
The Untold History of Arduino (2016) - cristoperb
https://arduinohistory.github.io/
======
gvand
One year later:

"Arduino Welcomes Hernando Barragán as Arduino Chief Design Architect"
[https://www.globenewswire.com/news-
release/2017/05/19/988294...](https://www.globenewswire.com/news-
release/2017/05/19/988294/0/en/Arduino-Welcomes-Hernando-Barrag%C3%A1n-as-
Arduino-Chief-Design-Architect.html)

------
ttsda
Prior discussion here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11212021](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11212021)

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homoiconic
I built some things with Wiring back in the day (2005 through 2006-ish) and
was very impressed with it. I had considered Arduino for the project, but I
believe I decided against it because it didn't support USB at the time.

There seemed to be fundamentally different philosophies to the two projects.
Arduino at the time was catering to the maker crowd--selecting only through-
hole components so people could assemble their own boards without having to
deal with SMD soldering. I think they didn't even sell pre-assembled boards
back then. Wiring was definitely more polished, trading low cost and ease of
assembly for additional features like USB.

Of course now you can buy fully assembled Arduino boards and a bunch of them
even use SMD components, which may be evidence validating the Wiring
philosophy...

------
azdle
(2016)

See
[https://github.com/ArduinoHistory/arduinohistory.github.io](https://github.com/ArduinoHistory/arduinohistory.github.io)

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beardyw
I owe Arduino a lot though I never bought one (real or clone). I retired from
commercial development in Java, saw these discussed, but looking at them I
thought - that's just an Atmel chip on a board. Not quite true, but with a £10
programmer I got a range of DIP Atmel chips and found it was easy to program
them with avr-gcc. It is a bit more complex, but not much, and very satisfying
to know what everything is doing.

Ironically I do use the Arduino IDE with the esp8266 but I consider I will
never fully know what those things are doing.

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IshKebab
Arm have finally started making a decent offline mBed IDE so hopefully in a
year or two there will be no reason to use Arduino at all. The mBed API is
_much_ better and the range and price of boards is generally better too.

E.g. ST Nucleo boards are around £10. Or the nRF52 device board is £30 - that
gets you a proper BLE/Thread/etc board with a fully documented radio
peripheral. You can write your own radio protocol if you want.

~~~
zzzcpan
I don't get your point. Atmega328p arduino boards start at $2 or so ($4 for
uno) and are currently at "apt-get install arduino" level of convenience that
arm isn't getting anytime soon. Plus the whole point of microcontrollers is in
working against specific chip, not universal API.

~~~
danieldk
You can get STM32 boards for the same price (Blue Pill/Black Pill). ARM _does_
have 'apt-get install arduino'-level of convenience. You can actually use the
Arduino IDE through stm32duino, which is literally a matter of adding an
additional board manager URL to the IDE.

Moreover, you program STM32 boards (besides mBed, etc.) with Rust, which is
also easily set up. The Rust embedded ecosystem is much smaller, but still
nice for hobbyists. Moreover Rust with ARM cross-compilation is easy to set
up.

Another nice feature is most ARM CPUs is that setting up and using gdb is
trivial (e.g. with STM32s it's usually a matter of starting OpenOCD and then
connecting to that with gdb).

------
WrtCdEvrydy
And this is why I buy Chinese made clones of Arduino.

~~~
00deadbeef
I don't even bother with Arduino clones. You can get much better for less
money.

E.g. in the UK on Amazon an Arduino Uno R3 is £39.99 and a clone with
excellent reviews is £6.99.

For £5 I can get an ESP8266 on a NodeMCU board - these have more GPIO, much
faster CPU, WiFi, drop nicely in to a breadboard, etc. They work with the
Arduino IDE with only a tiny bit of configuration.

For not much more there's an ESP-32 which adds, among other things, a faster
dual-core CPU and Bluetooth.

~~~
swiley
Aren't you forced into using the RTOS provided with the devkit though?

I don't like having blobs on my laptop much less in MCU firmware.

~~~
opencl
You're not forced to use it and it's not a blob[1].

[1] [https://github.com/nodemcu/nodemcu-
firmware](https://github.com/nodemcu/nodemcu-firmware)

~~~
swiley
Just looking at that briefly it looks like there are still closed source
components. (although they might not be part of the RTOS so I might have been
wrong about that)

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ncmncm
I couldn't tell from the article who was Arduino SRL and who was Arduino LLC.

It's great that Hernando is now Chief Design Architect, but how does that fit
with the rest of the story? Did his opponent have to take him on as part of a
settlement? Is this a win for the little guy?

