be the
| end of rpi project anyway, rpi is just a PR stunt to push brand
| recognition among nerds, so they buy real business broadcom
| products for real profits
| sarmadgulzar wrote:
| Thank goodness I switched to nrf + embassy before this happened
| amelius wrote:
| I hope this will make Arduino more suitable as a quick & easy dev
| tool for professional products.
|
| I recently tried it out, with an STM32 board, but found out that
| the USB communication buffer is overwritten when data comes in
| too quickly. This is quite disappointing because the relevant
| communication protocol is perfectly capable of stalling
| transfers. Some internet searching revealed that many people are
| complaining about this. And the proposed solution of increasing
| the buffer size is of course not really a solution.
|
| Someone should fix this. I know Arduino is marketed as hobbyist,
| and I can live with not being able to squeeze the juice out of my
| hardware to the fullest, but I was surprised to see that
| apparently they don't take correctness seriously.
| RyJones wrote:
| me, 13 years ago, a contractor at Qualcomm: how will QCE compete
| against Arduino?
|
| the then-CEO in a rare f2f in Seattle: oh that's a toy
|
| me, today: God speed, you crazy diamonds; I'm glad you cashed
| out, you are doomed.
| EasyMark wrote:
| Are they buying it up to kill it or phase it out? Seems like
| corporations never do anything like this to the "good" of the
| community, it's always bad. I'd love to be pointed at exceptions
| where a megacorp bought some small relatively benevolent project
| and then didn't squeeze all the profit out of it and leave it for
| dead.
| MountDoom wrote:
| I don't think it's malicious, it's just that Qualcomm offered a
| big payday to people who have been working on the project for a
| very long time and are probably on the verge of wanting to go
| something else in their life. And then they're gonna force them
| to navigate the Kafkaesque bureaucracy at BigCo to get an
| approval for every blog post, conference talk, etc. Expense
| reports, headcount planning, performance management, you name
| it. After a year or two, they're gonna be thoroughly cooked and
| leave.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Google bought Android, but did not kill it. Same with YouTube.
| But, I admit, there are a lot more examples of the other way...
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Google bought Android, but did not kill it.
|
| True, but they are currently in the process of further
| locking hobbyists out of it.
| olyjohn wrote:
| Yeah it's not totally dead. But they definitely killed what
| made Android great. Now it might as well just be iOS. Same
| boring ass phones that do nothing well but install spyware
| apps, consume content and scroll through social media. Just
| more trash for the landfill.
| a_victorp wrote:
| Spot on!
| vdfs wrote:
| https://killedbygoogle.com
| bluGill wrote:
| I would guess they want to keep it - there are a lot of company
| advanced engineering projects run on Arduino and when those
| prove useful (most don't) the company starts looking for how to
| make it production. Thus having Arduino as a push to their
| chips is a useful in to more companies.
|
| Of course companies change directions all the time. I wouldn't
| surprise me if the people who bought Arduino believe the above
| vision, but there are other political factions that will try to
| kill it.
| elictronic wrote:
| Killing Arduino doesn't serve their interests based how many
| as-like boards there are. This is more akin to Microsoft's
| acquisition of Minecraft. Quick and easy way to get people in
| the door through recognition and a large user base.
| jjrh wrote:
| Not sure why they would intentionally kill it, it's a good
| brand to drive people towards your chips.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I'm a bit baffled by this. For those of you who were paying
| attention there was a big controversy when Arduino split with
| Arduino and filed a lawsuit[1]. That made it hard to get hardware
| and resulted in a bunch of open source folks who had been
| contributing to redouble their efforts to insure that all of the
| copyrights and licenses were FOSS so that this couldn't happen
| again.
|
| And that makes me wonder what Qualcomm "bought." Was it the
| trademark? The form factor? Presumably this won't affect things
| that leveraged the infrastructure like platform.io ? Was there
| money involved? Who got it and how much?
|
| Part of me wonders if this is in response to Qualcomm being
| unable to acquire the Raspberry Pi foundation, and given their
| focus on the new 'Q' and "Linux-Debian"[2] its not much different
| than a Raspberry Pi[3]. So many questions and "We heard you liked
| AI so we put some AI in your AI" kinds messaging?
|
| This is really baffling to me.
|
| [1] _Arduino, LLC v. Arduino S.R.L. et al_ --
| https://dockets.justia.com/docket/massachusetts/madce/1:2015...
|
| [2] I always chuckle at distro specific Linux as a 'thing.'
|
| [3] "Hey look we have this computer that runs Linux and has a
| connector on the board so you can plug I/O devices into the top
| of it! Isn't that neat and unique?"
| MisterTea wrote:
| I don't have any faith in them doing anything good. Feels like
| the microcontroller ecosystem is going to get replaced with a
| quad core application CPU running Kubernetes on Linux while a
| companion microcontroller runs 5 lines of c code to blink an LED.
|
| Are we going to get datasheets or are we getting Raspberry Pi 2:
| nodatasheet boogaloo and the community has to spend the next 5
| years reverse engineering the fuckin thing while loading binary
| blobs.
| 0xTJ wrote:
| This new product could be neat, but it just doesn't have even the
| slightest appeal that an MCU-based Arduino does to me. I would
| also have concerns about the enshittification of Arduino in
| general.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| This reminds me of Intel and Samsung's brief forays into the
| microcontroller world (Edison and Artik, if anyone's wondering
| what to Google). Maybe Qualcomm is in it for the long haul
| though. IoT is going to grow, and Intel and Samsung just lost
| focus.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| is is just me or every open source hardware product is always get
| acquire left and rigth????
| anymouse123456 wrote:
| This news is making me much sadder than maybe it should.
