Qualcomm to acquire Arduino
(qualcomm.com)1337 points by janjongboom 7 days ago
1337 points by janjongboom 7 days ago
Don't look at just the specs. You also need to look at the board design and programming environment. I've used the ESP32 native tools and they are a lot more complex than Arduino. But I'm an embedded firmware developer, so it's kind of what I expect. But I used an Arduino, with 5V tolerant outputs, to light up Halloween costumes for years. I do it in 1 page of code that's I write in their IDE. I don't have to set up an SDK. And the Arudino API hides all the details I don't care about. Especially if I'm really just slinging solder and wiring something up quick.
What's hard about programming an ESP32?
I plug the USB in and its the same as an Arudino, can even use Arduino IDE, but I prefer VS Code with the PlatformIo extension. You can even use the Arduino Library (#import <Arduino.h>
And a ESP32C board with wifi/bluetooth is like $8 https://www.amazon.com/Seeed-Studio-XIAO-ESP32C3-Microcontro... (and thats from amazon, on alibaba its like couple bucks if that)
As a side note, you can power this with your IPhone's USB C which was surprisingly cool.
It is basically the same thing, don't understand either why it would harder.
The only thing is to add the ESP32 module on the addons since it doesn't come enabled by default. Arduino isn't good for projects with more than 5 source code files, it is an awful IDE beyond the basic things you can pack on a single source code file.
Always had so many difficulties handling the IDE defects, basically it can crash when starting and every now and then will just refuse to upload the firmware. The other part are libraries, really difficult to setup all the needed libraries for larger code bases.
On that sense, Visual Code with PlatformIO went far beyond. Just open the project there and the libraries are taken care. The connection to boards is more robust. I'm not so sure how to feel with this sale to Qualcomm, it just feels that it is going there to die.
Quite the difference from the early days where Arduino had such energy and the tools would bring almost anyone into microntrollers with such ease.
I got introduced to microcontrollers through the original Arduino board. It took me only a year to switch to bare metal atmega/attiny (zero external components!), and to this day, those are my favourite micros despite all their shortcomings. Theyare extremely well documented, and them being 8-bit with a simple instruction set makes it very easy to learn assembly (or even opcodes). At the same time, they are compatible with 5V logic (and can be abused!) which makes them almost perfect for beginners.
Would I have been able to learn assembly with ESP32? Probably not. You couldn't even find proper manuals for ESP8266 back in the day because they either didn't exist, weren't in English or weren't released to the general public...
Well which board do you select then? ESP32 boardfiles do not come with the Arduino application per default.
Sure, to you and me this may seem trivial, you paste the URL into the prefs, but there are people who will get stumped by this and with an Arduino there is one less step you can forget, not know about or do wrong.
As someone who teaches those things at an University level I can assure you that does make a difference for at least 50% of my students if I let them try to do this unguided.
(psa: Arduino IDE 1.x works flawlessly for tons of non-Arduino boards, including Pi Pico, ESP32 devkits, etc. Most Arduino users aren't even able to consider processor implementation specifics, never signed an NDA in life, and don't even know where generated binaries go, so those boards are almost "binary compatible" with each others, all in _very_ positive sense)
It's not about whether it's hard for you.
Lots of people don't program.
More people don't know how to program than do know how to program.
In that way, just because I can't imagine it being hard, doesn't mean I understand everything there is to understand.
This creates a gap and opportunity for products to make technology more approachable for the majority, instead of the minority (programmers).
Making things accessible to more people instead of less people seems to increasingly be the way.
Trouble is, this kind of trivial throwaway application is all that Arduino is really good for. Because the framework is designed to support thousands of chips, it supports none of them well. Any arduino code you write is easily 5x more terse than any of the native libraries, but it's also 10x slower. If you don't care, you don't care. But if you do care, Arduino is the least appropriate way to make a microcontroller go.
Besides that, IMO hiding hardware details from the developer is the worst thing about Arduino. The hardware details matter and it's far too easy to get footgunned by some implementation detail hidden from you.
But really, esp-IDF isn't that much more complex, nor are most of the other native frameworks. It's a bit more verbose, but esp-IDF provides helper libraries that replace almost everything Arduino provides, but in a way that is actually designed for the hardware and doesn't have to do things like lookup pin numbers in a giant table for each and every gpio call.
