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Comment by ghurtado | Hacker News Reader

No we don't.

I have dozens of Arduinos that I will never use.

With a similarly priced (sometimes cheaper) platform like the amazing rp2040 / rp2350 which is roughly 100 times more powerful, I have no idea what the niche is for them any more.

The way they dropped the ball with their IDE is amazing. It still looks and feels like something that was rejected during beta testing in 1993

Arduino is following roughly the same trajectory as BlackBerry, with the current phase being "rapidly fading into obscurity"

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There's plenty of semi-technical tinkerers out there, doing things like building flight sim cockpits, scraping by on copying ready made code, doing minimal changes and asking forums or LLMs if they get stuck.

They just want something that works, and ideally to keep using the same thing they've always used. They know what Arduino is, as long as it does the job they aren't interested in researching alternatives. They don't want to get involved in adapting someone's instructions for a different pin layout, or risk that anything they've done up to now stops working.

Yes, we all know it's a massively out of date platform easily outclassed by much cheaper and more flexible solutions, and if you must use the Arduino IDE it can build code for all sorts of boards. But for non-technical people by far the most important factor is to stick with something safe and known.

I just made the discovery the other day that there are two Arduino IDEs, the old crusty one maintained by Arduino.org and the new hotness maintained by Arduino.cc.

I'd been using the Arduino.org version which had mostly driven me to use PlatformIO and ESPHome.

https://www.arduino.cc/en/software/#ide

Unfortunately, but perhaps fortuitously, I needed to use a Library only compatible with Arduino 3.0.0 which is incompatible with PlatformIO. That lead me to discover the Arduino.cc IDE which, while not on par with VSCode, is dramatically better than the Arduino.org IDE.

>No we don't

Why do you speak for everyone? I use my 2009 Arduino when I need something quick and simple.

I'm sure somebody like me would happily take them off your hands. The AVR is still a solid platform for low-level applications. A lot of the Arduino libraries never really took full advantage of what you could do with that chip. Whatever happens with the Arduino IDE, those boards will still be useful tools for quite a while.

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