It started with Arduino for me, which led me to Adafruit, who has gone on to make their own Open Source Hardware and the Circuit Python platform. The scene now is multi-vendor and very healthy, but I'll admit I stopped using Arduino when it was very hard to get a genuine one... which I think is a solved problem by buying direct now.
Adafruit has done to Arduino what Arduino did to Wiring. Adafruit is pushing it's own custom python called 'Circuit Python' for it's new hardware so there is no Arduino code examples to go with thier products anymore which is a big disaster.
We should stick to standard Arduino code that should run on all compatible Arduino devices.
> We should stick to standard Arduino code that should run on all compatible Arduino devices.
Why should the entire hobbyist hardware space be an Arduino monoculture?
IMO the Arduino proto-language and framework are quite mediocre and it's time to move on. For beginners, embedded hardware has gotten much more powerful and more familiar languages can be employed. For more advanced users and larger projects, using a real RTOS with a real task system unlocks development velocity in a huge way.
I don't really love CircuitPython, but I don't see how this is comparable to the Wiring/Arduino situation, nor do I really see it as a step backwards.
The thing that bothers me about CircuitPython is that it’s unnecessarily fragmenting the ecosystem just for the gain of its creators. MicroPython was already around when it came about and it offers very little beyond what MicroPython already offers.
Arduino created the ecosystem, and while I agree it’s definitely a problematic way to approach things, I don’t really see a replacement for it in the C/C++ space currently. Using something like PlatformIO, which is almost objectively better from a developer perspective, is IMO not what I would consider a replacement. My hope is that eventually embedded Rust will have something beginner friendly like what Arduino offers but I don’t even see the nascent beginnings of something like that currently.
I lost respect for Adafruit after their data leak and they announced they would not be emailing their customers to notify them about the data leak. Although they later changed their mind after people criticised their decision.
Remember that Arduino is OSHW so clones & alternate implementations are everywhere at far lower cost. You're better off starting with a Black Pill or ESP32 based unit these days anyway. The overall ecosystem and common framework is far more valuable than any individual piece of hardware.
I have an Uno, but I've moved away from Arduino because an Uno costs as much as a Raspberry Pi. Granted, they serve different purposes, but now there's the Pi Pico for $5.
Nothing against the Arduino folks; they really opened up a great avenue for exploration. But it doesn't seem cost-competitive at the moment.
Have a look to Arduino "inspired" other boards, then. The ESP8266 comes to mind which brings onboard WIFI for around $5 or less and is probably a great start into anything IOT-like.
Thanks. I do have an ESP32 board with an integrated OLED display in the Tupperware bin I've stuffed with microcontroller-related gadgets that I'm going to get to "any day now."
Look at MisterFPGA they are doing a lot of cool stuff to make fpga a bit more mainstream with emulating game consoles, https://www.retrorgb.com/mister.html
I keep seeing this sentiment on HN-are fpgas something hobbyists actually get much value from? Do hobbyists learn Boolean algebra and know how to do things like design state machines from standard logic and rom? Programming in HDL is fundamentally different from C++ or Python.. I just don't get the allure of fpgas from amateurs who don't need to use them for work.
Hobbyist is not a skill level designation. It means someone is doing a particular activity for fun, typically not associated with a business.
There are hobbyist who wire up an LED, make it blink and get immense satisfaction out of that. There are also hobbyist who putter around with a scanning electron microscope in their shed, and everything in between.
There are hobbyist who learn the things you mention and more.
> Programming in HDL is fundamentally different from C++ or Python..
Ok? And cheese making is fundamentally different from radio astronomy. Yet there are hobbyist pursuing both.
> I just don't get the allure of fpgas from amateurs who don't need to use them for work.