> Besides that, IMO hiding hardware details from the developer is the worst thing about Arduino. The hardware details matter and it's far too easy to get footgunned by some implementation detail hidden from you.
Wasn't Arduino not for developers, but for hobbyists? People who aren't super technical but want to do something neat with basic microcontroller functionality?
You're complaint kinda seems like saying "BASIC isn't great language, it's got a lot of problems when used for enterprise applications." It's not really meant for that.
The pin mapping shenanigans are another annoying footgun with Arduino. Even in native development you're dealing with a physical pin number and the logical assignment (PA5, PA6, etc), but now Arduino maps that all again to an Arduino board pin number, and it's all shuffled to ensure the peripherals are in the right place to enable I2C, ADC, and PWM pins to function as expected.
arduino was supposed to be learning opportunity and training grounds for people who wanted to work in the field in the future, there was small arduino boards (similar to pi pico) for integration with actual projects, but still arduino was for hobbyists and students in the first place
On the other hand, their competitors haven't been sleeping either.
Companies like Adafruit and Sparkfun sell dozens of tailor-made dev board variants, and their I2C module system allows you to mix & match a whole bunch of peripherals.
The code? A handful of lines of Python, which you can drag&drop onto it like it's a flash drive. Or use a browser-based IDE if you want one-click library install and serial logging.
Arduino's IDE was groundbreaking in 2010, but these days there are easier (and cheaper!) alternatives for beginning hobbyists, and better alternatives for power users.
Good on the Arduino folks for getting acquired, then. They still have a niche and a brand with name recognition, even if that niche might be stable at best, collapsing at worst.
Even if you like the Arduino programming environment (and I do), there seems to be little reason to use Arduino hardware unless it’s for compatibility with other hardware you have? For example, there is a very nice unofficial port of Arduino for the Raspberry Pi Pico. There are also many fine Arduino-compatible single-board computers from Adafruit. The Arduino board form factor seems big and clunky in comparison.
I don’t even use the Ardiuino IDE anymore; I've switched to VS Code using PlatformIO.
It’s great that all these microcontroller boards and peripheral breakout boards can be programmed using the same basic API’s, but I don’t think it helps Arduino the company very much.
There's a wealth of easy projects that a person can get started with using an Arduino.
Without any opportunities for getting bogged down in anything extra at all, they can follow a simple recipe and quickly begin to blink an LED at the rate of their choosing.
The Arduino was developed to be a teaching tool, and it allows for a person to take little baby steps.
(Whether this placement is good or bad for Arduino as a business entity isn't something that I find particularly important.)
> I've used the ESP32 native tools and they are a lot more complex than Arduino.
How so? All of that is abstracted away from the users just like it is for Arduinos. In fact you can use the Arduino IDE to develop for most ESP32 chips.
If anything Arduino is holding back everyone with their horrible IDE. Their Board and Library managers are painfully slow and having no way to store configuration with your sketch means that you're taking a screenshot of a drop down menu if you have to make any changes.
Eventually people want to write their own libraries to make their code more manageable and the Arduino IDE makes it difficult for someone who knows what they're doing.
> But I used an Arduino, with 5V tolerant outputs, to light up Halloween costumes for years.
I have yet to encounter a piece of hardware that doesn't respect 3.3v as signal high. All of the neopixel variant's data pins work off 3.3v and most people have moved on to 12v and even 24v for larger projects while still raw dogging 3.3v on the data pin without issue.
Arduino's insistence on 5v logic levels is for maintaining backward compatibility which is honestly unnecessary.
I'm an amateur with this stuff and honestly find the ESP experience significantly more pleasant than Arduino. I'm sure there are footguns I haven't encountered, but I get so much more bang for the buck out of random ESP builds + the incredible line of various bundled ESP devices that come with touchscreens, sensors, etc. for incredibly low prices.
