Adafruit: Arduino’s Rules Are ‘Incompatible With Open Source’

https://thenewstack.io/adafruit-arduinos-rules-are-incompatible-with-open-source/

by MilnerRoute • 7 months ago

437 235 7 months ago

thenewstack.io

RobotToaster2• 7 months ago

our commitment to the open source spirit is unwavering and Arduino’s core mission remains unchanged

Running a proprietary SaaS doesn't really show commitment to open source.

_ache_• 7 months ago

I agree, but that is nothing new. The original SaaS was already proprietary.

And btw, the "reverse engineering" close was already here too. You can check the archive.org of Jan 2025, months before the Qualcomm acquisition.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250120145427/https://www.ardui...

So this citation, is basically fake news and FUD. The *now* part is false and this hide the fact that the "platform" is only the SaaS.

Phillip Torrone had warned [...] Arduino’s users were now “explicitly forbidden from reverse engineering or even attempting to understand how the platform works unless Arduino gives permission.”

RobotToaster2• 7 months ago

I feel like the Qualcomm thing has just woken up a lot of people to how Arduino has been enshittifying for years

They released their first closed source "pro" boards in 2021

https://blog.adafruit.com/2023/07/12/when-open-becomes-opaqu...

SV_BubbleTime3• 7 months ago

After Qualcomm bought them? Who could have seen this coming? Hang on while I get back to arguing with my MSP that I really would prefer ProxMox over HyperV to replace VMWare.

MomsAVoxell• 7 months ago

Proxmox is awesome, just do it. Ask for forgiveness not permission.

ocdtrekkie4• 7 months ago

I did some evaluating on this option and there's definitely complexity to bear in mind: Proxmox has worse support for my storage and backup solutions, and if the MSP you are working with has a ton of experience on Hyper-V migrations and limited Proxmox experience, the support you get will lack.

I will say I'd eventually love to have my day job environment on Proxmox but it isn't quite ready to be there today. No shade to anyone who is able to be there by any means, but I think it's fair to say hypervisors aren't something you want to choose on vibes alone.

SV_BubbleTime3• 7 months ago

100% nailed my current issue.

We need to get off of VMWare as the min license for us is now $15k pre year… from $3k. But the MSP knows the support for ProxMox isn’t there, and they have SLA contracts to uphold.

I’m going to have to HyperV which I expect to have the same issues as VMWare soon enough/someday.

MrJohz3• 7 months ago

It's a bit odd that most of this article is various claims from one of Arduino's competitors being taken at face value, especially when the EFF spokesperson generally seems to think the new terms broadly make sense, albeit with some criticisms.

It sounds like Adafruit are just trying to sow some outrage here.

malfist• 7 months ago

Adafruit is not an arduino competitor. They sell arduinos

sunnyps• 7 months ago

They sell Arduino compatible boards (amongst other things) from what I gather, so yes, they would be competitors.

andrewflnr• 7 months ago

I was very confused when the article referred to

Chief microcontroller rival Adafruit

Implying that Adafruit makes their own competing microcontrollers, which sure would have been news to me.

Edit: sees sibling posted at the same time. Well that would explain it.

rpcope1• 7 months ago

They also sell feather and a bunch of other vaguely similar stuff and have their own "maker" ecosystem (think CircuitPython). I like Adafruit, but they are in many senses competitors to Arduino.

riedel• 7 months ago

I understand adafruit's take at it. But I guess they are simply plain wrong when saying 'incompatible', at least from a pure license perspective for the HW/firmware.

As other pointed out, companies like Google demonstrate, how open source can be used in a rather aggressive commercial strategy. However, I think the good news is that that the open hardware stuff is not rocket science and maintenance hell at this point (without the new Qualcomm bits). I guess it is now for others to step up and make the ecosystem resilient. That is IMHO the power of open source in case it works.

dec0dedab0de• 7 months ago

Adafruit makes a ton Arduino libraries, and sells boards and starter kits. They also make their own stuff, and sell things from their other "competitors." I got my first arduino from them over 19 years ago.

Their real competitor is sparkfun, but I never heard them say anything to put them down.

arjie2• 7 months ago

Seems fine. There's a Qualcomm SaaS platform you don't need that they have the boilerplate no-hacking clause on. And Arduinos are the same as always. Considering the EFF and Arduino positions in favour, both of whom have done a lot for open-source stuff, I really can't be bothered that Adafruit is trying to drum up some marketing content.

vasco3• 7 months ago

Agree completely and I was writing arduino libraries almost 20 years ago

arjie2• 7 months ago

My first Arduino was something like 15 years ago as well, a Duemilanove. I suspect my parents still have it. I'm not saying nothing can change over time, but there's always one controversy after another online these days in software communities and I think rather than trust the latest mob I'm going to trust the guy who's been serving me well for more than a decade. These openness purity tests are really not for me.

healsdata• 7 months ago

Adafruit is trying to drum up some marketing content

This was evident to me when their original post "yada yada yada'd" over the details to make things in the agreement sound sinister.

stackghost• 7 months ago

These days I don't think Arduinos are meaningfully more accessible than, say, an ESP8266 or ESP32. If I was starting a new hobby project today I'd choose the latter.

