Why the Arduino Won and Why It's Here to Stay
arduino.cc
arduino.cc
Link: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/02/why-the-arduino-won...
BDMicro (Brian Dean): http://www.bdmicro.com/mavric-iib/ (hmmm, interesting layout in 2004 vs the Arduino in 2005) The avrdude developers: http://www.nongnu.org/avrdude/user-manual/avrdude_2.html (how "sketches" get to and fro) AVR Libc: http://www.nongnu.org/avr-libc/ Atmel MC's: http://www.atmel.com/products/AVR/ avrfreaks.net: The unofficial support forum for avr's that has had its ups and downs over the years. Tons of projects.
Not really sure what this guy means by winning.
It might have been better to write about how many people are "discovering" the Arduino platform versus phrasing it in terms of victory.
by winning, 'this guy' means that it has become a standard development platform and test bed EVEN FOR people who do not in general use AVRs. not having a standard test bed for devices is such a massive annoying failure in electronics, its difficult to explain how much not having it sucks. its like you know how every programming language has stdin/stdout with print(f)? ok, then Arduino is the printf.
The Arduino's standard for i/o headers, its development library for avr libc and avr-gcc, and its usb->serial interface for pushing hex files ("sketches") into the chip are where it shines.
It's not a "printf" but rather an S100 bus if you will.
This is a very well phrased description of a problem I've seen for a long time. I'm not an Arduino user: I prefer to use "raw" AVR devices in my own circuits. But something like the Arduino, like the BASIC Stamp before it, provides a sort of "language" to explain how to do things that was missing before.
In the days of PC's with printer ports, someone asking how to blink an LED under computer control could be given a simple answer that would have them up and running quickly. Now we need to find out if it has a printer port, or maybe a serial port to use one of the control lines, or otherwise suggest purchasing a USB device to use instead...
But with something like the Arduino available, the answer can be as simple as "buy this device (Arduino) from this vendor and run this code and your LED will blink." From the very beginning, the people involved are using a common vocabulary: the same development platform. And that has benefits that cannot be ignored.
I disagree. The answer is not in unit sales, spec sheets, or software architecture.
The Arduino "won" because of the helpful community that was developed up around it[1]. You could go to the forum and find everything from people reverse engineering some obscure interface to others that were wondering why about half their LEDs won't light up and getting a quick, helpful response that explains why one leg is longer than the other..
I think that made it possible for a less technical crowd to succeed with Arduinos and they paved the way for there to be a critical mass of internet articles to lure the rest.
[1] I don't think the community was an accident. It came from the backgrounds and goals of the Arduino creators. I think maybe "provide the tools to teach people to implement their XXX" would sum that up.
The Arduino is a great gadget to get people interested in electronics and micros, but it's not a revolution either.
Arduino hasn't really set the bar that high, it's the next/current evolution of something that has been going on ever since the commercialization of the first NP junction.
Like the Stamps before it, the Arduino is a neat prototyping device, but not something you can build a 'product' around with any great scale beyond a hobbyist market. The biggest difference in that in its heyday the Stamp didn't have the full power of the Internet to make people aware of them. You mostly had usenet or publications like Nuts N Volts to expose people to the possibilities of simple micros. The Arduino has gotten great exposure because of the Internet, but in the grand scheme of things hasn't really done all THAT much. The article on Make references 100000-150000 Arduinos sold. Maxim has given away more PICs than that as free samples.
Sure, the Arduino is neat and cool, but the fawning over it you see on sites like Make heavily skews reality. 30 years ago if we had the Internet this blog post would have been "Why the 555 won and why it's here to stay"
2. you could say the same thing about computers, crystal radios and solar panels, this is a really weak argument. we are talking about a specific product area and a group, Arduino is a great improvement, hell even having cross-platform capability (one of many details) much less a simple IDE was a pipe-dream.
3. "in the grand scheme of things", nothing except photosynthesis has been very effective. if you have a scheme in mind, you should specify it. yes Microchip gives away a lot of PICs, but they give away PICs to EEs and companies. the 150K people here are -not- all EEs, they are mostly -other- kinds of people. they are not people making products. people who make products never ever use dev boards in the final design, but at least with Arduino its bare AVR so you can reuse the code on raw chips whereas with BS you are screwed.
4. the 555 did win and its here to stay; it is a mainstay of electrical engineering and is used in products all the time. the LM101, ironically, did not.
The talked with the initial developers about the how the project came to be and what their goals were.
But if they were, I can think of a couple of companies that, unlike Google, might actually stand to benefit from such a move.