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Comment by jajuuka | Hacker News Reader

I don't think Qualcomm bought them to destroy them. I think they see Arduino as a gateway. Instead of hoping students will learn ARM it's more reasonable to leverage Arduino's simple nature to act as an on-ramp for more low level developers. I wouldn't be surprised if Arduino IDE saw a revamp to better support jumping the gap between the Arduino to Snapdragon.

ST and TI do the same thing with their boards too and it's not a bad strategy.

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People are making so much of this when it seems so much simpler. Qualcomm likes buying high-margin businesses, and Arduino is a high-margin business. Gross margin on their boards is over 90% (hence why you can buy a Chinese clone of a $30 board for $3) and this trend shows no signs of slowing down. The TI equivalent of the $30 Arduino Uno is $5, and it's a true gateway product.

clone relies on hardware being designed and software written - this takes a lot of money, so you can't just count the final price of parts as the price.

Arduino is open sourced in hard and software which allows this cheap cloning to exist. It also helps a lot with software and docs, which makes it cheaper for them.

A competent engineer designing a devkit as simple as an arduino needs about 1 day of work. Give it a week to include debugging. Amortize that cost over a million units and engineering time comes out to less than one cent per board.

It’s not quite that easy, and besides the hard part is the SW. arduino spent years writing SW code and still does to make it easy to run, debug issues and provide support.

Also a million dev kits is unrealistic for vast majority of companies 5-20k is more the number I hard.

To be frank, the Arduino ide was a fork of Processing's and the compiler suite was GCC. They 'simply' glued the pre-existing pieces together. I'm not saying that it's trivial to do that but it's also not exactly a herculean task. Even the bootloader was a fork of Hernando Barragán's pre-existing Wiring project.

>but it's also not exactly a herculean task.

To me it sounds like maybe 10 software engineers for a year. You gotta do a bootloader, test it out thoroughly, setup compiler to work, glue all the pieces together, write the missing pieces, test it all some more…

It’s expensive…

> A competent engineer designing a devkit as simple as an arduino needs about 1 day of work.

Hah! I like to underestimate scope as well, but this is really something else. Definitely a competent engineer could make something like this. But a couple of months maybe. You won't even read the documentation for the chip in a day.

Have you seen the schematics for these boards? They are exceptionally simple. Many devkits are much more complicated.

I have actually done embedded engineering in the past and I was being generous with "a day." Skimming a datasheet is a skill and it certainly will not take a day to get the information you need off of it.

If you mean the HW alone... Still over a day. If you mean the software to go along it, a couple orders of magnitude more.

Even the simplest peripherals can bite back if you are not careful and you don't test the edge cases. AVR's are indeed quite simple, but if you try to build stuff other people will use, things need to be polished.

I actually do embedded engineering. I'm doing it right now! More on the SW side than the PCB design side, and, again, this is quite an exaggeration from your side, saying you could do it in a day.

The estimate isn’t right, but the direction is right— there just aren’t that many discrete components on these boards. The chips themselves contain capabilities that an embedded designer would otherwise need to design. I’m not sure there’s much further to go, since much of what isn’t on the chipset is power related.

I agree. The estimate I was contesting. Also, we somewhat were talking past each other because I see these boards as an ensemble, HW+SW. So I was thinking about the time to make both. I agree that the boards have few discrete components and the PCB's are relatively simple.

I have been modifying Arduino libraries for weeks, there is much more work in them than just a single day. Granted replacing the Arduino IDE with Autoconf took 3 days. (2 and a half of which were spend on analyzing what the IDE does.)

You seem to equate gateway product = affordable but, IMHO, a gateway product is something that people who are not in the field are likely to stumble upon. I recently saw Arduino kits for kids at a small local bookstore, I can imagine someone thinking "hey this electronic thingy looks cool I'll buy one for my niece's birthday". On the flip side, people who don't know anything about microcontrollers are not going to look online for Chinese Arduino clones.

>people who don't know anything about microcontrollers are not going to look online for Chinese Arduino clones.

But high chance they will look it up on Amazon/Ebay/whatever e-store and buy a clone without knowing.

This has 100% been my experience, even with in-person shopping.

You ask for an Arduino, and the follow up question is: 'genuine or generic?'.

I don't think the Arduino trademark is that valuable, it's already well underway genericization.

I think a key part of a gateway product is community. That is what Arduino has, and what RPi has. It can also exist separate to products (e.g. micropython)

What's the TI equivalent?

Various launchpads, on the very low end MSP430

The Raspberry Pi Pico blows the Arduino out of the water in terms of computational speed, available RAM and so on, and it costs a fraction. I don't remember using an Arduino since the Pi Pico came out. And if the Pico isn't enough there are the bigger family members waiting in the wings. For me Arduino is mostly over. And then there is Espressif as well, they make some neat boards.

Do you mean the Uno specifically? There are a lot of Arduino boards with varying capabilities.

For everything Arduino offers that I've ever used I know of a cheaper board with better specs.

Long live Teensy [1]!

I just wanted that someone mentioned these Arduino-likes in the comments. I suspect many of you have come across them though.

[1] https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/

The teensy is so weird though. At least back when I played with them. They put a secondary chip which let's you flash over USB but they cover the debug pins and the only way to get serial over the USB port is to have a whole USB stack as part of your application. As a development board I would rather go with one of those STM32 backed boards and a knock off STLink, you need the STLink to flash, if you want DFU you can add that yourself, and you get a debug adapter.

Could you clarify what you mean about getting serial over the USB port in the context of debug pins?

I've been using Teensy devices for over a decade and have always had it just recognize the device as if it were a USB to serial adapter and I can talk to it as what I'd call "serial over the USB port". But that obviously doesn't involve what I think software people usually mean when they're talking about firmware debug -- which usually entails stepping through execution, right?