jxdnnd• 7 months ago

Don't the latter require separate board support in the Arduino IDE? That was at least the case in the past

Liftyee• 7 months ago

That's only if you're using the Arduino IDE though, and it's so commonplace that instructions are widespread. Many are using MicroPython/CircuitPython which are independent from Arduino.

xxs2• 7 months ago

esp32 with 'free' (built-in) wifi/bluetooth is just so much easier to work with. That was my experience a few years back.

askvictor• 7 months ago

The first esp8266 I bought was as a dedicated wifi chip for an arduino (or something) project. I discovered after getting it, that it came with a 'free' MCU (that was default flashed with a UART/AT-command firmware to allow other MCUs to get wifi)

Animats• 7 months ago

"Anything that was open, stays open".

Now contemplate open Android and Google Play Services.

p0w3n3d• 7 months ago

They did a great job. We must recognise experts in this matter. They had help of other companies and hardware producers of course, but still...

Or even that they forbid to use different clients for YouTube

Y_Y• 7 months ago

Or even that they forbid to use different clients for YouTube

Ineffectively, thank God

squarefoot• 7 months ago

Was going to quote this exact line. Yes, what was open stays open, but unmaintained, then development/updates/patches are moved to the close(r) alternative until the hassle of running the open old one isn't worth the effort anymore and the need of updated/debugged libraries or board definitions forces the users to migrate. I wonder how doable would be a fork of the whole shebang with the online downloadable content hosted somewhere.

chaosprint• 7 months ago

I never use Arduino or Arduino IDE anyway; it's incredibly laggy for me, and I hate having these things in the cloud. I mainly use Pico and VS Code now.

platevoltage3• 7 months ago

Yeah their IDE is basically unusable.

171862744015• 7 months ago

And yet that is the only thing, that they actually produce. Everything is else is from someone else.

jojobas• 7 months ago

Setting up the toolchain that's not Arduino IDE is a prohibitively high bar for a school child that wants to blink leds.

schappim5• 7 months ago

There is a version of Thonny[1] designed for use with the Pico that is great for education. Raspberry Pi have some good resources on getting started[2].

If your target audience is school kids, you really can't go past the micro:bit and Makecode[3].

1. https://thonny.org

2. https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects/getting-started...

3. https://makecode.microbit.org

neilv• 7 months ago

I'd like to see HN generally take a stance that a hacking-ish education platform like Arduino should be open source and hacking-friendly.

(Disclosure: I know the Adafruit founder, but haven't discussed this matter with her.)

ErroneousBosh3• 7 months ago

It is entirely opensource and hacking-friendly.

Why do you think it isn't?

drxzcl• 7 months ago

As an aside, I have never seen a decent license for user generated content. Either they expose the platform to serious liability, or they come across as incredibly predatory.

OhSoHumble• 7 months ago

What do you feel is a good approach to licensing user generated content?

bigfishrunning5• 7 months ago

Allow the user to license the content that they generate. I can write a novel with Microsoft Word, and Microsoft has no claim over it -- why should any IDE tools be different?

b112• 7 months ago

That's not needed though. No licensing is required.

Code is copyright without any licensing. The hardware is not licensed, I don't sign a license or agree to one when buying a car or microwave.

You can find edge cases, but the point is no licensing is actually required.

notarobot123• 7 months ago

One of the big difference between technology and law is how significant edge-cases are considered to be.

MrJohz3• 7 months ago

In this context, the license is for using the Arduino Studio application. This is hosted by Arduino, and therefore needs to take user input, save it and work with it. As I understand it, this puts them in a complex situation: they don't own the code you've written (obviously), but they do need to do things with it like compile it and run it (when you press the button in the IDE). They're also hosting the code and therefore partly legally responsible for it.

At the very least, you need some sort of user agreement to specify the things you can do with their content, otherwise you can't really do it because it's their content and you're not allowed to mess with it by default. (Like you said, code is copyrighted by default.) You also need to specify the things that are necessary by law because you are hosting that code and therefore in part responsible for it. You also don't want to make the user sign a new agreement every other week if you add some new feature that they need to agree to use, because the cost of all those legal documents is prohibitive, and it's also very bad UX.

Added to this the fact that lawyers are naturally very conservative as a profession (generally only doing things that have been proven successful, rather than avoiding things that have been proven unsuccessful), and it's easy to see why these sorts of agreements tend to be more expansive than they perhaps need to be, in order to ensure the company is fully protected.

7moritz7• 7 months ago

Chief microcontroller rival Adafruit

They are PCB brands. The microcontrollers are made by the usual manufacturers like ST, Renesas, Infineon...

sho_hn2• 7 months ago

I agree the writing is imprecise.

But of course Arduino historically also didn't make the Atmel or Pico chips, so I can sort of see what they were going for.

chrisjj• 7 months ago

The writing is precise. Just inaccurate.

quijoteuniv• 7 months ago

Is this another one of those opensource project gone wrong, that when they lose the user base because of this gray(blackish) i would say) “new terms” they apologise and try to come back… often too late?