Let me give you an example. One summer when i was younger I have found a Xilinx Spartan dev board in a dusty bin in our hackspace. Nobody around me did know anything about it, it was probably a donation originally. I spent about two weeks playing with that thing. The most advanced stuff I ever got working was some example code found on the internet which synthetised a pong game through a vga connector. It was generating the video signal through just turning its outputs on and off in the right patterns. That was total magic to me. I spent the time understanding every line of the code and modifying it to do different things. I was goofing off, learning about tech, and having a great time.
I’m not saying this is the only way to enjoy an FPGA, but it certainly illustrates that hobbyist can get value out of one.
I dunno, Vivaldi is quite good. Or did you mean open source? In which case I 100% agree. Still full of tools that are only usable by masochists and the people that wrote them.
The Vidor is unusable garbage. Arduino's tools provide no support whatsoever for FPGA development on the board -- they haven't even clearly documented the process for uploading a new bitstream to the FPGA. For all intents and purposes, the FPGA is an expensive toy you can use to run their demo bitstream, and that's it.
Arduino's approach has historically been to sell breakout boards for commodity microcontrollers. They do not have any history of success in any of the fields they're proposing to enter, and particularly not in IoT services or AI.
Arduino has made approaches to industry before, e.g. with the Portenta series of boards. They have generally been unsuccessful, in large part because their approach to industry has generally been "look, we're using industrial temperature range ICs" -- hardly a compelling offering.
Me neither. In industry, Arduino is almost an expletive- mostly associated with projects where someone is trying to use the hardware in a way that's not actually fulfilling an underspecified set of requirements, or where someone has stepped on one of many foot-guns in it's software ecosystem.
An example for the first group: trying to save a couple hundred USD/EUR and using it where a PLC would be universally better choice (IO protection, EMC assurances, maintenance).
Examples of the second group: delay functions disabling interrupts leading to missed serial data, (L)GPL'd library code, lack of debugging support (until recently), any sleep mode support.
Don't get me wrong- there is a lot of good stuff in there- some of the libraries and projects built around it are really useful but effective use of them requires deeper knowledge than getting an intern "just doing it on an Arduino".
I was offered a controls gig to design a very complicated machine that was to be used by consumers in shopping malls. Many moving parts. Many pinch zones, safety concerns etc. All in all probably 100 drives and maybe double as many sensors. They were hell bent on using an Arduino to "save money". I ran as fast as I could.
I've heard a story where somebody tried to automate some woodworking equipment with Arduino, bare optical encoders and microswitches instead of more rugged sensors.
Predictably, the machine was constantly broken (a loose solder joint here, a spurious reset when some other machine was turned on there). Luckily,it did not lead to serious accidents, but eventually all of that was scrapped after wasting a few months and a controls company replaced it with appropriate solution.
Yeah this is what I was trying to explain. PLCs don't exist just to be expensive. They wanted to make hundreds of these and I was to develop a prototype. They also wanted it to be self-servicable. I told them they'd need to employ a dozen guys just to calibrate and maintain them.
> using it where a PLC would be universally better choice (IO protection, EMC assurances, maintenance)
Oh, that touches on another interesting and important point.
Most development hardware, including Arduino boards, gets to skip a lot of standard EMI/EMC compliance testing because they're considered subassemblies and/or test equipment. Integrating them into a finished product means the integrator is going to be responsible for doing the testing and making any changes required for compliance -- at which point, they're probably better off building something equivalent themselves.
Yeah, and once you solve the issue of EMI/EMC compliance for generic applications (that is, expanding your market appeal to be large enough to sustain a hockeystick growth VCs expect)- you basically end up with a PLC, which means you now get the opportunity to compete with Siemens, ABB, Allen Bradley and the likes.
It's not obvious to work out what exactly the plan is, as the press release has a fairly thick coat of corporate speak on it.
However I assume they'll want to take a chunk out of the Raspberry Pi market -- whose hardware always was shit, but whose execution has lately been terrible as well, what with the years-long scarcity of boards.
The Pi's secret to its success is arguably its community support, and I think only Arduino can match that.