I know a million people have replied to you, and while I don't want to be jumping on the dog pile, I just want to say that along with PlatformIO (which automates the setup of ESPIDF and/or Arduino for the ESP, (and it also does it for a ton of other micros)) and Expressif having their own Arduino Core for their chips with integrates into Arduino's IDE, Expressif have also released their own extensions for VSCode and Eclipse that greatly aid the end user in getting ESPIDF setup and configured.)
You no longer have to break your back going from zero to blinking an LED. I remember when I first got into espressif chips and it was a right pita back then. But no more!
Personally I'm a fan of PlatformIO because its not just because of the wide selection of platforms it supports and that it uses VSCode which is my IDE of choice.
I use arduino ide to build esp projects. I have not found it much different than the arduino as a beginner, except much cheaper and faster. I like not having to do all the shield stuff. But will admit, it was helpful to start on arduino as its built in pins helped me get going as I tried to avoid soldering and breadboarded everything. That only lasted a short time before I realized I had to solder some things if I wanted to grow the project. I still like the idea of breakout boards for specific things but I usually solder them in now.
You can make the argument that esp32 supports Arduino but you can quickly run into “here be dragons” which sends most people for a loop. Arduino has a fantastic reputation for a very good reason.
What do you think about the Arduino professional line? They have industrial PLC equipments and other high end boards etc.
Not the OP, but have had some experience with the Arduino Opta around this time twelve months ago (Oct 24) through a professional development course I took at my local university on industrial control systems programming.
While it's nice to have exposure to PLC programming at an Arduino price point, the IDE, and PLC firmware was VERY rough around the edges. It took lots of resets and fiddling to even get the units connected over their USB serial, and you'd come back the next day and you'd have to repeat the process. Lots of "hold your tongue the right way while pressing this button". The IDE was also very buggy (though it may have improved in the last 12 months), but once you got things going, it did the job.
Doesn't look bad, but the Arduino name is a serious drawback. It's a brand focusing on DIY tinkering, how are you going to sell that to your boss who only finds a bunch of shady hobbyist stuff when he Googles it?
Besides, what's the market? The non-pro hardware is fine for prototypes, but you don't want a bowl of spaghetti in production, so porting it to the pro is pointless. If you want a generic compute board, why not a Raspberry Pi? If you want a PLC, why not go for a proper PLC?
There's perhaps a market for the shadow IT equivalent of electronics projects where an Arduino sketch is suddenly a load-bearing part of the company, but that's about it.
Military drones maybe? The trend is now on local AI features and they are practically throwaway.
ESP stuff is very cheap and works well, but the Arduino Uno is a great board/ecosystem for beginners and simple projects. Being 5V is more convenient for a lot of things, and having the pin headers already on the board that you can just start plugging things in with jumper wires is great.
The Arduino IDE is awesome for an extremely quick setup time. You can very easily download libraries and add them to your project, you don't have to create a blank source file, you just have to fill in setup() and loop(). The Arduino IDE makes it very easy to set up a new board and download code to it.
Much of this also applies to the Arduino IDE with and ESP32, but what I really appreciate about the whole Arduino ecosystem is if you want to do something really simple, like say, activate a servo when some sensor reaches a certain value, you literally only have to type 5-6 lines of code. You're not messing around with SDKs and Makefiles and git cloning repositories etc etc etc. You can get kits for $70 that have an Arduino clone, and a bunch of different sensors, servos, steppers, etc. It's absolutely fantastic for teaching basic programming and electronics.
Various ESP dev boards, Arduino, Pi Pico -- any of these are good places to get started from on the road towards doing useful things with microcontrollers, I think.
Arduino is just a familiar name with a long (~20 year!) history. There's a plethora of pre-existing projects that a person with no prior programming or electronics experience can implement easily to get their feet wet.
Some manner of ESP32 (or STM or MSP or RP2...) may be a good choice for a project for someone with some experience, but if you put a reasonably-motivated person in a room with a computer and an Arduino starter kit then they'll successfully be building simple things in no time.
It remains a friendly place to start doing stuff, and that was always the primary intent.
Yes. That's one way. It works fine if a person knows enough to find that board on AliExpress and buy it and is able to gather the resources to get themselves started with it. (I, myself, typically use cheap no-name dev boards...but I've been around the block a few times.)