Surac• 7 months ago

I doubt Qualcomm will be able to pressure there rules to the market. They do not own the cpu and making a arduino like board is very easy nowerdays. The have not even the power over the bootloader or the compiler. Library’s are either standard c/c++ or open source. People also do not like the arduino ide because the days of easy setup and run are gone and a real way of debug is needed in most projects. China board makers will never obey any rules and marketplaces like alibaba will still sell clones. Perhaps the ai at Qualcomm told them to buy arduino because it is in a suicide mission. Please excuse my bad English, no native speaker

robert_foss• 7 months ago

Arduino is a tiny market, and Qcom has left bigger things to die on the vine previously. They dont need Arduino to succeed in any way.

blagie2• 7 months ago

I, respectfully, disagree with this analysis.

Prototyping platforms have tiny markets, but lead to downstream sales. Many a company were brought down by more developer-friendly platforms ignoring the "tiny" userbase of people who want to do unconventional things.

Most IC vendors provide free samples and support because of this. That's a market size of close to zero -- electronic engineers -- but leads to a market size of "massive." I can get an application engineer to visit my office for free to help me develop if I want.

Arguably, iPhone and Android won by supporting the tiny market of developers, who went on to build an ecosystem of applications, some long-tail, and some unexpected successes.

And arguably, x86 won for the same reason.

Atmel had shipped 500 million AVR flash microcontrollers, due in large part to the ecosystem created by Arduino.

Balmer said "Developers! developers! developers!" Visual Studio was not a major revenue driver for Microsoft; what was developed in it was.

timinou• 7 months ago

Your English is perfectly understandable :)

finaard• 7 months ago

People also do not like the arduino ide because the days of easy setup and run are gone and a real way of debug is needed in most projects.

A surprising amount of embedded SoCs target the Arduino IDE either as the main IDE, or one of the main ones. And for those the setup is still pretty easy for non technical users - "Download IDE, paste this into the boardmanager, compile the sketch, upload". That's the main reason I'm still using the Arduino IDE for stuff I publish and expect less technical people to use.

The problem with the IDE is that it doesn't offer a gradual path to more advanced usage. You're pretty much stuck with a single file main project. You can split off functionality into libraries, but the way library resolving works is way worse compared to "proper" build systems. There are projects to provide makefiles for Arduino projects, but it's a bit of a pain to set up - I use that for CI on some of my stuff, but it clearly is on the other end of difficulty scale.

And of course the editor is horrible - but thanks to file watching and automatic reloads that isn't much of an issue nowadasy.

seg_lol2• 7 months ago

So basically, Arduino IDE acts as the client side of the tether to compile and flash firmware to the target device.

This seems like an ideal component for the OSS community to handle and rally around. Then anyone can use the IDE of their choice, the compile-flash manager handles the rest.

171862744015• 7 months ago

But targeting the Arduino IDE only means to have a GCC version to compile and some upload program and then set a bunch of variables in platform.txt . It doesn't actually make it any harder to not use the Arduino IDE.

The problem with the IDE is that it doesn't offer a gradual path to more advanced usage. You're pretty much stuck with a single file main project. You can split off functionality into libraries, but the way library resolving works is way worse compared to "proper" build systems. There are projects to provide makefiles for Arduino projects, but it's a bit of a pain to set up - I use that for CI on some of my stuff, but it clearly is on the other end of difficulty scale.

It actually isn't all that hard. I recently did exactly that and it took like a week, most of which was spent on understanding what the Arduino IDE does with strace. Initially I assumed the Arduino IDE does way more stuff then it actually does. The makefile projects are too complicated, because they try to abstract over the installation and project. Instead I used Autotools which is way easier and simpler. It also breaks less, because these makefile projects tend to hardcode paths.

To save others the work: All you need to do is populate CPPFLAGS, CFLAGS, LDFLAGS, ... with the information from platform.txt and boards.txt . Then tell your build system to use the cross-compiler toolchain from your OS. Take care to only use the exact uploader program version that the Arduino IDE also uses, I have been burned by using the latest version, which bricked my board (i.e. you can't upload anything to fix it and need to use a second board to reflash the bootloader). This information is in the package_index.json file. Granted this is annoying to work with using fulltext search, you would have a much saner experience actually using the JSON format, but it still works and I am lazy.

You're pretty much stuck with a single file main project.

You can have multiple files just fine, this is actually the reason why the Arduino IDE defaults to having this project directory. The Arduino IDE just assumes all files below that are things to compile. You need to remember to not name the other files with *.ino, but *.cpp, *.c and *.h, otherwise you end up with multiple main functions. An *.ino file is just a *.cpp file that gets preprocessed with a main function template.

And of course the editor is horrible

You can tell the Arduino IDE to use another editor, which is what I did when I used it.

procaryote3• 7 months ago

The raspberry pico is much nicer to work with, if you're looking for an alternative. It has dual core if you need it, and the fun little IO coprocessors if you want to get really low level. The pico2 even has a risc-v mode

The process of getting a binary onto the board is just dragging a file, and on linux at least you can script it with picotool

schappim5• 7 months ago

To "yes, and..." you, the whole RP2040 microcontroller line is great and I would encourage folks to support the smaller maker/OSHW companies on Tindie[1] who use it.

