
The End of Arduino 101: Intel Leaves Maker Market - szczys
http://hackaday.com/2017/07/25/the-end-of-arduino-101-intel-leaves-maker-market/
======
wiremine
I work on IoT projects professionally, and we see a large gap between makers-
grade hardware and production-quality systems. Every week we talk with
startups and enterprise customers who start off on something like an Arduino,
only to hit a wall because there is no good way to take it to production.

IMHO, the market is ripe for a hardware/software platform that bridges the
ease of Arduino with a path to production. A bunch of the silicon vendors are
in this space, but they offer weak solutions, and things like AWS IoT are
really bad on the hardware side.

~~~
slackingoff2017
IMO, the biggest problem is software startups unwillingness to hire other
types of engineers.

It's easy to bridge from Arduino to Atmel AVR IF you know how to do board
layout. Startups need to either grow their knowledge of electronics or hire
some electrical engineers.

The AVR documentation is excellent, you could easily design your own board if
you have anything beyond rudimentary electronics skills.

A lot of IoT startups are dependent on attachment "blades" for interfaces.
They get burned because a lot of their value proposition and profit is tied up
in some other guy's blade they don't know how to build.

~~~
user5994461
IMO hardware manufacturers should get their shit together.

It is unbelievable that they are not able to provide a decent hardware
development platform that can match Arduino in ease of use & documentation,
that use decent production-grade components, that's supported for sale for >
10 years and that has a clear path to switch from dev board to own IC.

~~~
sokoloff
I think that's what AVR is; there is a clear (and reasonably straightforward)
path from Arduino to production on a custom board. I'm a total hack/n00b and
my first AVR PCB worked.

I suspect that STM and TI are of similar difficulty, but I've only seriously
played with Atmel because of the Arduino dev board (and related ecosystem).

10 year guaranteed availability of the exact same part is not guaranteed, but
there's a clear enough lifecycle policy and paying any attention, you'll have
a chance to a make a final "lifetime" buy. (If have the luxury problem that
you're selling so much product that a lifetime buy is impractical, the NRE for
a redesign is probably manageable for your business.)

~~~
joshvm
The documentation for STM and TI is far, far below the standard of Atmel's,
both officially and unofficially. It's more difficult to find information,
there's a much smaller development community for beginners and the boards
_start_ in TQFP.

That last part alone stops most people from playing with ARM, because you're
almost forced to get boards made. At least with AVR/PIC you can prototype most
of the Atmegas on a breadboard. Obviously there's a limit to what you can do
with an AVR, but you can do a lot with 20MHz.

This may be an ARM thing though. I found it much more difficult to find
development documentation for Atmel's XMega platform, I didn't even look at
the SAM chips.

TI's website is a rabbit hole though. Sometimes the datasheet is enough, other
times you have to go to their weird Wiki which looks unfinished. Sometimes
it's available for free, other times you have to log in to get the
information. STM isn't much better.

It's a crying shame. ARM is more capable and often cheaper and lower power
than going the 8-bit route, but it's a pain in the arse to get started.

In terms of layout though, there isn't much in it. There are datasheets from
ST that tell you what the mandatory hookups/passives are. Everything else is
more or less identical to any other microcontroller, though you may need to
worry about speed.

~~~
mindentropy
You can always get MSP430 Launchpads at $9.99 which comes with a MSP430G2x in
a DIP. You can breadboard it if you want or you can run it on the board
itself. The individual MSP430G2x are also pretty cheap. So if you blow one up
you can always replace the chip.

The documentation for STM and TI is far, far below the standard of Atmel's,
both officially and unofficially. It's more difficult to find information,
there's a much smaller development community for beginners and the boards
start in TQFP.

> _That last part alone stops most people from playing with ARM, because you
> 're almost forced to get boards made. At least with AVR/PIC you can
> prototype most of the Atmegas on a breadboard. Obviously there's a limit to
> what you can do with an AVR, but you can do a lot with 20MHz._

Isn't it why we have development/prototyping boards right? You can always
develop/experiment your code in it and also develop your PCB in parallel. In
this way when there are problems with your custom board you can always be sure
of your code.

In my experience TI documentation is excellent but their software sometimes is
over engineered especially TI-RTOS.

Personally I have worked on the STM32F series and I found the documentation
good. Also if you want to read through the internals of the ARM architecture
you will have to refer to the ARM manuals from ARM website.

------
elijahparker
As someone who spent a bit of time trying to start a project based on the
Edison, the most frustrating thing was the amount of bugs and the lack of
documentation to be able to do anything about it myself, leaving me hopelessly
waiting for them to release fixes.

For example, after several months of terribly slow and buggy SPI and no fix
over multiple releases, I finally switched to ARM and am very glad I did.
Intel did finally fix the SPI issue about 9 months after it was first
reported.

With ARM, I had plenty of issues and challenges, but had the documentation and
resources I needed to be able to fix things, as well as a better support
community.

One of the key issues in the Intel support communities was a growing lack of
trust, now confirmed by Intel dropping out. It takes a big commitment to
really understand a system, and the nice thing about ARM is that the community
goes beyond a single company, so a company dropping out is not as significant
as in this case with Intel.

