

Why the Arduino Won and Why It's Here to Stay - india
http://arduino.cc/blog/2011/02/11/why-the-arduino-won-and-why-it%E2%80%99s-here-to-stay/

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nyellin
The full article is over at Make magazine.

Link: [http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/02/why-the-arduino-
won...](http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/02/why-the-arduino-won-and-why-
its-here-to-stay.html)

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johnohara
The Arduino is a nice, accessible platform which stands tall on the shoulders
of some true pioneers.

BDMicro (Brian Dean): <http://www.bdmicro.com/mavric-iib/> (hmmm, interesting
layout in 2004 vs the Arduino in 2005) The avrdude developers:
<http://www.nongnu.org/avrdude/user-manual/avrdude_2.html> (how "sketches" get
to and fro) AVR Libc: <http://www.nongnu.org/avr-libc/> Atmel MC's:
<http://www.atmel.com/products/AVR/> avrfreaks.net: The unofficial support
forum for avr's that has had its ups and downs over the years. Tons of
projects.

Not really sure what this guy means by winning.

It might have been better to write about how many people are "discovering" the
Arduino platform versus phrasing it in terms of victory.

~~~
ladyada
i seriously doubt BDmicro was even seen by Arduino its Yet Another Dev Board.
and avrfreaks is (if you read the article) the anti-hero. you missed the most
important one which is Processing.

by winning, 'this guy' means that it has become a standard development
platform and test bed EVEN FOR people who do not in general use AVRs. not
having a standard test bed for devices is such a massive annoying failure in
electronics, its difficult to explain how much not having it sucks. its like
you know how every programming language has stdin/stdout with print(f)? ok,
then Arduino is the printf.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
_having a standard test bed for devices is such a massive annoying failure in
electronics_

This is a very well phrased description of a problem I've seen for a long
time. I'm not an Arduino user: I prefer to use "raw" AVR devices in my own
circuits. But something like the Arduino, like the BASIC Stamp before it,
provides a sort of "language" to explain how to do things that was missing
before.

In the days of PC's with printer ports, someone asking how to blink an LED
under computer control could be given a simple answer that would have them up
and running quickly. Now we need to find out _if_ it has a printer port, or
maybe a serial port to use one of the control lines, or otherwise suggest
purchasing a USB device to use instead...

But with something like the Arduino available, the answer can be as simple as
"buy _this_ device (Arduino) from _this_ vendor and run _this_ code and your
LED will blink." From the very beginning, the people involved are using a
common vocabulary: the same development platform. And that has benefits that
cannot be ignored.

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jws
Edit: _As ladyada points out, I missed the paragraphs where community is
discussed in the Make article. So let's say not that I disagree, but I
disagree with the emphasis._

I disagree. The answer is not in unit sales, spec sheets, or software
architecture.

The Arduino "won" because of the helpful community that was developed up
around it[1]. You could go to the forum and find everything from people
reverse engineering some obscure interface to others that were wondering why
about half their LEDs won't light up and getting a quick, helpful response
that explains why one leg is longer than the other..

I think that made it possible for a less technical crowd to succeed with
Arduinos and they paved the way for there to be a critical mass of internet
articles to lure the rest.

[1] I don't think the community was an accident. It came from the backgrounds
and goals of the Arduino creators. I think maybe "provide the tools to teach
people to implement their XXX" would sum that up.

~~~
ladyada
why are you disagreeing when the middle of the article is all about the great
community. its easy to say 'community!' the point of the article is that
community isnt something that just -happens- magically because you have a
forum, there are concrete (and sometimes technical!) things were taken care of
first in order to allow a critical mass community to form.

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brk
Before the Arduino the Basic Stamo was the popular easy micro controller.
After the Arduino will be something else. Before the Stamp was the Radio Shack
200-in-1 beginners electronics kits.

The Arduino is a great gadget to get people interested in electronics and
micros, but it's not a revolution either.

~~~
ladyada
things don't have to last 20 years to be revolutionary. arduino has set the
bar very high. basic stamp was good for a few years but it was closed, weak,
proprietary and expensive. people should be happy/impressed/annoyed that in
this case, open source is much better than the proprietary product and its
still very young.

~~~
brk
For their time, the BS1 and BS2 were considered pretty open, powerful, and
cheap compared to the other options out there (PICs with expensive programmers
and steep learning curves, etc.). Being able to drive a 44780 LCD, read a
rotary encoder, and do basic serial I/O in the same hobbyist project were well
out of the grasp of the common hobbyist in the late 90's, but the BS2 made all
those things possible for $50.

Arduino hasn't really set the bar that high, it's the next/current evolution
of something that has been going on ever since the commercialization of the
first NP junction.

Like the Stamps before it, the Arduino is a neat prototyping device, but not
something you can build a 'product' around with any great scale beyond a
hobbyist market. The biggest difference in that in its heyday the Stamp didn't
have the full power of the Internet to make people aware of them. You mostly
had usenet or publications like Nuts N Volts to expose people to the
possibilities of simple micros. The Arduino has gotten great exposure because
of the Internet, but in the grand scheme of things hasn't really done all THAT
much. The article on Make references 100000-150000 Arduinos sold. Maxim has
given away more PICs than that as free samples.

Sure, the Arduino is neat and cool, but the fawning over it you see on sites
like Make heavily skews reality. 30 years ago if we had the Internet this blog
post would have been "Why the 555 won and why it's here to stay"

~~~
ladyada
1\. the BS was also revolutionary, and obviously the arduino references it,
but the BS did not evolve in the last 10 years.

2\. you could say the same thing about computers, crystal radios and solar
panels, this is a really weak argument. we are talking about a specific
product area and a group, Arduino is a great improvement, hell even having
cross-platform capability (one of many details) much less a simple IDE was a
pipe-dream.

3\. "in the grand scheme of things", nothing except photosynthesis has been
very effective. if you have a scheme in mind, you should specify it. yes
Microchip gives away a lot of PICs, but they give away PICs to EEs and
companies. the 150K people here are -not- all EEs, they are mostly -other-
kinds of people. they are not people making products. people who make products
never ever use dev boards in the final design, but at least with Arduino its
bare AVR so you can reuse the code on raw chips whereas with BS you are
screwed.

4\. the 555 did win and its here to stay; it is a mainstay of electrical
engineering and is used in products all the time. the LM101, ironically, did
not.

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trafficlight
The Arduino Documentary is worth watching. <http://vimeo.com/18539129>

The talked with the initial developers about the how the project came to be
and what their goals were.

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Kilimanjaro
Google should buy Arduino.

~~~
ashconnor
What would they do with it?

~~~
Kilimanjaro
Talent. Diversify. Community. Future. Ideas. Good will. Open source.
Innovation.

~~~
mkr-hn
I'd be worried about Google if they based acquisitions on buzzword soup.

~~~
Kilimanjaro
I'd be worried if my CEO doesn't understand the internet of things.

~~~
mkr-hn
You responded to a question with a list of buzzwords. You responded to a
gentle ribbing of that list of buzzwords with another buzzword.

