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!
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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 ?
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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"
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
> 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.)
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.
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)
>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
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.
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.”
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
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.
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
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.
"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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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>
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
(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)
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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
>
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.
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
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"
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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)
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?
[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?"
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".
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.
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.
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.
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...
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.)
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?
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
If I had a dollar for every time a Qualcomm rep promised me something that never actually happened, I'd be a hundredaire.
Here's hoping. Qualcomm hardware would be fun to play with if it wasn't attached to, you know. The rest of Qualcomm.
And NDAs, licenses. The world has pretty much moved on to ESP32, RPi Pico and other boards post pandemic.
Genuine Qualcomm! And u/geerlingguy already has a youtube video up promoting the new SoCs...
> 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.
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.
I think to Arduino, Uno just means 'Uno form factor, with shield pins in the same place'
Which is kind of sad, since the Uno pinout is horrible for high-speed signals
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.
Yes, but many (most?) of them are 5V-tolerant.
Depends on the MCU, but generally STM32 is 1.7-3.6V
STM32 is 3v3 logic.
Not necessarily; see above (Or a datasheet)
This reminds me of the Arduino Intel Galileo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Galileo
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.
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.
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.
At this point in time, the shield headers rather look like a trademark than a useful connecter.
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.
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.
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...).
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.
The GPU on the RPi is a _lot_ slower
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.
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.
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.
Because Jetson is getting traction?
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
dragonwing docs are where?
Arduino is dead, ESP is better.
They're trying to bring Arduino back from the dead.
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...
Does it have video output? Otherwise, yawn!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not sure why they would intentionally kill it, it's a good brand to drive people towards your chips.
Google bought Android, but did not kill it. Same with YouTube. But, I admit, there are a lot more examples of the other way...
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.
> 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 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.
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 ?
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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"
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.
That design started ~10Y ago. If I was starting again I might pick something different.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I only feel dread when I see a Qualcomm story on HN anymore.
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.
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
> 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.)
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.
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)
>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.
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.
Auto Rev is Snapdragon Digital Chassis based is it not? I presumed people were aware of the legacy Snapdragon stuff, but maybe not!
Thank goodness for that $4B a year. It will certainly keep the stock valued at a market cap of $182B.
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
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.
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.
facts brother!
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
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.
What a nightmare!
"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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
>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.
just a correction: Mediatek is Taiwanese.
Qualcomm are good at radios and associated signal processing. The rest is simply integrations around that.
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?
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.
So they're basically going to become a patent troll, like IBM?
They are a patent troll for a long time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Buying random companies they have no use for like Arduino, they have firmly entered the Intel era.
>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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Yeah, it might as well say “Oracle to acquire $FOO”
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.
If you want to use SOTA camera sensors on an embedded system Qualcomm is great (in particular compared to NVIDA Jetson).
"Broadcom to acquire Qualcomm"
Better? :)
ESP stuff is so damn cheap and capable now I'm not sure what you would use Arduino for these days.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Well, it's a bad idea to rely on Microsoft in some manner
VSCodium is a de-microsoft'd version available. Still missing some of the features that aren't licensed the same.
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.
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.
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.
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...
(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)
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.
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.
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...
If youbuse PlatformIO everthing Just Works out of the box. Acquiring board files and such is handled behind the scenes
Yup, youre right I remember that
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.
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...
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.
>> Lots of people don't program.
Cathy Woods says we are all programmers now, so this shouldn't be a problem anymore.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
And yet there is clearly a market for easy-to-program MCUs for hobby and educational purposes.
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.
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.
While I've written Rpi Pico applications in C++, IMO CircuitPython/MicroPython is a far better environment for that processor.
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.
As a hobby user, RP2040/2350 seems like the best to for beginners. As long as it's not battery powered.
Arduino was around long before RP2040, therefore RP2040 shouldn’t exist because the niche was already filled.
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.
This is spot on. Arduino occupies a space that everyone else vacated a long time ago.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
You can program the normal ESP32 Devboards with the Arduino IDE.
Yup- ESP32 is absolutely compatible with Arduino.
There's also great support for CircuitPython and MicroPython, which makes it trivial to program the devices.
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.
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.
May I ask what your go-to battery is for light up wearables?
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.
What do you think about the Arduino professional line? They have industrial PLC equipments and other high end boards etc.
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.
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.
Military drones maybe? The trend is now on local AI features and they are practically throwaway.
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.
> 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.
ESP32 is also 5V tolerant for input pins.
Page of code?
About 50 lines... Give or take
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
this. esp 32 supermini is $3 and has wifi and bluetooth. Arduino stopped being useful many years ago
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.
Community inertia / maker content.
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.
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).
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.
Cheap fun, if you acquired a box of Arduinos from a defunct makerspace or startup in the mid 2010s
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.
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.
"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.
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.
That's probably why these AI-capable Qualcomm boards are being introduced.
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.
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.
That's pretty useless when they won't release the documentation for their SoCs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/WarshipPorn/comments/140oahc/japane...
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?
> the aircraft carrier could simply turn around.
Pretty sure it can turn 180 degrees fairly quickly.