Another other way is a ~$100 Arduino starter kit. It includes a printed instruction book and enough useful parts to sit down and begin doing stuff immediately. Anyone with a sufficiently-large pocketbook can buy it for themselves (or for someone else).
One of these things is like buying individual Lego bricks, or maybe lumber and fasteners from the hardware store, with a specific goal in mind. It's creative by necessity, and for those who know how to get where they're going then it's really quite lovely to have marketplaces like AliExpress and Ace Hardware available to satisfy our whims.
The other is more like a buying a packaged Lego kit or Meccano or an erector set that includes instructions for building several different things using the included parts. If a person (including a child) doesn't yet have any idea how to get started, then this can help them get the clues they need to go further with building other things.
---
I could buy a Chinese D1 mini dev board and a bag of assorted resistors, LEDs, transistors, and a breadboard and put it all in a nice box and give it to a kid, but I expect that they'll have a hard time figuring out what comes next. ["Now just draw the rest of the owl."]
Or, I could buy an packaged Arduino starter kit for a kid and have a reasonable expectation that they'll soon be telling me all about the neat -- if simple -- stuff they've done with it. They might not even realize the things they've learned along the way, but it'll stick with them well-enough if they want it to. And then they can move on to using VS Code with PlatformIO and start hammering out RP2040 PIO assembler when that time comes. If that's something they choose to be interested in, then they'll have a good foundation for the independent projects that may come later.
The whole is sometimes greater than the sum of its parts.
Yeah I'm kind of puzzled by what Qualcomm is getting out of this.
Arduino has so little presence in production devices and is largely an enthusiast and hobbyist product. To be clear, this is good! Having well-supported high-quality enthusiast products is awesome.
But it just doesn't... seem to overlap with the bulk of Qualcomm's business, which is large-scale silicon sales to consumer and industrial clients.
To be selling shovels for the gold rush of AI-enabled embedded devices.
Is it going to happen? I don't know. But ollama on an SBC is a sandbox I'd play in.
The earlier up the product development stream you can place your product, the bigger share you'll have down the road. There's the saying about planning for 1 year, rice, 20 years, trees, 100 years schools. Windows is the leader because most kids grow up using windows in elementary school and blindly continue on. If you own arduino, maybe they start on ardunio, continue on to qualcomm products, and they're already trained in the qualcomm ecosystem before they've started engineering school. Adobe famously was very lax on closing Photoshop cracks in the early 2000s and trained up an entire generation on their product with great success.
I run a medialab at an university. ESP32 is great, but there are some downsides that are all not dealbreakers, but can in some cases lead me to recommend a classic Arduino-type device:
1. Lack of 5V tolerant pins. Beginners may or may not be aware of the possibility of destroying the device or the need to level-shift signals.
2. Tooling may not work out of the box. As of today the tooling step boils down to pasting a URL into a field in the preferences, but that is something you need to know. You need to select the right uploading options which are much more complex than with arduino type devices.
3. IMO less clear naming of different dev boards, thus also harder to find docs.
4. Examples may not work out of the box, simple Arduino examples may fail with hard to debug issues (for beginners) where they don't know whether it is a hardware issue, wrong board/uploader setup or a pinout issue (e.g. if the onboard LED pin differs).
These are all examples of issues students had when they used the ESP32 boards without my guidance, so not just my opinion or a theory. And as I said none of these are dealbreakers, but depending on the patience, stress levels, perceived skill etc. of the student this might make me recommend an Arduino over an ESP32.
I use it for learning and play with my kids. I load the program on the board then we wire the components together and get all excited about blinking LEDs or a LCD.
The lack of features (notably Wifi on our boards) and somewhat larger size are benefits for us.
The ATMega AVR devices are not cost effective for what they deliver. However, the new ATtiny 0/1/2-series devices are worthwhile for applications the Cortex-M devices aren't a good fit for. The Arduino ecosystem doesn't really acknowledge these parts.
Exactly. I dunno why you’d ever use anything but an esp for “maker stuff” at this point. They are cheaper, more capable, and have the same DX (largely, setting aside 3.3v vs 5v).
Well you might go Nordic for the power efficiency, but I agree capital-A Arduino wouldn't even cross my mind as an option these days.