[1] https://www.tindie.com/search/?q=rp2040

jack_tripper7• 7 months ago

It has dual core if you need it, and the fun little IO coprocessors

I think you're missing the point of what made arduino so popular. It's not the HW itself, it's that you can plug in whatever display, sensor or motor driver out there, and there's ready made templates in the IDE that gets you running immediately, without you having to know anything about how the HW or SW works under the hood.

The lack of dual cores or "fun IO coprocessor" whatever fun is in that context, was never an issue for the arduino.

There's a virtually unlimited number microcontrollers and boards out there for tinkering or production, that are more powerful and have more features, but they all have a higher technical barrier to entry than the standard Arduino out of the box.

I don't wanna have to read datasheets and erratas just to learn how to use a second core, deal with shared memory between cores, or how to configure the GPIO of the "fun IO coprocessor" just to get a LED blinking to work. That's not what fun is to a lot of people. Fun is getting the motor spinning until my coffee finishes brewing and that's where the Arduino ecosystem USP was versus other more powerful platforms.

crote7• 7 months ago

The RP2xxx also comes with excellent documentation and libraries. If anything, with the drag-n-drop flashing it is even easier to work with than an Arduino.

171862744015• 7 months ago

I don't wanna have to read datasheets and erratas

I recently started programming Arduino for profit and you need to do exactly that, because the libraries range from somewhat buggy to completely broken. They so often just write into random other registers and if it works it is only do to the chip already working without any configuration and the library not breaking things too badly.

vrighter• 7 months ago

if you rely on hobbyist libraries, you will eventually have to read datasheets. They usually only contain the barest minimum possible that one can still call "working". Usually most of the functionality of the device you're using is just not supported. At which point it's datasheet time.

And before long, you'll find yourself reading datasheets first and doing your utmost to avoid the "ready made templates"

procaryote3• 7 months ago

I get the impression that pico with micropython does this pretty well. You can ignore the second core and PIO if you don't want them. They won't hurt you.

crote7• 7 months ago

The flipside of this is that the RP2xxx has rather poor hard IP, and the PIO is not quite powerful enough to make up for it.

They are great for basic hobbyist projects, but they just can't compare to something like an STM32 for more complicated applications.

They are a pleasure to work with and I think that they are great MCUs, but every time I try to use them for nontrivial applications I end up being disappointed.

schappim5• 7 months ago

STM32 is great!

nontrivial applications

Out of curiosity, where do you find that you’re hitting the limits of what it can handle?

londons_explore2• 7 months ago

They're also very poor value for money if you need millions of them.

There are similar chips at a quarter of the price.

Obviously for hobbyist stuff, $1 doesn't really matter.

dvh• 7 months ago

How long does raspberry pico run on CR2032?

I'm asking because used Arduino ide to program STM32L011 and it would run for months or even years.

DrewADesign2• 7 months ago

I believe you need 5v to run the regular $4 pi pico board. The chip only requires 3.2v though so maybe it’s not a hard requirement? There are probably other lighter weight RP2040 boards but I don’t think months or years-long low power usage was an intended goal— it’s $4 (still!) with 40 GPIO pins and PIO and it runs micropython for people scared of/chafed by C— it’s a prototyping/hobby tool.

05• 7 months ago

It has sleep current of 200microamps, so no longer than 40 days…

bigfishrunning5• 7 months ago

The STM32L011 in no way requires the arduino IDE; your code would likely compile with GCC just fine. The pico would probably work if you redesigned your project, but your hardware very likely doesn't need to change, just the software you're using.

markb139• 7 months ago

“ The process of getting a binary onto the board is just dragging a file, and on linux at least you can script it with picotool”

Even easier if you setup debugging using another pico, debug probe or even a Pi (not sure if this works on the 5)

quailfarmer2• 7 months ago

+1, if only for the documentation. If you haven’t, skim through it: https://pip.raspberrypi.com/documents/RP-008373-DS-2-rp2350-... it’s truly unlike any reference manual I’ve ever read. I will happily pay a few extra cents at modest volumes for a chance to get the detailed technical details and opinions from the design team.

scottbez1• 7 months ago

Flashing can be easy, sure. Compiling that binary, including library management, is not, unless you’re using something like micropython. CMake is not hobbyist/student-friendly as an introductory system. (Arduino isn’t either, but platformio with Arduino framework IS! RPi refuses to support platformio sadly)

Arduino took over for 3 reasons: a thoughtful and relatively low cost (at the time) development board that included easy one-click flashing, a dead-simple cross-platform packaging of the avr-gcc toolchain, and a simple HAL that enabled libraries to flourish.

Only the first item, and a bit of the second), is really outdated at this point (with clones and ESP32 taking over the predominant hardware) but the framework is still extremely prominent and active even if many don’t realize it. ESPHome for example still will generally use the Arduino HAL/Framework enabling a wide library ecosystem, even though it’s using platformio under the hood for the toolchain.

