The Untold History of Arduino

arduino is one of those things in life that you love and hate: you love it because (its success) has opened up the world of microcontrollers on a commercial/production level, it has made it easy for amateurs to use smart electronics and its open source nature has generated millions of different libraries, all things that 10 or 15 years ago were only possible for big industries with big budgets; at the same time you hate it because it is a horrible cardbox-walled garden that hides how things really work, it is full of bugs and the documentation is often embarrassing;

and of course you hate it because it is the result of ugly dealings "all'Italiana" (who wants to understand, understand)

Why is this not already exploding to the top of the blogosphere?

I have never heard of Wiring before. It is quite shocking to see how Wiring was already the core platform that Arduino has been built on.

The sketch API, the cross-platform toolchain, the bootloader-based serial upload, the core example programs - the entire premise of making embedded programming accessible. All of this was already provided by Wiring - why did the advising professor have to just grab all the credit and slap the name Arduino on top?

I only now learned about a whole Arduino vs. Arduino mess that seems to be getting some publicity. Now it looks like a crying over who are "the original Arduino folks" that deserve some manufacturing royalties. Hernando was never invited to the team and these idiots probably never gave a penny to Hernando or other essential contributors of the toolchain.

If this is another pro/anti Arduino thread, consider this example:

https://www.elegoo.com/products/elegoo-penguin-bot

I bought two of those on Amazon, one to send as a Christmas parcel thing to a couple of nephews, who may get interested at a deeper level than just "cute smartphone-remote controllable toy", and one for myself. I haven't put it together yet.

It's source code all the way down to the bare metal. It uses the Arduino environment. Sure the Arduino stuff abstracts a lot of technical minutiae, but look what you can do with it, and how you can credibly coach a not very technical person who lives 1000+ km away to install the necessary tool, recompile everything - down to the metal - from source, and upload the modified version.

OK, technically not source code all the way down, because both the MP3 playback chip and the bluetooth module probably have firmware blobs in them. But at least on the main CPU.

Arduino is one of those projects that I think makes for an excellent place to start, but then you should move on from there once you understand how Arduino works. Arduino introduced uncountable amounts of people to microcontroller programming, but then so many people are just left with the understanding that Arduino is all there is to embedded programming, never moving on from it.

I mean it's the easiest thing to recommend for someone to start learning something about microcontrollers, but at the same time I cringe every time someone suggests using an Arduino as a part of some actual device in production.

I did not know Processing and Arduino shared such close origins! they're both projects I adore and I believe Arduino revolutionized embedded programming, maker culture and hobby electronics. I also appreciate that the creator persisted on their choice of open source.