

Arduino Dispute reaches out to Distributors - szczys
http://hackaday.com/2015/03/28/arduino-srl-to-distributors-were-the-real-arduino/

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jacquesm
Actions like these will kill the whole arduino brand. It's akin to parents
that divorce claiming a physical half of their kids each, it simply will not
work.

The rest of the world needs to see a unified front and to air your dirty
laundry like this in an attempt to pre-empt the lawsuit is only going to turn
off the recipients of this letter from the arduino brand and will cause them
to look for alternatives elsewhere (of which there are quite a few by now).

What a pity, the arduino brand had a ton of goodwill attached.

~~~
dkhenry
I think the arduino brand will die out and I am kinda happy. Those chips are
way underpowered for their price and with the rest of the embedded space
really moving towards tiny arm cores and general purpose computers I think the
market for the AVR's is going to dry up. Even now I can use a raspberry pi for
most of the hacks I was using arduino for.

~~~
szczys
I think it's two different tools. "Underpowered" chips have their use and
their place. Why deal with embedded Linux when I only need to twiddle some IO
on a simple protocol?

For me the issue isn't the brand dying out, its decentralized uniformity. If
the main organization spins into oblivion (when talented people give up
because of this turmoil) who will make sure the unified IDE keeps with the
times?

~~~
dkersten
There are ARM microcontrollers (Cortex-M{1-4}) - these don't run embedded
linux. See, for example, the Teensy 3.x boards.

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aceperry
It's a shame that Arduino SRL is behaving like this. The smart move would've
been to make up with the original founders instead of trying to shove them
aside.

"Open Source is the environment we want for millions"

In my view, their actions don't seem to embody the spirit of the open source
movement.

I've gotten into the arduino environment recently and really enjoy it, even
though I come from an embedded background. I hope this doesn't stop the
arduino environment and ecosystem.

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roel_v
So I have a small project I wanted to get into using Arduino, for which bigger
full PC solutions like RPi aren't suitable (small embedded controller for home
automation). The Arduino 'ecosystem' was confusing before this, now with this
infighting it has become a total clusterfuck.

So, what alternatives are there? I need a simple, very cheap and very lower
power chip that I can program easily using a regular PC and that can interface
with a few optocouplers. Would it make sense to go directly for an ATmega? Or
would I need additional circuitry to make that work? If I can program in C
that would be OK, I don't need the software to be 'easy to use' \- the
hardware I'm unfamiliar with though so that needs to be plug and play.

~~~
StringyBob
Have you seen mbed?
[http://developer.mbed.org/platforms/](http://developer.mbed.org/platforms/)
Not used it for a couple of years myself, but it seems to have expanded in
scope a lot recently.

Was very quick to get started hacking (can program over usb from the free
cloud-based IDE), and some of the boards are under $15.

~~~
bartekko
Another vote for mbed, their Cookbook can get the tedious stuff out of the way
for most projects:
[https://developer.mbed.org/cookbook/Homepage](https://developer.mbed.org/cookbook/Homepage)

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analog31
I will admit that I find the whole issue bewildering, but my gut reaction is
that I will in the long run care more about keeping the software flowing than
the hardware.

~~~
toyg
The problem is that these things take time (in Italy even more so), and until
they're resolved, any reasonable reseller or manufacturer will stay away from
Arduino, basically destroying the ecosystem. In that sense, it doesn't really
matter which side "keeps flowing" because nobody will care by then.

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Animats
Atmel ought to come out with an Arduino form factor board. They make the CPU,
and they make lots of eval and demo boards. Just cut out the middleman.

~~~
lukaslalinsky
At least for me, Arduino is not even about the hardware itself. It's about a
nice, simple and standard platform. You can get many different Arduino
compatible boards from different manufacturers, usable for different purposes.
You can easily make your own. Having an IDE and a simple library that works on
all those boards, without needing any complicated setup, is what makes Arduino
what it is.

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PhantomGremlin
Today's business lesson:

    
    
       But everyone was friends, right?
    

Wrong!

That's why you need lawyers and contracts and agreements about who owns what
intellectual property. That's why you try to remove any and all ambiguity you
can think of. Don't worry, that won't get remove all the "fun". There will be
plenty of new ambiguities to squabble over that you haven't thought of yet.