Even folks who “don’t use Arduino any more” and use platformio instead are often still leveraging the HAL for library support, myself included. Advanced users might be using raw esp-idf but the esp-idf HAL has had a number of breaking API changes over the years that make library support more annoying unless you truly need advanced features or more performance.

procaryote3• 7 months ago

CMake doesn't spark joy, but it's not something you need to touch constantly. I figured out how to set up a basic cmake file and now I mostly need to touch it to set a project name, add or remove modules etc.

It was a while since I used arduino, but I remember having a harder time setting up a workflow that didn't need me to touch the arduino IDE.

skybrian2• 7 months ago

This article doesn’t really explain how the new Arduino stuff works, which makes it harder to judge the impact of these new licenses. I’m used to flashing microcontroller boards over USB, originally from the Arduino IDE, more recently with PlatformIO. I’ve bought boards that have WiFi, but it wasn’t an essential part of the development environment.

I did a bit of searching and found some sketchy documentation that just leaves me with more questions. It sounds like Arduino’s new web editor programs boards wirelessly somehow? Does it assume the board has WiFi? What is this new, networked system? What Internet protocols does it use? How do you pair it with the web editor?

nottorp6• 7 months ago

More importantly, do they still allow local development or you're now depending on the "cloud" ?

ErroneousBosh3• 7 months ago

It's an 8-bit microcontroller programmed directly with a suite of open-source software.

It doesn't need to do anything with "the cloud".

8cvor6j844qw_d6• 7 months ago

Wait, does the IDE no longer work with cloud/account?/etc.?

I have a old Arduino UNO R3, would be a really disappointing if I could no longer play around with it by just downloading the IDE and connecting the cables.

tete• 7 months ago

That has been a long way coming. Only a couple of months ago I was looking at alternatives and "Arduino compatible" products. The reason being simply that so many "for fun projects" are built with it and I wondered what good alternatives there are.

I kind of drifted off. So curious about what people here think is the best "Arduino when it still was open source" contender. Preferably something Arduino compatible because of the sheer amount of projects already out there.

That said I've heard a fair bit about Adafruit criticism as well, but that's more on the company level and no personal experience there.

rcarmo2• 7 months ago

Hobbyists don’t get full exposure to this, but the reality is that the embedded space is still very much a binary blob landscape. Even relatively popular SDKs like Expressif and Nordic’s are full of weird proprietary stuff, and it just gets worse as you go into beefier hardware (Rockchip, I’m looking at you).

But yeah, Arduino is in a weird place right now. I knew people there (kind of lost track), quite liked their IDE and how accessible it made a lot of things, but the recent turn on events is just… weird.

embeddedbert2• 7 months ago

For Espressif it's only their radio blob. And and community is on a good way for a open source replacement for this.

Everything else is top notch open.

rcarmo2• 7 months ago

You get two blobs if you use ZigBee :)

pabs3• 7 months ago

Link: https://github.com/esp32-open-mac/

Other open firmware: https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware/Open

archerx• 7 months ago

Adafruit’s Torrone had also said Arduino’s new documents “introduce an irrevocable, perpetual license over anything users upload.”

Yea that's gonna be a hard pass for me. Thank goodness for the Pi Pico which means I'll never have to use Arduino ever again. On a side note, the new Arduino IDE based on Monaco looked nice but made development so painful I just stopped. I had to keep disconnecting and reconnecting devices all the time to upload sketches when before with the old IDE that was never an issue. Everything Arduino feels like a regression.

londons_explore2• 7 months ago

This seems dumb from Qualcomms point of view...

T&C's preventing reverse engineering of an online platform seems to have no real business value. Serious hackers will ignore the T&C's, whilst serious competitors will not need to do any reverse engineering to build an online compiler.

znpy• 7 months ago

I would likely check the open source definition, chances are the changes are actually compatible with open source.

Maybe it should all have been free software all the time.

quailfarmer2• 7 months ago

Adafruit is pretty clearly the front-runner these days in the educational/hobbyist market, Arduino (and even SparkFun) have fallen by the wayside. My only gripe is the focus on micropython these days, it can introduce a barrier later in the learning process when you eventually need to leave the nicely organized sandbox. They still support the “Arduino” C++ libraries, but uPy is the default.

hellweaver666• 7 months ago

Adafruit actually focus on CircuitPython which is a fork of Micro Python but takes some of the complexity of Micro Python away. I don't personally like coding in C++ as I started my career with Perl then PHP and Javascript. Writing Python in my own choice of text editor instead of the Arduino IDE is much more my style.

rahimnathwani• 7 months ago

A couple of weeks ago, I bought a 'sensor kit' from Amazon for my son to use with his Raspberry Pi. It includes some input devices (e.g. button, moisture sensor) and output devices (e.g. LED) that can be plugged onto breadboard.

The setup instructions included something to do with CircuitPython. I had not heard of it before then: https://github.com/sunfounder/universal-maker-sensor-kit/blo...

shevy-java2• 7 months ago

Using python makes sense though - it widens the user base. Not everyone is a C++ guru.

bathwaterpizza• 7 months ago

In my experience LLMs can code C++ for the Arduino framework pretty well these days. The mistakes they make, like wrong pin numbers, are pretty language agnostic.

greengrass422• 7 months ago

I can't afford the luxury of an interpreted language due to the speed hit.

seg_lol2• 7 months ago

There is a lot of shade being thrown against Adafruit in this discussion thread which is disappointing.

