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Comment by actinium226 | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't look like they've made any drastic changes that would impel anyone to leave Arduino tomorrow, or in the foreseeable future, but if they keep going down this route I imagine the community will move to RPi. They've always been vastly more performant than Arduino and they can run linux, which is somewhat more approachable than the concept of programming a microcontroller and only being able to talk to it over serial.

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RPi is not a good analog compared to Arduino.

The main feature of classic Arduino boards has always been a thin abstraction layer on bare metal. RPi is not that at all.

(As mentioned by the other commenter, I'm referring to their Linux boards, not the Pico)

RPi Picos are certainly bare metal.

Yes, their MCU offerings are. And I generally think that Micropython is a better "modern" Arduino.

But most people know them for their Linux boards. And that's what OC was talking about.

I disagree, I think for the average hobbyist Arduino is an abstraction of "thing that can talk to sensors and actuate motors." You're right of course that RPi (excl pico) is very different from Arduino, but for the hobbyist it makes no difference if the processor on the Arduino is an Atmel or an ARM.

> but for the hobbyist it makes no difference if the processor on the Arduino is an Atmel or an ARM.

I don't think anyone was arguing they cared about Atmel vs ARM. In fact, the point of Arduino is to make that not even something a user would need to know.

The argument is Linux vs Bare metal Arduino are vastly different user experiences and complexities.

It won't be just one big move that kills the community. Eventually, I could see it as locked down as the STM32 ecosystem. Nor do I see them continuing to sell the same parts for over a decade. They'll just want to use it to promote new kit. Nor do I see them keeping to board designs open over the long term. That will come one little step at a time.

Full-size RPi isn't Arduino's competition, surely (except for the newest Uno Q, which is a novel take on a Pi-type SBC).

There are meaningful disadvantages to replacing an Arduino with even the Pi Zero.

Yeah, makers will move to Raspberry Pi products for the ecosystem and documentation, but it will be to the RP2040/2350 products.

But also the ESP32 series, particularly Adafruit's kit.

The patent language would worry me a lot. It would be tough to have to admit, up front, "even if this widget becomes popular I can never build a business on it."

But I'm not using Arduino, so idk.

The cool thing about an Arduino is you can just buy the boards and use them in a commercial product. This isn't something you can do with other boards. Some people have said the license requires you to disclose your firmware, but that's not the way I read it and I've never heard of anyone being compelled to release anything (unless they modify any GPL covered code).

Not all platforms give you the right to do this. For example, if you buy a dev board from STM - it's only licensed for research and development. Also, because you might want to continue to sell the same thing for years, and the board designs were open-sourced, you could buy the same part for years and years. So you can continue to sell your CNC kit that uses an Mega 2560 without worrying about Arduino coming after you or that they'd discontinue that part.

Has Qualcomm changed that?

Not in the short while since they've purchased Arduino, but I could see them restricting the licensing for commercial use, while keeping it freely usable for education. Like STM.

> "even if this widget becomes popular I can never build a business on it.

With the exception of a handful of applications for their higher-end boards, I would think most of this flotilla of ships has already sailed, just on a cost basis?

Especially lately. So much more choice.

There's believing Arduino isn't useful for anything serious. And that might be true, I don't know. But then there's buying the company and making sure it isn't good for anything serious. It's that second part that confuses me.

I often use picos because they're much more capable when it comes to interfacing with hardware.

You can do gpio, pwm etc from a linux pi but the hardware is worse at it and you'll be fighting against the system quite a bit. It's a lot of boring complexity to be allowed to do something simple; and the next update might break it.

If I need a linux system AND hardware interfacing, I'll usually use a regular pi + a pico for the hardware stuff and connect them via serial or something

It looks like they have modern options that run Linux now; it’s no longer the realm of 8-bit Atmel MCUs.

I’m not sure what the value proposition is overall, though. The IDE, perhaps? I never particularly saw the draw, but it clearly met the needs of some real market niche.

Maybe two different things here: SBCs that run Linux versus microcontrollers (MCUs).

MCUs are lower power, have less overhead, and can perform hard real-time tasks. Most of what Arduino focuses on are MCUs. The equivalent is the Raspberry Pi Pico.

In my experience, the key thing is the library ecosystem for the C++ runtime environment. There are a large number of Arduino and third-party high-level libraries provided through their package management system that make it really easy to use sensors and other hardware without needing to write intermediate level code that uses SPI or I2C. And it all integrates and works together. The Pico C/C++ SDK is lower level and doesn’t have a good library / package management story, so you have to read vendor data sheets to figure out how to communicate with hardware and then write your own libraries.

It’s much more common for less experienced users to use MicroPython. It has a package management and library ecosystem. But it’s also harder to write anything of any complexity that fits within the small RAM available without calling gc.collect() in every other line.

Yes. One looming concern here is that if the new Arduino is happy locking stuff down, the Arduino IDE story could end up being murkier like the PlatformIO story.

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