Wow!!! I had no idea about this story. Terribly toxic environment created by Benzi. Could you imagine working all that time on a successful thesis and your main advisor has been plotting against you the whole time?? And how he wasn’t even excited for the thesis presentation. How did that guy even get into teaching?
For some reason I was under the impression they were a non-profit or some corporate supported education related thing.
Outside of selling a few boards that can be hard to get a hold of how do they make all this money back? Just about as soon as I started playing with one Arduino I found other third party hardware better suited my needs. I don't really see any reason to use Arduino's hardware over anyone else's compatible hardware ....
> Arduino's approach has historically been to sell breakout boards for commodity microcontrollers.
Maybe that was compelling around 2010, but it certainly isn't now. The AVR models aren't even that great, many of the alternatives are much, much more performant and feature-packed (ESP8266/32), as well as smaller and available in many form factors.
The only compelling (and really innovative) thing Arduino did was building an abstraction for many different kinds of micro controller boards and building an easy to use IDE for them. This was and is, of course, a huge deal! But here too the landscape isn't what it used to be. Larger projects nowadays use PlatformIO and I could see that increasing, though, to be fair, that is still much more complex to get started with. Arduino is still the simplest way to program a micro controller ... but in my mind Arduino hardware is a legacy offering barely anyone uses.
The focus of this "expansion" is thus correct. I'm not that they'll be able to create much more interesting software. The Arduino IDE wasn't even great, just a good enough thing at the right time paired with a great ecosystem. Maybe that's their offering here ... but how relevant is that in "the enterprise"?
Which one? Because there was a huge drama with two incorported Arduinos, one by a guy who has nothing to do with a project other than running a PCB house making boards for them and then silently filing trademarks all over Europe and suing original project.
We do, Gen X was a thing in the '80s/90s, to the point that the Kevin Smith movie "mallrats" got titled "generazione x" in the Italian dubbing.
Youngsters online also seem very keen on referring to older people as boomers, because the online world is smaller and american cultural influence is stronger then it used to be.
Edit: yes, Italian youngsters also forget that gen x exists, much like the US kids do.
Is this the original team or the venture by the guy who bought the rights to the name? Wasn't there some controversy about the original developers and team being pushed out? Maybe someone else remembers the whole story?
Maybe they can put that towards moderating their forum. Almost every post is a reply from users berating the OP and being generally unhelpful. Ive seen it turn off plenty of people from ever wanting to touch it.
There are various community moderators on the Reddit and other places that are also actively hostile looking for their empowerment high. I've been censored and banned for pointing it out when it happens even.
As much as arduino helped me in understanding electronics and building products, the forum has more or less been very discouraging. Stackoverflow and Instructables were far more helpful to learn and implement. Very often you see arrogance in people commenting against an honest query. For a post like "How do I use x to do y....?" , many would start with "Why do you need to do x?" Or even worse "Why do you need to do y?"
It would easily put off enthusiasts. Many I know just left Arduino and started using NodeMCU platform.
> or a post like "How do I use x to do y....?" , many would start with "Why do you need to do x?" Or even worse "Why do you need to do y?"
Quite often this falls into the trap of the "XY Problem", where the initial premise starts off wrong. "How do I use this hammer to change the flat tyre on my car?" is best answered with "You should use a wheelbrace. Why do you want to use a hammer?" because it's important to find out how the person asking the question got to that place to begin with.
This exactly is the problem I was trying to point out. This comment does the same thing.
When I articulated my observation with a decent level of clarity, it means I know to an extent what I was talking about. I don't know how to put this exactly, but there is some intuition which tells us from the comment/question how much the OP knows. The X and Y comparison is to say that "I want to do precisely what I asked for and I was not able to figure out a way." While there are beginner questions on the forum, there is high sense of entitlement with "high karma" members. Its frustrating after a while to be treated like infants when seriously searching for a solution.