It's not the hardware but the ecosystem, libraries and support which is available. Sure there are alternatives like platformio but when you're learning most of the stuff out there eg youtube use Arduino IDE and libs. And just try and get an LLM to produce code based on Espressif libraries not Arduino lols...
Arduino is an ecosystem of pushing solutions. This is likely what is partially the appeal.
My hope and wish is Arduino sincerely remains accessible as it's always been and not solely drift into B2B or enterprise spaces.
There is a lot of chip building and delivery capacity being aligned this year.
Cheap fun, if you acquired a box of Arduinos from a defunct makerspace or startup in the mid 2010s
this. esp 32 supermini is $3 and has wifi and bluetooth. Arduino stopped being useful many years ago
you are comparing apple to orange, Arduino is not MCU. In fact, the uno r4 has a variant with esp32 module on it.
It's like saying AMD Cpu is so much better, why do you need Linux.
That's probably why these AI-capable Qualcomm boards are being introduced.
Just wait for a few years and then you can forget everything about open or open source about Arduino. And maybe in 2030, you will only be able to run the Arduino IDE on Windows with a specific driver to ensure that you only flash a firmware to a DRM controlled authentic Arduino device.
It is a nightmare when such an acquisition happen.
That's pretty useless when they won't release the documentation for their SoCs.
Arduino made a lot of their boards closed source a while ago IIRC. I was surprised this one is supposedly going to be open source.
To anyone at Arduino/Qualcomm reading --
If you're looking to make Uno Q SBC a gateway to more companies building on Qualcomm SoCs, please also release:
- Affordable HQ camera modules, with drivers, tuned ISP support for the board
- Low volume SoC purchases on Mouser/Digikey so we can move from evaluation board to prototypes
- Reference schematics
- High quality documentation and maintained Yocto layers for embedded linux development
- Ability to use SoC features like AI acceleration / ISP without huge headaches
Shame to see Arduino go, but honestly how relevant are they anymore? The Arduino framework is one of the worst ways possible to write firmware for any slightly serious use, and their hardware is... quaint in the era of Espressif and the Cambrian explosion of devboards with any number of highly advanced features.
Arduino was a great way to get into microcontrollers back when the only alternative was vendors' native libraries in straight undocumented C and wiggling CPU registers manually. But that's not really a niche anymore, there's plenty of other, better designed, frameworks and libraries. Arduino has always been the worst, slowest framework available.
Honestly it's high time to replace Arduino with something else that doesn't instill such awful habits in new engineers.
There's still relevance in making it stupidly easy to make an LED blink and make basic apps on circuit boards. Education + weekend hardware hackers might look for something different in a framework than a professional.
But certainly for pro use cases the hardware specific frameworks are way more powerful (but also complex).
I wrote up a bit on Arduino vs ESP-IDF here https://bitclock.io/blog/esp-idf-vscode
The native AVR libraries are really good. It's not quite as idiomatic as Arduino, but it's really not all that different.
Beginners can learn frameworks more complicated than Arduino and I think they should. Before Arduino, beginners were expected to write plain C or assembly, and the industry got along just fine. There were still countless hackers and weekend tinkerers. They just had to learn more, which is not a bad thing
If by native AVR, you mean avr-libc, it's nothing at all like Arduino.
Instead of analogRead, you need to write your own busy loop watching certain bits in a register (or ISR), you need to twiddle bits in several registers to set up the ADC the way you want it, etc.
Serial.write? Nope, gotta read the docs, twiddle some bits again, and then you actually do get to use printf.
Those two right there are big hurdles to someone new to microcontrollers. In fact, they're a hurdle to me and I've read AVR datasheets for fun.
> There's still relevance in making it stupidly easy to make an LED blink and make basic apps on circuit boards. Education + weekend hardware hackers might look for something different in a framework than a professional.
This group is has been moving to circuitpython, which is much less performant, but even easier to use. The more serious cross-platform development environments, like Zephyr, have also become much better.
FreeRTOS is pleasant to use.
I've recently been getting into Rust + Embassy + Probe-rs and in my opinion it's been the best embedded experience by far.
