The Untold History of Arduino (2016) | Hacker News Reader

The Untold History of Arduino (2016)

arduinohistory.github.io

177 pointscristoperb33 comments

One year later:

"Arduino Welcomes Hernando Barragán as Arduino Chief Design Architect" https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2017/05/19/988294...

Prior discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11212021

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...

(2016)

See https://github.com/ArduinoHistory/arduinohistory.github.io

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.

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.

mBed is complicated. Arduino is simpler for artists/hobbists.

The libraries of each are written for different groups of people, and it shows.

For example, you can do a lot of stuff in the Arduino without using pointers. The mBed requires pointer usage.

I don't think it needs pointers any more than Arduino does. Can you give an example?

Best of all, C++ based OS.

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.

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).

nRF52 is amazing, but IDEs are a trap. Sure, use one for your first project, then immediately move on to a proper Makefile.

All professional development with microcontrollers is done with Makefiles, because of Reasons.

You know most IDEs support CMake and custom build tools?

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

What site do you use?

Nowadays you can find them on amazon too (or for example on seeed studio).

I use aliexpress.

Sparkfun. I've had bad luck with cloned ESP32s. Arduinos seem to be more forgiving for some reason.

Anything specific? I work there - would love to help out if you are still working on it

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.

I agree. I think the esp8266 is an awesome platform.

I started out with a board from Adafruit: https://www.adafruit.com/product/2471

I later switched to this one for cost savings: https://www.banggood.com/Geekcreit-Doit-NodeMcu-Lua-ESP8266-...

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.

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

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

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)

You can even use the arduino IDE thanks to the awesome work of this [0] project.

[0] - https://github.com/esp8266/Arduino

What dev board you use has no bearing on the firmware you can use for the ESP8266 and you can flash it for whatever firmware you want as long as there is enough flash memory, be it NodeMCU (Lua), Arduino, etc (they're all built on top of the native Espressif frameworks, regardless). All non-trivial firmware on the ESP8266 requires binary blobs from Espressif to run, however.

I think there's a decent re-implementation out there but as far as I'm aware most of the mainstream software for the Espressif chips still uses the blobs.

The esp* boards are 3v logic level, though.

Which makes them perfect for a 3.3v 18650 lion battery. If you're still on arduino and haven't tried an esp8266 chip you owe it to yourself to get one and reshape how you think about electronics.

GP was probably thinking of something like the STM32-based blue pill or black pill, which can be had for ~$2 including shipping the US.

Blue Pills are nice, except that most Chinese Blue Pills have an out-of-spec pull-up resistor on D+. So, if you want to use the USB port, you have to replace the resistor. Also, on many of them the micro-USB connectors are not soldered to they board properly and break easily. Many Blue Pills have cheap knock-off voltage regulators. Finally, recently Blue Pills have showed up with fake STM32 chips [1]. As far as I understand Black Pills fix these deficiencies, though I wouldn't be surprised if some manufacturers break Black Pills to cut some costs.

I have good experience with RobotDyn's Blue Pill boards. They have the correct pull-up resistor value and a micro-USB connector that is properly attached to the boards. They also sell them with the stm32duino bootloader pre-flashed, so that you directly use them with stm32duino (Arduino for STM32) without ST-Link:

https://robotdyn.com/catalog/development-boards/stm-boards-a...

[1] https://embeddedtronicsblog.wordpress.com/2018/12/29/fake-st...

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.

Unfortunately, many Chinese manufacturers 'improved' the NodeMCU design. The so-called NodeMCU v3 boards are two wide to leave a free row of holes on both sides. (NodeMCU v3 is a bit of a misnomer, since the NodeMCU project never made such a revision).

I like the WeMos D1 Mini boards more [1]. They have fewer pins, but are narrow enough to leave a row of holes on both sides of the breadboards. Moreover, they have a nice collections of shields that you can stack on the D1 Mini [2] and/or a base doubler so that you can put shields side by side. My favorite is the protoboard shield that costs very little, and can be used to make your own shields [3].

The Wemos boards are priced in the same ballpark as the NodeMCU ($3.50 from Wemos/Lolin). Be sure to buy them directly from Wemos though or a reliable distributor from the west, there are a lot of fake Wemos boards with bad voltage regulators, etc.

Still hoping that they'll make a shield ecosystem for their ESP32 boards some day.

[1] https://wiki.wemos.cc/products:d1:d1_mini

[2] https://wiki.wemos.cc/doku.php#d1_mini_shields

[3] https://wiki.wemos.cc/products:d1_mini_shields:protoboard_sh...

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?

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