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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people still program ESP32's with the arduino IDE.

And there are a good number of devices on the shelves of stores today which contain the arduino bootloader. It turns out the "point and click and get a working IoT product" tends to outcompete hiring a professional embedded coder to spend months to make something bespoke from scratch.

My dumb fridge for example runs on top of the arduino bootloader on an atmel chip - it has the distinctive 1 second startup delay and speaks stk500. And all that chip supports is four temperature sensors, two fans, two door switches and lights, a little 7 seg display and up/down buttons for temperature, a defrost heater, door edge heater, and a relay for the compressor motor.

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> It turns out the "point and click and get a working IoT product" tends to outcompete hiring a professional embedded coder to spend months to make something bespoke from scratch.

Setting up an embedded toolchain and development/debug workflow from scratch is so tedious. No wonder Arduino (and Micropython) has had so much success. I write Micropython for flight controllers in the High Power Rocketry hobby. I get a lot of snide remarks from the other people doing embedded coding but my stuff runs just fine and i can get to a blinking LED (the helloworld of embedded) on a new board in ..seconds typically.

> I get a lot of snide remarks

Those remarks tend to stop when you can add some new feature in 5 minutes which would take a 'proper' embedded dev days.

Eg.:

Gee, it would be nice to measure CO2 high in the atmosphere from our hobby rocket, let me just plonk this CO2 monitor in, hook it up to 2 pins, and add 3 lines of code to read from the sensor and write to an SD card file every second.

Thats the kind of thing that, for most other toolchains/IDE's, would require reconfiguring HAL's to get I2C working, configuring the pins to have the right drive strength and pullups, studying datasheets to find out what registers to read/write to get the sensor going, etc...

If it isn't Arduino, then it will be MicroPython/CiruitPython and you won't even need a compiler.

Arduino is supporting the official MicroPython project and has released ports for a number of boards in addition to tools like a simple MicroPython IDE and a GUI installer.

True, which is to say they are a competitor with alternate toolchains

If I get a board with an Arm0 chip and want to flash it with micropython, Arduino is not the only game in town (not even my first choice by a long shot, ymmv)

With the lower power AVR chips, Arduino's only competitor was the project it was forked from, Wiring - any other embedded toolchains were not even trying to reach the casual hobbyist, the Arduino IDE dominates that niche.

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