It is disappointing because it distracts from the discussion around Open Source and Arduino as a long term educational tool. Regardless if that shade is in good faith or not, it distracts from the conversation we should be having.

moron4hire• 7 months ago

Yeah, let's not forget that Arduino was built on a history of being kinda sheisty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduino#History

And Adafruit has been a stalwart of open hardware advocacy. If it were anyone else, I might entertain the idea that they're "just trying to drum up some marketing." But we're talking about Limor "LadyAda" Fried here. She's good people and always has been. Her opinion should count for a lot.

dev_l1x_be• 7 months ago

Could risc-v save opensource hardware?

Taniwha• 7 months ago

The latest esp32 chips are RISCV meaning you're not paying a licence for the old ESP CPU (which comes from elsewhere).

There are also 10c RISCV cores available that people are starting to use

I don't think it "saves" it particularly though

MPSimmons4• 7 months ago

Ever since I got involved with Espressif's ESP32/ESP8266 chips, I haven't even thought about arduinos, except to download the UI, but you don't even need to do that with the right VSCode extensions to make your life better.

I do keep meaning to try this though - https://platformio.org/

cbdevidal2• 7 months ago

I use a combination of Adafruit Ampy to copy files, esptool to reflash, picocom for the REPL, and VSCode. Some of those might be redundant and it did take a bit to figure out the syntax. But once that’s determined it’s cake, and all saved in my CLI history. I just Ctrl+R and bring it back.

ahoka• 7 months ago

For ESP32? You just install the VS Code extension and it does all the toolchain setup and you can flash with a button.

alias_neo• 7 months ago

Last time I used Arduino was probably the late 2000s, as a kid/teenager,student their prices always felt too high to me, so I moved to "compatibles" or "clones" for a while.

Once ESP8266 and ESP32 came along (with a detour thanks to Raspberry Pi coming along in the 2010s), there was really no need nor desire to use Arduino anymore and like you I forget about them.

Maybe they have a place in education, and maybe in industrial applications, but outside of that, I wouldn't even consider Arduino anymore.

PlatformIO by the way is excellent, and I've used it for all ESP8266/ESP32 development in VSCode for some time now, though increasingly I just use ESPHome, as my desire to program microcontrollers at a low level wanes and my desire to simply achieve the task quickly grows.

MPSimmons4• 7 months ago

I also really appreciate how routine ESPHome has made building sensor networks in my home. Really just incredibly useful software.

dismalpedigree• 7 months ago

I switched to platformio in vscode (and command line) a few months ago after using arduino ide for over a decade.

Can’t recommend it enough. Faster startup. Repeatable builds. The abilty to save your image and then flash on many devices. Build time parameters. Also allows access to some functionality that is not possible using arduino build process due to how arduino compiles and processes sketches.

platevoltage3• 7 months ago

Yeah. There is no reason to even touch the Arduino IDE anymore now that PlatformIO is so good.

Alexander-Barth• 7 months ago

I use the command line tool arduino-cli (with plain Makefile) to compile and upload the code (obviously usable in any editor). It has also a --verbose mode to show exactly what is getting executed. But I heard a lot about platformio, so I am wondering what is its benefits (beside the integration in vscode; as an emacs user vscode is not working for me)

juliangmp• 7 months ago

I think platformio's selling point is multiple target boards via ts config. That and you can use an actual editor instead of the arduino "IDE", although I'm not a fan of vscode anymore either.

I also think they have some testing features built in, though i never delved too deep.

the__alchemist2• 7 months ago

What do you think of PlatformIo on these chips compared to the official ESP IDF?

Personally, I am not convinced we should (continue) conflating the IDE with the build+flash tools; the former should be associated with the programming language and developer preferences, and the latter with the MCU being programmed.

estimator72922• 7 months ago

It's not an either/or. You can use platformio with esp-IDF or arduino for ESP chips.

PIO + esp-IDF is the only way I write ESP firmware.

Aurornis• 7 months ago

Arduino’s sweet spot was always in education and learning.

I think most people should graduate into PlatformIO or vendor tools if they’ve used Arduino to learn basics.

I think it’s great that the Arduino ecosystem became so large and capable, but it had the side effect of leading many beginners into thinking that Arduino was synonymous with microcontroller.

I even took a contract once updating a company’s internal tooling because their first contractor tried to do it all with Arduino. The same scenario happens with Raspberry Pi in the world of Linux embedded systems development.

srg0• 7 months ago

Are there good ESP32-based starter kits with manual books which a kid can learn from? I was looking for an Arduino-like kit as a Christmas gift, and it seems that Arduino kits are unbeatable. The starter kit is available in 10 languages and comes with a project booklet. All ESP32-based products seem to be better suited for more advanced users and seem to have a steeper learning curve.