~~~
VHRanger
> lack of documentation

For what it's worth, I think it's an intel trademark to have bad or lacking
documentation. Even projects that should have stellar documentation like intel
TBB or MKL have fairly cryptic docs

~~~
lotyrin
They somehow think "Intel Inside" marketing strategy worked (not that Wintel
monopoly happened) and they think that they can just "Intel Inside" their way
into any market, and somehow make Wintel-like margins even in b2b markets that
are fully commoditized, not need to put out competitive parts or reduce
adoption costs with things like documentation.

------
StavrosK
Was Intel ever seriously in the maker market? As a maker, I feel that it was
kind of an afterthought for them. The Edison looked great on paper, but the
price was wrong, the tooling was inadequate, and the whole attempt felt like
an enterprise was just trying to cargo-cult its way into some marketshare.

~~~
thom_nic
It never made sense for Intel to enter this market to begin with.
Opportunities that move the needle for a company like Intel come in sizes of
100s of millions $ or more. The maker market is just not that big. "IoT"
however is - from industrial to home automation and everything in between
where sensors, controllers and networks get added to traditionally analog or
un-networked technology.

If you look at what Intel was selling, _that 's_ the market that Intel's
products were _actually_ geared toward. Look at the price, specs and form
factor of the Edison. Now imagine that Intel was really trying to push into
the IoT space, it is a good play considering they failed to break into mobile.
These products were really competing against companies like Phytec, Variscite,
Compulab, Toradex, Myir and Olimex who make ARM-based modules for embedded
networked products.

Why they pushed so hard to market to the maker community instead of commercial
IoT is sort of beyond me. Marketing to makers helps gain mindshare and
familiarity with your product (but x86 is already ubiquitous.) For comparison,
I wonder how much Atmel's bottom line has been affected by Arduino, or RPi for
Broadcom. Why Intel couldn't get their act together to make a well-supported
compelling product for commercial IoT applications is baffling. That's where
they really failed.

~~~
SAI_Peregrinus
I feel like Atmel and Broadcom will see more of an uptick in sales as makers
finish college and get jobs doing actual engineering. If you've been building
things using Atmel chips in your spare time they'll be familiar, you'll
probably reach for them first when designing something for a job, and one
product using a chip can lead to millions sold. Even if only a small handful
of engineers converted to using their stuff instead of PIC/STM/TI/etc due to
the Maker movement it's still potentially a huge payout. And considering that
they didn't even pay to create Arduino it's even better!

------
gonewest
Because no one looks at an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi and says, "I would pay
top dollar for a version of this thing that has x86 instructions."

~~~
soneil
It probably would have got further if they actually managed that properly.

eg, [https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=738575](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=738575)

Once you make your 'x86' incompatible enough that it won't actually run glibc
fully, you've negated the whole point of having x86 in the first place.

Intel's "strategy" with Quark etc has been to to sell you on the idea of a
ubiquitous platform, and then provide a niche platform that looks "mostly
similar" to the ubiquity you were promised.

~~~
askvictor
And also failing on the Arduino bit (Galileo's IO timing was too slow to use
with many commonplace sensors)

------
rasz
Everything you need to know about joke of an Intel IoT/maker offering is right
there in hackaday comments:

"Chinese companies, even with a language barrier, are __BETTER THAN INTEL __at
documentation "

------
dman
Intels addiction to high margin products might prove to be their undoing as
they get disrupted from below.

~~~
MrBuddyCasino
History repeats itself.

------
jaymzcampbell
I'm not very surprised with this. Quite a long time ago I came across their
Galileo boards but for the price point it just did not seem worth it - 2 - 4
times the price of a RasperryPi or Uno.