|
| Arduino is what pulled me into electronics. I have such fond
| memories of those old chonkers blinking LEDs. It felt like magic.
|
| Unless they've had a major staffing and leadership shakeup, there
| is a zero percent chance Qualcomm is going to suddenly become
| some kind of open, sharing, culture. The company DNA is patent
| troll.
|
| The recent joint ventures are a perfect example. I got so excited
| by those newish super powerful penta-whatever Qualcomm chips from
| Arduino a few years ago.
|
| Then learned the chips were unobtainable outside the Arduino
| modules.
|
| Complete garbage move by a garbage company.
| CommenterPerson wrote:
| Already in their future plans I can see the seeds of
| enshittification. I loved Arduino and built many projects with
| it. Hoping I am wrong about their future.
| palata wrote:
| Every time I tried to use something from Qualcomm, the experience
| sucked.
|
| I wonder if they will learn from Arduino or destroy it.
| phlipski wrote:
| Seems like a shrewd move. Historically Qualcomm products were
| only available to the top 5 phone vendors. You couldn't even
| steal a datasheet... If they're serious about opening up their
| products to more potential customers this might be a great way.
| Follow the raspberry pi model. You never know when a garage
| product will grow into the next multi-billion dollar socket.
| TI/ST/NXP/etcc could do this too and all it takes is cheap PCB's
| (mass produce at scale) and lots of documentation.....
| LordGrignard wrote:
| Hello world
| hoppp wrote:
| Aw man why does everything need to be Ai. I like my arduino
| boards, it don't need enshittification
| bvan wrote:
| Ma Che Cazzo?! The end of an era.
| hartjer wrote:
| F
| qdotme wrote:
| What I was actually hoping for.. and so far turned out
| disappointed, is a half-decent LTE/4/5G module that can be
| Arduino compatible.
|
| Just like ESP8266 (and later -32) variant opened up the IoT over
| WiFi, there is a potential industry-wide opportunity space for a
| decent, low-cost, always-online (just bring SIM) hobby board.
| Without awful vendor tooling. And ideally without "modem-to-
| something" bridge (which almost always means AT+ and vendor
| tooling..)
| jhallenworld wrote:
| I like https://www.makerfabs.com/maduino
|
| It uses Simcomm modules...
| andrewstuart wrote:
| How does this work when Qualcomm hides its technical
| documentation?
| angry_octet wrote:
| Lady Ada is not impressed:
|
| https://blog.adafruit.com/2025/10/07/qualcomms-latest-ai-pla...
|
| One of their key points is that the AI component is completely
| tied to the Qualcomm stack, the opposite of Open. Essentially the
| Arduino brand will live on as a marketing layer over Qualcomm
| hardware, which you will still need an NDA and significant volume
| to gain access to.
| reflexe wrote:
| Hopefully it will make Qualcomm behave more like Arduino and not
| the opposite. Qualcomm is one of the worse companies I have had
| the pleasure to work with.
|
| Their support model is hellish and they provide very little
| information and documentation, so usually you'll end up doing a
| lot of guessing and reverse engineering. They will tell you to
| sign a contract with one of their "design partners", but even
| they can't get answers for basic questions.
|
| Seriously, if they want more small cap companies working with
| them they have to treat them better, I worked with them as a
| small company and as a larger company and in both cases their
| support was basically non existent even if we were buying chips
| from them for more than 10m$ a year.
| robert_foss wrote:
| Qcom is a corporate behemoth, much like Oracle. In the immortal
| words of Bryan Cantrill, it is a lawnmower and if you stick
| your hand in it you'll get it chopped off.
| z3ratul163071 wrote:
| qualcomm are pos.
|
| after more than a decade of releasing CPUs for Linux based
| Android they released Snapdragon X CPU with Windows only support,
| intentionally not providing Linux drivers, to chum up with M$.
|
| it was one of the rare opportunities to break the AMD / Apple
| duopoly for PC CPUs/SoCs.
| finnjohnsen2 wrote:
| This means Arduino is no longer European, but American instead.
| This is relevant and unfortunate as Trump has made everything
| American taste bitter.
| werdl wrote:
| Interesting, but I do wonder if Arduino is close to the peak of
| its market share. Basically every hobbyist already knows about
| them - opportunities for growth would seem limited. Still
| exciting though!
| thot_experiment wrote:
| Is arduino even relevant at all in 2025? I mean i gotta hand it
| to em they're getting an insane amount of life out of marketing a
| 20 year old chip but I haven't seriously considered using one for
| a decade or so because of how much better in literally every way
| the esp32 is. I mean it's like $10 for three of them, they're
| dual core, have a radio on board and you can even use the arduino
| IDE for em, what's the downside? I especially love the two cores
| because I can have a web stack and bluetooth on one core, and
| whatever realtime actual programming i need to do on the second
| core.
| pbandhoney wrote:
| Any article that uses 'empower' is automatically in my books
| bullshit and bad for downstream receivers of the news. This uses
| it Five times. I can see their strategy; data-center with VMware
| and now Arduino on the edge, but in the first case unless you
| have massive budget you're leaving ASAP, and really many Arduino
| users are precisely in that bracket, so they are 'already left'.
| Platform.io maybe? What are other OSS alternatives?
| jwr wrote:
| I wonder how Qualcomm's extremely closed culture will play with
| this acquisition. I am worried.
| ktosobcy wrote:
| meh... probably unpopular opinion but we should ban companies
| from growing to big and acquiring other companies above certain
| valuation... ffs
| zild3d wrote:
| the downstream effect of that is less startups
| Iridiumkoivu wrote:
| Not cool.
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