MPSimmons4• 7 months ago

No, not like there are with Arduino. Arduino is definitely the best I know of for embedded programming, and it has its place there, but I stopped trying to do real work with it.

potato-peeler• 7 months ago

Isn’t arduino completely open source including its PCB, firmware, IDE, etc, even accessible for commercial use?

shevy-java2• 7 months ago

It's sad that they are killing Arduino.

DeepSeaTortoise• 7 months ago

IMO too many people come to the conclusion that Qualcomm will in some way screw up the Arduino takeover at the expense of the community.

And I think these people are right, but that is not necessary a bad thing.

There is just about no reason a giant like Qualcomm would take over something like Arduino for any other purpose but to acquire resources (talent, customers, community, processes, documentation, ...) they can use to teach themselves how to become more open, to what degree they even want to and to have a trusted platform they can take their initial steps in and will get feedback from.

And the reality is, that someone with little experience will screw up badly, several times. I mean, look at the current state of the major silicon IP holders, the only reason they dont ship brain-chips with their NDAs that explode the moment you mention the wrong part number infornt of a competitor is because the NDAs for the documentation on how to install the brain-chips would get them stuck in recursion hell.

And just as little experience Qualcomm has at making open source a successful business strategy, Arduino has just as little experience at being a corporate Godzilla trying to carefully pet the egg they just adopted. And let's be real: Open source projects OWE it to their community to be financially successful, because it's that financial success that guarantees that the project CAN STAY open and wont force its core maintainers into choosing between their commitment to their community and a fulfilling lifestyle, although for someone like Qualcomm this success can probably be something else but financial in nature (acquiring talent, their products becoming a preferred choice, schools teaching students using Qualcomm products, whatever).

Both Arduino and Qualcomm will end up outside of their domain and it'd be surprising if this would not result in major mistakes being made.

Qualcomm has to evaluate whether their new talent at Arduino is doing a good job and are suddenly looking at a giant dumpster fire, wondering what could have possibly caused this since their lawyers aren't even half-done sticking on the "by Qualcomm" labels yet.

Right now, instead of trying to pressure Qualcomm into making commitments they do not understand, the community should try to adopt the role of a stakeholder, who prioritizes a long and healthy relationship with a currently struggling contractor over getting the desired product at a reasonable timeline.

The community needs to make a cold day in hell happen, calm down, get together and formalize what they think they liked about Arduino up until now, the fundamental requirements that need to be retained or even developed and what would be nice to have.

benbojangles• 7 months ago

I have gotten into platformio cli and find it much easier to program an MCU this way

ajsnigrutin• 7 months ago

Arduino was the first (and then, the only) simple microcontroller, that you could give to someone, even a child, give them a 5 page tutorial, and they'd be able to blink leds, capture a button press, a potentiometer input and display the results via leds or 7 segment displays. Every other microcontroller needed a special board to program it, you needed a thick book to program it, take care of registers, use some weird windows-only ide and usually none of that was free... arduino was just different, one board, one cable, free software and good documentation.

Of course, an ecosystem has grown around that, so you could attach pretty much any popular device (sensor, display, input device,...) to it, and the library was already made for you to simply use it in your project.

But now, years later? There are many such controllers, from esp8266/esp32 to rpi pico, with additional features (wifi included) on better boards (displays, buttons, interfaces,...), for even less money.

Yes, the original arduino was important.. but if it vanishes overnight, very few people would notice.

greengrass422• 7 months ago

Thank you for pointing out why Arduino was important.

analog31• 7 months ago

I'm a long time user of the Arduino IDE for third party boards such as the Teensy. Recently I've switched to Platformio for coding. So I should be satisfied with never needing Arduino's cloud service.

But Adafruit points out a problem, which is that the cloud service is the only available option for students using school-issued Chromebooks. I can confirm that a school-issued Chromebook is likely to be set up to lock out access to any programming tools. We wouldn't want children to learn coding after all, right?

I think relying on a corporation to preserve our freedom to code is a bit too optimistic.

raxxorraxor• 7 months ago

Chromebooks and iPads are both completely unsuitable for digital education in my opinion. They can be decent tools for education using digital resources, but that is something different.

To "force" someone to develop on a Chromebook is like giving someone a bicycle to become a race car driver.

That said, I usually flashed my arduinos and used bare metal C. Ironically I think it makes many things easier to learn and understand, provided you have a programming device.

AlexeyBrin5• 7 months ago

You really can't compare a Chromebook with an iPad. On a Chromebook that I bought and that I fully own I can enable the Linux system and install whatever I want on it (it runs in a VM and it is a full Linux system). The iPad is artificially crippled for programming by Apple.

thadt• 7 months ago

What does a "digital education" look like, specifically?

Having spent several years teaching kids to code everything from games to lightbulbs on Chromebooks, I can confirm that there are certainly difficulties - but they're tradeoffs. I could spend my time coming up with a way to work through the platform restrictions, or I could spend my time maintaining a motley crew of devices and configurations. Having done it both ways, they both have different pain points.