The appeal/benefit of having x86 was just never there for me or the agency I
was at. I could see how it might be useful if you are writing a lot of
assembly and low level at that but this seemed too much of a niche with the
way they were marketed. If it had networking and I could use it with Python I
was happy.

~~~
beagle3
x86 has two things going for it: Microsoft Windows x86/AMD64 compatibility,
and highest possible performance (not performance per watt; absolute
attainable performance). If you don't need either, it is expensive in cost,
power or both. And in the IoT/Maker world, one rarely needs computing power on
the device itself (and Galileo doesn't really provide a lot of computing
power), or wants to pay for a windows license per device (and deal with
activation, etc)

------
protomyth
Intel really seems to be stuck in their commodity PC / Server mentality. The
number of customizations that are done these days in mobile and I suspect as
things become cheaper IoT is pretty impressive. Intel hates customization
since that means other people make money (see the whole NVidia Ion chipset
saga). I just cannot see them making any headway with their current "must be
high volume commodity product" attitude.

------
0xbear
One could argue the never actually entered the maker market. I can't name one
prominent project that used any Intel maker oriented device. That's a
monumental marketing/product development failure: offer overpriced products
that don't really do much (if anything) new, then completely fail to get
people interested in them. No one cares about your instruction set here, so
you can't ride on that alone.

------
ChuckMcM
I think Intel realized that the 'maker market' is the craft/toy/hobby market
not the embedded systems market. Intel is also dealing with threats to its
core businesses so better to pull back from a marginal market that can't even
support what were the two leading chip companies in the space (Atmel &
Microchip) and focus on not losing market share to ARM in other areas.

~~~
stefanpie
Microchip recently acquired Atmel I believe

~~~
ChuckMcM
Exactly, the market could not support both. Generally that is a sign of a weak
market.

------
zitterbewegung
Intel attempting to make a play in the maker market with their x86 cores seem
attractive to many software developers. Partnering with arduino was a good
move for usability but the boards that they were competing with were players
like Beagle board and Raspberry Pi. Realistically they could try to be in
third place but to unseat ARM boards proved to be too difficult.

------
wildpeaks
It's quite unfortunate as they were a convenient middle ground between amateur
and "we'll sell to you only if you order 500+ units" boards, and the brand was
famous enough in less technical circles to help prototypes being taken
seriously (given the technical side is rarely what kills off a project).

------
kazinator
Not the first time. Intel got into mobile devices circa 2000-2001 or so. Then
suddenly they abandoned this area.

I worked on a secure (authenticated, encrypted) port forwarding proxy for
mobile devices at that time. Our company partnered with Intel to bring the
software to their new mobile devices. We were quite far along, with working
demos and all. Then one fine day, word came down from the higher levels in
Intel that they are pulling out of that.

The Intel team we collaborated with were split up and sent in different ways
within Intel and that was that.

It was bad for us because we put resources into it and were counting on some
cash which never materialized, plus the dot com bust was in full downward
swing.

------
acoye
I saw it coming when they discontinued Joule and Galileo.

I actually liked the Curie chip, plenty of goodies in one die. From bluetooth
LE to battery charger to accelerometer and gyro plus hardware acceleration for
k nearest neighbor (cool for gesture recognition). All that on small form
factor low energy die.

Plus, I _feel_ safer using a curie for IoT than just using a raspberry pi and
never updating a linux distro.

[https://hackaday.com/2017/06/19/intel-discontinues-joule-
gal...](https://hackaday.com/2017/06/19/intel-discontinues-joule-galileo-and-
edison-product-lines/)

------
petra
I wonder if all those declarations by Intel are just a game: Declare something
big/interesting with tons of media etc - stock picks up by x%, than a few
years afterwards, cancel it without a fanfare, stock goes down by much less
than x%. Intel wins. For those knowledgeable about the stock market, could it
be the case ?

Because that would be a good explain why did Intel enter this field, which is
is a very poor fit for it - unless they come with some breakthrough.

~~~
euyyn
The stock price is driven by what investors think the company is worth. For
what you describe to work, investors would need to calculate that the
investment Intel made here was profitable (via the sales made, for example),
thus adding value to the company. At which point you couldn't really see it as
a "game", but a good investment that was now ended.

~~~
petra
That's only one parts of what deteremines the stocks' worth. There's also
predictions of future growth.

~~~
euyyn
But it's hard to see cancelling a product as a cause of growth.

~~~
georgeecollins
Canceling an unsuccessful project can trigger a growth in profits.

~~~
euyyn
Don't lose sight of the forest for the trees: OP's scenario is a strategy in
which the project's start (with investment) causes a raise in valuation, and
its premature cancellation a smaller decrease in valuation.