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
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Qualcomm did not need to buy Arduino in order to do that.
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
> Qualcomm gets used to supporting smaller developers/startups/tinkerers
I'll believe it when I see it
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.
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
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.
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
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.
Yet another example of how corporate consolidation in America is hurting the consumer. FTC needs Lina Khan back to break up the oligopolies.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
> 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.
Curious what the better frameworks are these days? Are they tied to specific hardware like arduino was? And what language do they use?
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.
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
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"
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.
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.
What frameworks would you recommend for new people learning about embedded systems?
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.
> 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.
True from an industry perspective, but they're very much competitors in the hobby market.
Counterpoint: prototyping and low volume production runs. Hardware is cheap - development time is expensive.
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.
Which is also exactly what a mega-flop Intel Galileo was.
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.
If you're a hobbyist making IoT stuff though, you might want 10 of them. And then the price per piece starts mattering.
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.
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
The ADCs are almost useless. But yeah otherwise for most applications they are much better in every regard.
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.
Espressif has been eating their lunch, the boards are way more capable and much cheaper. Why would anyone pick an Uno over an ESP32?
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.
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.
Ain't fun spending $40 for a 'fun' project. ESP32 is like a dollar for WiFi and GPIOs. That's fun.
That's like the cost of two burritos. Unless you're bricking these things on the daily why would $1 vs $40 be the deciding factor for a project that is tens of hours at a minimum?
I buy 10s them and throw them around the house. I have a couple on AAA batteries and with deep sleep + watchdog wake on WiFi they last months.
What kind of projects are you using them for?
20$ 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.
$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.
Taco Bell lists their burrito supreme as $5.59.
ESP32 is a dumpster fire IMO.
I prefer to get things done quickly over cheap.
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/
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..
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.
For what it’s worth, the original ESP32 is actually 5V tolerant, semi-officially acknowledged by Espressif. Good enough for hobby projects, anyway
I'm surprised cheap level shifters with the same pin pitch as various dev boards aren't common.
There's DIP-packaged level shifters that are 0.1"
Do you know where you can get one?
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.
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.
Power draw, and 5V.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I thought ESP32 does exactly the same as Nordic Softdevice model? It's just that people hardly notice, and it's perfectly fine.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
- Silicon Labs
- Texas Instruments (soon.)
Different tools for different needs.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
… which would kill your business, unless you are able to source an alternative part. So not entirely harmless.
They could claim copyright infringement if you distribute their SDK in your firmware without their permission.
https://www.st.com/resource/en/evaluation_board_terms_of_use...
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)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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!?
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
If you ever wondered, how Arduino came about: The Untold History of Arduino (https://arduinohistory.github.io/).
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.
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.
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
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).
At least it's not Broadcom
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.
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.
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)
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?"
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".
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.
> "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.
> 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.
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.
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...
Is power a single way?
> low latency connectivity + goliath data centres will always beat on-device inference/training.
Except that it's not always an option...
SOOOO buy Qualcomm. The second they start talking about AI-IOT stock is gonna sky rocket.
We live in a broken world.
Low latency, low power, portable
pick two.
well actually you can't really, low latency is pretty hard to do full stop
tf are you on. just look at meta display glasses. it s all on board compute
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!
Realtime and offline would like a word.
privacy is a thing people care about.
> 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.
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.
beyond delusional. imagine unironically saying this in the big '25.
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.
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.
You also now who misses the point? Qualcomm. Why? Well just read the headline qualcomm itself provides.
well, they'll be missed for sure.
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...
you can't say no on this website, downvoted until you change it to `yes, they won't`
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Yeah, and nothing was going to change when IBM acquired Red Hat.
>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?
Yes! Including a null-terminator '\0'
:P thought someone is going to ask but great that people on HN figured it out already
Just like when Broadcom bought VMware. Great stuff /s.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wonder if another big gun will swallow raspberry pi someday. the embedded field is getting more exciting these days.
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.
This is like Arduino checking into a hospice.
Can someone explain why Arsuino is attractive to Qualcomm? I mean is it a gateway drug to Qualcomm chips?
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.
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.
I've not used an arduino for a number of years, I assume this means they are not going to use atmel/microchip anymore?
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.
They has added other vendors for years now. The Uno R4 uses Renesas MCU and espressif module.
Sad day for education. I would be surprised to find any user who is happy about this.
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.
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.
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
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".
This does not bring joy
Okay, IIRC the sum wasn't disclosed. I wonder what was the ask.
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.
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.)
Curious if anyone’s seen actual numbers on the acquisition
End of an era...
Thank goodness I switched to nrf + embassy before this happened
this is bad, qualcomm hides their documentation and its not accessible unless you pay and enter into a contract
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.
Let's fork Arduino, Qualcomm is a patent troll.
What's Arduino's IP look like?
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...
Thanks! That doesn't seem like a tempting target for patent trolling (which wasn't your assertion).
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?
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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
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/
Well that seems like a worst case scenario. Qualcomm not known for open source legacy.
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?
RIP Arduino
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.
Came here to post this word. Sums it all up.
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.
I hope they don't enshittify Arduino. Please keep it open hardware and open source.