GeekyBear• 7 months ago

Apple has long provided tools for teaching kids how to code. Including lessons targeted at kids in middle schools.

young coders are asked to assist these characters achieving simple goals by coding simple instructions. As challenges become more difficult, more complex algorithms are required to solve them and new concepts are introduced.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_Playgrounds

assbuttbuttass• 7 months ago

To "force" someone to develop on a Chromebook is like giving someone a bicycle to become a race car driver.

Lol, I use a Chromebook for development at work

galleywest2002• 7 months ago

If your digital education is at an art school then an iPad with creative software is great.

If you mean computer science then yes you are correct.

mips_avatar• 7 months ago

more like giving them a speed limited citi bike and expecting them to train for cyclocross.

AlexeyBrin5• 7 months ago

Technically any recent Chromebook can run Linux in a VM if enabled from settings. Now, I don't know if most schools forbid this, but since it is running in a VM it is safe to use for sure.

blackcatsec• 7 months ago

The reason people use Chromebooks is because they want to minimally manage the devices. The Chromebooks being locked down is ENTIRELY the point of using them in the first place...That and because Google.

sybercecurity• 7 months ago

We wouldn't want children to learn coding after all, right?

Why aren't we teaching kids vibe coding? I've been told that is the future after all, and junior devs will never be needed ever again. All they need a webpage interface to an LLM to provide data and customer demographics for AI companies.

brookst• 7 months ago

Because typically we don’t leap to teach kids things that are speculative.

We in the industry might see AI progressing to where cube vibe coding is just as real as using spreadsheets rather than paper ledger books, but it is years out, and teaching kids on v0.1 tools would just be frustrating for teachers while likely teaching kids all the wrong things.

chrsw• 7 months ago

Arduino was finished the moment it was acquired by Qualcomm.

ASalazarMX• 7 months ago

Someone should do a conspiracy board showing why evil companies doing acquisitions have names that end in com.

TechSquidTV• 7 months ago

I recently had a great time developing on ESP-32 directly in VSCode/Cursor and using the Arduino CLI. I believe very similar in concept to Platformio. I've always hated being limited to the Arduino IDE.

blensor• 7 months ago

+1 for platformio, I recently switched to it and working in VSCode on the code is much more to my liking than the separate Arduino IDE

skybrian2• 7 months ago

Chrome can read and write to a serial port using the Web Serial API. There is also the WebUSB API, but I haven't tried that. I wonder if that would be enough to flash boards on a locked-down Chromebook?

schappim5• 7 months ago

cloud service is the only available option for students using school-issued Chromebooks

Perhaps Chromebooks are incompatible with open-source too?

Joel_Mckay3• 7 months ago

Arduino was always a terrible pseudo-language/IDE, taught bad workmanship, and had problems with fast chip io handling etc.

However, it was a "standard" boot-loader, had consistent documentation, and a wide community of users. It encouraged people of all skill levels to play with chips, and that was great.

These days a full Linux SoC is often cheaper than most mcu. The age of the Arduino board will just end a little quicker now. Generally, irritating a planet of bored computer engineers does not end well for a business. =3

saidinesh5• 7 months ago

The problem space a full Linux SoC solves is very different from the problem an MCU solves. (Imagine a lot of real time io, interacting with a lot of peripherals etc....)

What's eating Arduino's lunch is the various mcus: risc v, stm32, esp32 etc...

Joel_Mckay3• 7 months ago

The Arduino 1kHz busy-loop and ISR designs is not real-time or necessarily guaranteed latency.

RTLinux or FreeRTOS are guaranteed-latency OS, that can reduce timing jitter.

"Real-time" is another term hijacked by people that think it means the same thing. It was a disservice to students, but thankfully FPGA or Raspberry Pico io DMA with mcu parallelism can teach people to understand clock domain crossing.

Part of the Arduino appeal, was convincing people the mcu and application SoC problem domains were the same. They are not, and never were... Hence the new Arduino board dual chip layout is twice as bad in some ways. Cheers =3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2y8Sx4B2Sk

risc v -- a new hope, but 20 years too late

stm32 -- a solid competitor to Microchip/AVR, but 14 years too late

esp32 -- FreeRTOS with hardware flash paging can pose an issue, but at least it already doesn't need Arduino software lol

kevin_thibedeau• 7 months ago

They should team up with Sparkfin and establish a new open platform.

the__alchemist2• 7 months ago

I feel like Arduino has lost its unique place in all but mindshare 5+ years ago. What I would recommend as a default:

  - Wi-Fi: Esp Risc-V (C3 etc)
  - BLE without Wi-Fi (Or ANTD): Nordic. Also a good choice in general for simple devices
  - General-purpose, including high-performance, low-power, and high I/O: Stm32

Use whichever IDE is suitable for the language you're programming in. (Jetbrains, Zed, VsCode etc). Use the specialty IDEs like Cube for viewing pinouts and configuring hardware as a reference.

If using rust, probe-rs + cargo is a "just works" CLI workflow to compile, flash, and debug.

zoobab• 7 months ago

Qualcomm is a patent troll, no money for those guys.

We need an arduino fork.

matt3210• 7 months ago

We knew it would go this way when they were acquired

Adafruit: Arduino’s Rules Are ‘Incompatible With Open Source’

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