I'm used to just printing debug statements to the Serial.println() function, I learned on the 8051 where the best bet was to toggle different pins when code lines are passed, so even Serial.println() was a huge step up.

It wasn't specifically in the context of debug pins.

On a "normal" arduino, an FTDI chip on the board handles the job of exposing a serial adapter to your computer over USB. The atmel chip on the other side of the FTDI chip runs your code and getting serial out from your firmware is a short codepath which directly uses the UART peripheral.

On a teensy, there is still a secondary chip, but its just a small microcontroller running PJRC code. This microcontroller talks over the debug pins of the main chip, and those pins aren't broken out (at least back when I last used a teensy). Despite covering the debug pins, this chip only handles flashing and offers no other functionality. Since there is no USB serial adapter, for hobbyists trying to use it for running code with an arduino HAL, the HAL has to ship an entire USB driver just for you to get serial over USB. And this itself means you can't use the USB for other purposes.

For advanced users, this makes debugging much harder, and god forbid you need to debug your USB driver.

It's kind of just a bunch of weird tradeoffs which maybe don't matter too much if you are just trying to run arduino sketches on it but it was annoying for me when I was trying to develop bare metal firmware for it in C.

Yes, the Teensy is pretty impressive too. I've used one in a project and came away impressed.

It's probably simpler, Arduino knows the market has no future and wanted to get out and did a sales pitch to Qualcomm and Qualcomm accepted.

Some years back when bluepills ran $2, Arduinos seemed to have no point. Today, you can buy an ESP32 dev board with wifi for $6. Or an Arduino Uno Wifi for $55.

Note that both Bluepill and ESP32 can be programmed in the Arduino IDE, using the Arduino library, and the vast library of Arduino sketches and 3rd party libraries (as long as they don't use AVR assembly language.

So can the Pi Pico, the Milk-V Duo (one 64 bit Linux core, one 64 bit microcontroller core), and many others.

While that is true, both Espressif and the Pico have their own SDKs, and they're really well written too.

The Arduino SDK is the simplest to use, sure, but the Pico framework (I don't have experience with the Espressif one) is extremely good, and the Pico's PIO is a godsend. I used it to implement 3 wire SPI (data bidirectional on the same wire) at almost 'real-time', which is to say, at half the speed of the hardware SPI controller (half the speed because the interface clock is put up one cycle and down the next; this also gives enough time for data shuffling).

Why does the Arduino SDK necessitate a huge markup on Arduino boards, when $0 of every computer I buy to run Linux on goes to GCC?

Just because most of the free software ecosystem relies on unpaid volunteer work does not mean it is a desirable state of affairs, especially with billion dollar companies building on top of said work while hardly contributing anything back.

While that is true, if Espressif and the Raspberry Pi Foundation can build their SDKs and still offer cheap chips/boards, so could Arduino.

I'm not expecting a $0 markup, but Arduino prices are simply unreasonable for what they offer, especially if you live in a lower income country.

If you think the price is unreasonable, don't buy. You have listed what you seem to think are better options. I agree that there are better options. If somebody else wants to spend their money in different ways than I do, let them. If Arduino thinks they can make money this way, let them try. If it works, good for them, I guess. If it fails, I guess the joke will be on Qualcomm. Honestly, Arduino could slash their price to be $1 less than a Milk-V Duo and I'd still by the Duo. If the Arduino was $1 less than an ESP32, I'd still by the ESP32. So I'm not sure lowering prices wouldn't just hurt them.

I have never bought an Arduino. I have bought a few Picos, a few ESP32s, and a couple Picos. And a clone of an Arduino Nano integrated in a system with a Pico for 5V logic, specifically, to implement a PS/2 controller. I don't see any advantage an Arduino has over an ESP32, aside from 5V logic support.

Both Espressif and Raspberry pi (pico) target OEMs who will buy millions of their chips. They've both embraced the hobbyist market as well, but it's not how they've recouped their investment.

Arduino targets the hobyist market where customers will buy one (or at best a handful) of their boards. Arduino simply has no other way of recouping their investment than selling expensive hardware.

So I don't think it's fair to say that Arduino is being greedy. Also FWIW, Espressif's official dev boards are also pretty expensive. Not Arduino expensive, but several times the price of identical "clones" based on the same reference design and using the same official esp32 module.

Branding power. Precisely why brand drugs continue to make money over fist for pharmaceutical companies even after patents expire.

> Precisely why brand drugs continue to make money over fist for pharmaceutical companies even after patents expire.

Generics may have the same active ingredient but (vastly) different pharmacokinetics - i.e. different absorption rates/retention in the body. For basic stuff such as painkillers that's one thing, but for more sensitive medication such as insulin, antidepressants or anything related to the cardiovascular system (heart rate, blood pressure and clotting) one has to be very careful when switching between brands.

Its relevant, however, that the Bluepill and ESP8266 cores for Arduino were originally independent reimplementations by third party hobbyists, not made by Arduino. And Espressif themselves have always developed the ESP32 Arduino library implementation. They weren't completely freeloading off Arduino's work, and Arduino (the company and the ecosystem) heavily benefit from contributors of all sorts. Particularly in the case of Arduino and Espressif, they have been successful together.

> Some years back when bluepills ran $2, Arduinos seemed to have no point.

But you still used the Arduino SDK with the bluepill, so clearly Arduino had a point. Unless you were one of the few masochist who dealt with the STM32 toolchain directly for fun?

The Pi Pico is such a breath of fresh air in that regard. Finally a decent-enough toolchain for a decent-enough performing ARM MCU!

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