Broad support for many different chips is precisely why Arduino is so bad. It has to check pin numbers against a gigantic table for every gpio call.
You want chip-specific libraries. When the software is designed for the hardware everything works better.
The native AVR and esp-IDF frameworks are very good. There's also micropython and circuit python. I've heard good things, but I don't partake in Python.
Personally I think attempting to provide a cross-platform library for microcontrollers is an enormous mistake. This is not x86, you can't rely on any CPU feature existing, which results in awful branching code in places that in a sane framework is a single instruction updating a CPU register
I feel like this has to be a toolchain issue, there's no reason the pin number -> register table couldn't be resolved at compile time, similar with conditionally compiling certain things based on the CPU features.
I'm not saying it's not a real or an easy problem, just that I wonder if it truly is the reason Arduino is "bad"
If you want a "framework", Zephyr is the only thing i can think of, that is somewhat hardware agnostic, have great software packages, and fairly widely used.
Why care about framework, just use whatever vendor HAL for your MCU and be good with it
This is a recipe for disaster. Arduino is great for education/tinkering. Qualcomm won't sell you anything even if you are ready to commit to buying 1000s. I tried to source some Qualcomm chips for a startup @ 10k qty and was told there would be no information or support. Qualcomm can have a much bigger market if they simply open up some product lines for distribution like MediaTek do.
China has a way more vibrant, innovative hardware industry simply because you can source everything made by Chinese firms.
This is the exact reason why they bought Arduino... So now startups have a way to buy say 1,000 devices for prototyping. Qualcomm gets used to supporting smaller developers/startups/tinkerers and will hopefully push different types of chips into the Arduino product lines.
The issue is that their corporate culture does not support it. Arduino will be too small to matter. This is the same issue as with Coral, the Google TPU. They are not refreshed as they are too small. They are too small cause they are not updated or supported widely.
People need mainline kernel support and regular refreshes to reliably build projects based on it. This will require some level of building their BSPs in open and providing APIs for people to take advantage of the QCOM specific features. A QCOM that won't talk to anyone without an NDA cannot adapt to this.
This was very much my experience going through an acquisition like that. I was working at a company that served big customers. We bought a smaller company, with one of the goals being to expand to serving smaller customers.
What actually happened was that our management very quickly started telling the people who came along with the acquisition that they were doing everything wrong. The salespeople were selling wrong, the marketing people were marketing wrong, the customer support people were supporting customers wrong. Everything that the company we acquired did differently was seen as a problem.
Within about a year, anyone they hadn't pressured to adopt our practices had left and been replaced with a transplant from the Mothership. Another year later, the customers we picked up in the acquisition were rapidly leaving for other vendors. They simply couldn't work with us in a way that worked for their business anymore. Last I heard, pretty much the only remaining vestiges of the company we acquired were trademarks, and we were back to only having very large customers.
Here's how I like to think about it. Tech salesmen (especially enterprise software salesmen) are just like car salesmen. Now which commission would you like to receive: mattel matchbox car or BMW? This makes sense, because it's often the same sales effort per-sale for each possibility.
> This is the exact reason why they bought Arduino... So now startups have a way to buy say 1,000 devices for prototyping. Qualcomm gets used to supporting smaller developers/startups/tinkerers
For this, Qualcomm does not have to buy Arduino for a big amount of money: Qualcomm could simply offer this option on their own and save the acquisition cost.
Addendum: For the acquisition cost, Qualcomm could do a lot of marketing of their offering towards makers.
> Qualcomm could simply offer this option on their own and save the acquisition cost.
No they can't. That's like suggesting "the aircraft carrier could simply turn around." The cheap and simple way for a multi-billion-dollar secretive semiconductor manufacturing behemoth that doesn't know how to write a contract for less than a million dollars or to publish documents for the public is not to just change that. It's to write a contract for millions of dollars to buy someone else that can already do that.
Seems like a corporate version of the "buy vs build" question. If it's true that the goal is to become more approachable to students and hobbyists (which personally I think would be a good idea) - then Qualcomm must've evaluated both options and decided "buy".
The problem is that massive semiconductor companies like Qualcomm rarely follow through. They want their lottery ticket to be included in the next smartphone revolution but won't care about random under 5k unit Kickstarter. Everyone knows that those are two sides of the same coin, but they always choose to wait for the bankruptcy trustees to show up.