It might seem frustrating for new users to not get straight answers but there’s countless questions along the lines of “I need more power output from an arduino, how do I connect 3 pins together?” Then after 2 days of back and forth, the details emerge and the question should have been “I’m trying to control a motor to automate a light switch, but it only worked twice before the arduino broke. Is there a better way to connect the motor, or a better way altogether?”
The answers could be more polite but what’s really missing is something that makes sure new users understand what an XY problem is, understand the limitations of arduino, and understand where to find good tutorials.
Such a central pillar in such a vast ecosystem of mutually compatible hardware and software, their IDE having been used as everything from a hardware design platform with standardized peripherals (Papilio) to being used for supporting the Teensy boards, it’s clear that the Arduino is a ubiquitous icon of our era, the platform that brought embedded computing to the masses.
Hooray for Arduino, they deserve to get bigger and more widely accepted.
Barring certain libraries that underperform in order to teach their operating principles in a simpler fashion, the general framework has no overhead or runtime to waste computing power, as the original Arduino is a rather small 8bit AVR.
You can program the fastest RT Arm processors with it as well…
After reading further about the attribution issues vis-à-vis arduino, wiring, processing, board design vs fabrication, I’m certainly disappointed in human behavior, nevertheless the collective value of these tools in onboarding people to the wonderful world of microcontrollers and direct programming is not to be dismissed.
There’s absolutely no technical cost to using arduino tools to program even at advanced levels, if you don’t run into issues doing so for other reasons like compiler flags etc.
The only runtime costs can be avoided with care in library choice, as the wiring language constructs have no runtime costs, but occur at compile time
Arduino positively transformed me. I thought code was cool, but then getting an Arduino and being able to blink an LED from software, control a motor, move dials and buttons... it's amazingly empowering.
I bet in a little bit they'll do yet another press release regarding how "excited" they are to sell themselves to Microsoft or Oracle or something similar to "transform" "enhance" "integrate" and "optimize" "enterprise cloud services" with "new AI capabilities" or similar.
I am happy to see them succeeding and expanding into new areas. They have done so much for the tech scene.
At least a few things they did were in use at nearly every job I've ever had, and they did well every time, aside from a few times when a Pi would have been more appropriate.
If you want to also support the ecosystem, buying both Adafruit and Arduino helps. Buying knockoffs is great if you're on a budget or need more than one, plus there are some really nice boards by "knockoff" vendors.
I feel terrible for Hernando Barragán who invented Wiring, only for it essentially to be stolen by his advisor Massimo Banzi and renamed Arduino, leaving out the inventor. Given that Banzi and the Arduino team never referred any credit to Wiring, I can only assume it was due to ego reasons since they credited Banzi's previous project as the source of Arduino.
Then the Arduino team had their own further battle about rights. The Arduino folks don't seem to be the most honest of folks. I have always avoided Arduino due to this history.
I have zero qualms about buying cheap Arduino clone boards because of this.
Although lately I've found myself requiring basic IP/wi-fi for almost every usecase, so I've turned to ESP8266/ESP32 boards instead of AVR boards.
Here's hoping for a low-cost wi-fi-enabled Raspberry Pi Pico. I wonder what the wi-fi IP licensing cost is like for companies that actually need to pay attention to things like that.
There are RP2040 based boards with wifi are starting to come out. While they aren't horrendously expensive, they are double or triple the cost of a regular base raspberry pi pico model.
Here is one I have seen, but I haven't used or played with it.
"The WiFi section on this board is based on the Espressif ESP8285 chip which basically is an ESP8266 with 1MByte FLASH memory integrated onto the chip".
I suppose I'm wishing for an Espressif-like approach. A (low-power?) RPxxxx core fully assigned to running a Wi-Fi software stack, in the same RPxxxx chip, along with having the analogue RF aspects handled by the same chip/package.
I've found ESP8266 boards really suit my needs more than a "full" Arduino boards, just a few wires and some built in wi-fi is all I want for the most part so far with how I've been using / playing them.
