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Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

I used to be interested in Arduino, but the hobbyist movement is nothing like it was in the early 2010s. In part, I think, we had amazing technologies (3D Printing! Arduino! CNC! Raspberry Pi!)… but not really that many amazing ideas on what to actually do with it.

What can I build with an Arduino that isn’t better, cheaper, faster, and more complete as a full product on Amazon? Almost nothing. When I’m staring at a screen 8 hours a day as a computer programmer already, my body screams for less screen time, not more. I’d rather learn Spanish or go skiing than start a FOSS project; and I don’t think I’m alone.

I understand there’s an artistic expression aspect to it… but I think at this point I’d rather learn photography or painting, actual art, for expression. Something normal people understand and appreciate. It’s too much of the same for me.

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As a hobbyist, it's not about being able to buy it faster, cheaper, or better. It's about learning how to tinker, making something work, and building something that is effectively the artistic expression of my technical skills.

YMMV, but if you aren't loving the hobby element anymore and the itch can be scratched by reaching for a product, that's a shift in what you are enjoying, not an indictment of hobbies :)

You are just becoming old.

Less time, more money, changing hobbies, etc...

It is almost always better from a practical perspective to buy the complete product over DIY, or even better, not buy at all. Those who claim otherwise are justifying their hobby. Best case scenario, you break even after not counting your time, which is actually great, because most people pay for their hobbies.

The hobbyist movement didn't change, you did, life is like that and that's not a bad thing. The technologies change but the general idea stay the same. For Arduino (the brand), I think it is dying, but that just because you can buy generic ESP32 boards on AliExpress for cheaper and with more variety.

> What can I build with an Arduino that isn’t better, cheaper, faster, and more complete as a full product on Amazon?

For an end user maybe not much, but for tinkerers, a lot. Almost everything where you need/want customization, unique features, and so on. This said, you don't strictly need an Arduino for that, I actually (almost) never use them because their software library is so high level that it eats so much resources on the underlying microcontrollers and make things more complex when you want to do more advanced stuff (like handling interrupts). When I use them, is for some quick&dirty thing (e.g. I need to turn on a stripe of "smart" LEDs quickly), but never include them in finished things.

What can you create as a programmer that isn't already a product? For each of us the answer is only limited by our interests and imagination. I use the Arduino development environment to create peripherals for specialized measurment gear, where I absolutly must control the design at the firmware level to make it work.

Arduino and related technologies have revolutionzed scientific instrument making. Things that were either "too hard" or "too expensive" are now straightforward for hobbyist and non-technical scientists.

For example, I build automated microscopes as a hobby and I use arduino products (well, used- now I use ESP32 with micropython, but that still depends on the Arduino API) and it's been tremendous for building high speed interfaces (I need to blink an LED at the same rate/in sync with a camera shutter opening/closing) . Even when I do photography, I'm still building arduino and other related things to help automate the tedious bits. And when that gets boring, I take out my guitar and use arduino or similar products to do audio processing in realtime.

For many of the things I want to do, there is no product on Amazon, or it's obscenely expensive (XY stages typically cost $10K and up).

Almost every song I play on any instrument is available played better, more professionally, and more precisely and more artistically, on any music source possibly available. And yet I still play every day for my own pleasure.

It's the act of playing, where the music itself is an important part, but just a part, that I enjoy.

This sounds more like your personal journey, and less like some broad trend.

A quick check of just one of your examples shows the term "3d printer" is googled for literally twice as frequently today as it was in 2016, for instance.

And for another n=1 input, from my perspective, 3d printing is MUCH BIGGER now than it was back then. Weird take from the parent comment!

I've been programming esp32 connected with soil moisture sensors and solenoid valves to water each individual pot of plants according to its own readings, instead of having a centrally controlled irrigation system. Overkill, I know, but with a cost of 8-10usd per set up it is not expensive

Photos? If you have a blog post, it may be a good post for HN. (Bonus points if the plants survived :) .)

In my eyes it's quite the opposite: there is almost nothing that exists as a complete product on Amazon. Faster and cheaper? Yes. Better and more complete? Not a chance. But you have to want it bad enough, and have enough skill to do it.

Arduino is (was?) one of those skills. Practice them enough, and you'll soon find the things you want aren't available for sale, at any price.

My 2c: I got into electronics, firmware, and PCB design during the Pandemic, and haven't used Arduino beyond cursory support for integrations. At the time, it used obsolete chips, and didn't have a practical advantage over STM32, Nordic, Espressif chips (Or dev boards) beyond name recognition. I speculate that there was a time before this when it had innovative UX for new users segment, but this hasn't been true for (at least, from my experience) 6 years.

> What can I build with an Arduino that isn’t better, cheaper, faster, and more complete as a full product on Amazon? Almost nothing.

I mean, my little hobby project is making the LED strips taped to my skis respond to an accelerometer, so they pulse brighter when I make a good turn. Plus Bluetooth control of the patterns. Not gonna find that on Amazon.

Please blog and post about this. I need a how to.

If I complete the project! Haha.

Love it, and I agree. I've built two "star skies" for kids, using cheap RGB LED lights, programming them to slowly change color, only use warm colors, and turn off more and more stars over time. Nothing super fancy, but very custom to my needs.

There are plenty of not-arduino microcontrollers that can do this.

To your reply-writer, how do you think those products came to be, many of them are productization of hobbiest projects.

The arduino project jumpstarted a whole ecosystem, but I don't that ecosystem needs arduino anymore.

> There are plenty of not-arduino microcontrollers that can do this.

Sure. I'm responding to this bit:

> better, cheaper, faster, and more complete as a full product on Amazon

Mine's on a nRF52840 board. My point is less about Arduino and more about tinkering.

It sounded like OP was saying they couldn't think of any interesting things to tinker with since everything they could think of is already a product on amazon. So in this case it isn't about alternatives to Arduino, it's about alternatives to reactive LED lights for your skis.

Also what can I build with an Arduino that isn't cheaper, faster, and more complete with an STM32 Nucleo or other similar dev board? These days you can get a nice 32-bit ARM MCU for the same price (or cheaper) as an Arduino board. No need to deal with an 8-bit ATMEGA and its quirks.

> When I’m staring at a screen 8 hours a day as a computer programmer already, my body screams for less screen time, not more.

Can sympathise. When I worked in SW I avoided computer games and hobby coding like the plague. During bouts of unemployment I dived back in.

There's limits to being a glassy-eyed inert lump of protoplasm.

> When I’m staring at a screen 8 hours a day as a computer programmer already, my body screams for less screen time, not more ... and I don’t think I’m alone.

Isn't there a term for that: wage slavery[1]?

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery

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