------
rietta
Reminds me of a saying that one of my startup mentors has said many times. "A
great way to make a small fortune in home automation is to start with a large
fortune." Seems that Intel is taking their step back rather than doubling down
on the long game.

------
faragon
Intel could make tons of money by licensing their IP so 5-10 USD SoC could
flood the IoT market.

~~~
sigstoat
intel IP just doesn't even offer anything in that space. who cares about
x86-compatibility when you're doing new firmware? it's a horrorshow compared
to what ARM provides.

i don't need AVX extensions or whatever, i need sane and plentiful interrupts,
a reasonable memory model, simple IO, etc.

~~~
joezydeco
So, an Intel 8051.

~~~
sigstoat
lacks "sane and plentiful interrupts" and "reasonable memory model".

so, no.

~~~
joezydeco
Okay, but could the 8051 have made a decent foundation for a small, _cheap_
8/16 bit core? Intel could have literally given the parts away.

The obvious answer is that Intel couldn't monetize it like the x86, so there
we go.

------
qualitytime
I was lucky (or unlucky) enough to get hold of an intel gallileo at launch as
a gift from intel.

Unfortuantely the experience of using it was mediocre and am not the least bit
surprised about this news.

------
shusson
Sounds like to me this is because the market for developing novel IOT devices
is not as disruptive as previously thought.

------
Calamitous
Wow, that was fast.

------
skbohra123
Good riddance!

------
cushychicken
Well, that took a surprisingly long time to happen.

The maker community represents a trivial (at best) contribution to Intel's
bottom line. Intel's bread has always been buttered by delivering high-
performance, server-grade chips to the people willing to pay for the cutting
edge of performance. And every year, at that! That's pretty much the opposite
of the maker market - people who are building electronics for fun, and not
exactly flush with cash to spend on it. I'd wager that the net profit of any
one of Intel's enterprise customers vastly outstrips the entirety of what they
made on their _entire_ maker line of chips and boards.

Why would they bother diluting their production focus and stretching their
support engineers thin, to help court and address the concerns of a bunch of
spendthrift HW hackers and garage IoT operations?

~~~
thesandlord
IBM used to make all of it's money from Mainframes, but then over the years
commodity computers have gotten good enough to replace mainframes in most
businesses. There are still some customers who need them, but the lion's share
of the market is now dominated by commodity x86 servers.

Now x86 is in the process of being disrupted. Look at ARM for example.
Currently, most ARM chipsets are focused on mobile applications where low
power is necessary. They are not powerful enough to compete with x86 on the
server (yes I know there are ARM server parts, but it's still early days), but
soon they will be for most customers. And at that point, the power/cost
advantage will cause customers to switch over. This is already happening in
laptops, with both Apple and Microsoft moving to ARM for their desktop OS. So
I think it makes a lot of sense for Intel to try and address this concern, and
competing with ARM/MIPS head on for the IoT market is one way to do this.

IMO the mistake Intel made is trying to take their x86 process, which has a
value chain designed to serve high margin server markets, and shoehorn it into
the IoT market which is dominated by low margin, ultra cheap parts (think
ESP8266).

Take a look at this book for more info:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma)

~~~
cushychicken
> ...most ARM chipsets are focused on mobile applications where low power is
> necessary. They are not powerful enough to compete with x86 on the server...
> but soon they will be for most customers... I think it makes a lot of sense
> for Intel to try and address this concern, and competing with ARM/MIPS head
> on for the IoT market is one way to do this.

I agree with most of your reasoning - it's the strategic choice to go after
the embedded market that I think was unwise. The makerspace move was Intel
trying to compete in a whole different sector than their core competency
(embedded devices vs server chips). A more sensible strategic move, in my
opinion, would have been trying to optimize the power consumption of their
previous generation server grade chips. That allows them to sell through their
existing channels (which they're very good at), but segment based on those
customers that care about power consumption. It's all of the advantages of
ARM, but eliminates a lot of risk to the customer by being x86, and legacy
compatible. Plus, it gives the sales guys the option to say "Well, if you _don
't_ care about power, and _do_ want maximum performance, we can always discuss
our cutting edge line of server cores..."

~~~
thesandlord
> it's the strategic choice to go after the embedded market that I think was
> unwise

I think the way they entered the market was unwise, not the decision itself.
For example, Intel could have created an independent org within itself that
could use Intel's resources but wasn't tied to legacy processes.