I completely agree, with the exception of wanting easy support for powering from a lipo battery and also charging that battery without disconnecting it. This has led me to use the Adafruit Feather RP2040 lately because it has a builtin lipo charger and will automatically switch between USB and battery power as needed, but of course it doesn't work for projects that need WiFi. I'm hoping that we'll get a board that easily combines the two soon.
Well yeah I mean "Arduino" is just a couple #defines to make a sort of custom C++ version. After a couple months playing with it, most people shouldn't need anything Arduino anymore.
While it's regrettable if Massimo broke his trust, this is open source software/hardware, and its ethos is about sharing and forking the designs, so you can't really "steal" it. Also for context, Wiring was a further development of the open source Processing language, and Hernando is no more a "thief" for doing that.
Also, the first inventor is only one part of any product, and it's hard to argue that Massimo did wrong to the community by popularizing Arduino, and people still know what Wiring is.
The point is that there was no reason not to just contribute to Wiring and take it from there. The nefarious thing is that they took the project and rewrote its history to make it seem as if it was their own work, meanwhile still taking new Wiring development and incorporating it into Arduino, all without credit. So it was about control and ego. I would assume that even some open source licenses were broken.
Slightly off topic but in Banzi's article (subheading Counterfeits) he mentions the now well known problem of Amazon cohousing different manufacturers products and then effectively sending a random one to the client. I think this is interesting as it still seems to be a problem nearly a decade later.
I would say proper attribution and credit is even more important in open source development than elsewhere.
My day job takes credit for my work, but compensates me in money. Pretty much the only "pay" for the vast majority of open source work is credit.
> it's hard to argue that Massimo did wrong to the community by popularizing Arduino
So who made that argument? I haven't seen anyone claim his marketing efforts were unethical.
But let's say you wrote a significant part of a book. I took your work, completed it, and published it as solely my work. It becomes wildly successful. Have I done anything wrong?
This kind of intellectual theft is extremely common in academia, particularly between <an immigrant from a different country> vs. <someone who is a national wherever this happens>.
I think that it's fair to consider Arduino's complicated history (the legal battles, the Wiring history, etc.) while also acknowledging how revolutionary it's been to hobbyist electronics.
I'm not sure what would be improved by trying to avoid Arduino at this point. Especially considering that it has spawned a very large and versatile ecosystem: all of the open source libraries that have been created for it (some random amazing ones: [0], [1]), the compatible shields and accessories [2], tutorials & courses, etc.
It remains an extremely important and useful platform, and for good reason.
And we can still piggyback a zillion projects off the IDE, the libraries and HAL, and other artifacts of this complicated and sometimes disgraceful software project, it’s not like using Nazi experiment data to engage in Arduino ecosystem pilferage, with proper credit given to {project name}
Arduino is to commercial embedded development as what Javascript is to Java.
I had the first Arduino model with a COM port bought to me by my late mother to spike my interest into computer stuff when I was in high school.
I grew a bit over confident with what I can do, when on my first job I went on to fix an MP3 player firmware so it don't crash from Russian in ID3 tags.
I told the boss the fix is trivial, then it took me 3 month to find out that whatever you knew of garden variety C++ is not working in the world of hardcore C, and that hardware needs control down to clock cycles, registers, and assembly instructions. It was a sink, or swim experience.
Which is exactly what concerns me as people start throwing high level languages with loads of questionable libraries into critical microcontroller circuits.
I’ve recently dealt with power-on reset, oscillator start up, and UART timing issues which required digging into 600 page data sheets to resolve the issues. No way in hell I’d ever deploy a product with circuit Python, Wiring, Arduino, etc.
I have observed hobbyists innovating in really cool ways in all sorts of corners - musicians, athletes, retro computer collectors, etc
Very glad to see they're being well funded and can continue building
PS - I elect this as the greatest current Arduino contribution to humanity - The Furby Organ - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYLBjScgb7o