Seems like a similar play to what Broadcom did with Raspberry Pi— create a new entity/brand that could resell their chips on hobby boards and be stewards of a "community" support framework but largely without distracting the company from its enterprise customers or risk cannibalizing those relationships.
That said, interesting that Qualcomm would buy twenty years of Arduino legacy for this rather than launching something new in the space.
Broadcom wasn't really a driver behind Raspberry Pi. They acquiesced and let them have chips, once the product took off, they continued supplying chips for the Pi. And of course supported the community by refusing to supply non-propriety firmware blobs to this day ;)
Other than that, Broadcom never really had any community involvement, nor any involvement in the Raspberry Pi Foundation that runs it. However, some broadcom engineers were part of the foundation, which isn't quite the same.
> interesting that Qualcomm would buy twenty years of Arduino legacy for this rather than launching something new in the space
I wouldn't minimise the effect of people just googling around and finding the name Arduino all over the place. It would be very hard for an entirely new platform to get critical mass while esp32 is not standing still.
As other have pointed out, that doesn't make any sense. Qualcomm doesn't want anyone buying their products at 1k quantities for prototyping. They want huge customers that place huge orders consistently. The return for supporting those small orders is miserable and doesn't align with their business objectives
Qualcomm has bought plenty of companies that serviced small customers, and what happed is exactly what the person you’re replying to described. You can’t even get a quote many times.
What I expect short term is what happened to Eagle in the PCB space when Autodesk bought it (best thing that happened to kicad).
Longterm Arduino goes into the periphery of the maker market, similarly to beaglebone.
Qualcomm did not need to buy Arduino in order to do that.
It's cheaper and easier to just spin your own boards at that point. Arduinos are not complex or special in any way. Even if you did need a ton of off the shelf boards, there are countless clones that will sell you as many as you want for next to nothing.
Plus the market you're implying exists is so small as to be utterly worthless to Qualcomm. They are in no way interested in individuals or small businesses
From the presser:
> Entrepreneurs, businesses, tech professionals, students, educators, and hobbyists will be empowered to rapidly prototype and test new solutions, with a clear path to commercialization supported by Qualcomm Technologies’ advanced technologies and extensive partner ecosystem.
At the least the official line is to remedy this situation. Could be embrace/extend/extinguish but tech companies spend all kinds of money on getting students and smaller businesses into their monolithic ecosystems.
The data center AI race was won by nvidia, embedded AI might still be up for grabs and it helps to have developer adoption.
Yeah, I was going to say this is like the worst-case scenario for the average user.
One of the benefits of the main Arduino line is it was very simple to convert to your own design. Companies like Broadcom and Qualcomm won't sell (many of) their chips on normal distributer sites.
Same reason why Raspberry PIs kind of suck in my opinion. Great you've come up with a neat thing you want to build with it; you are forced to utilize either their compute modules which may not be sufficient for your task, or might be out of stock, or XYZ.
Yep. Same here but dramatically lower quantities. Was told basically we'd have to pay for a partner's support. Not that I'm expecting better from Arduino, but the community makes up for it. You Google "dragonwing stackoverflow" and there are 604 results, but even the first few aren't remotely relevant. "Atmega328p stackoverflow" is over 14k and relevant. Arduino is 52 million. It's a nonstarter
Arduino is great for education/tinkering
Arduino has been trying out a new "pro" line for about a year now, making PLC-level devices to be used in automation but hopefully attracting developers by letting them use the same family of tools as the educational line.
10k? Sorry, pal! We're in QualcommLand, and you need to be at least 100k units tall to ride this ride!
But if you are a small developer, there are options for you! Have you tried to: eat shit? And die? So that you don't insult our PRECIOUS FUCKING TIME by IMPLYING that a MERE 10K would be ENOUGH for THE GREAT QUALCOMM to ACTUALLY CARE?
The optimist in me wants to believe that this acquisition is a sign of Qualcomm actually trying to be better than that. But realistically? Yeah no. It's Qualcomm. They wouldn't have let it get this bad if they ever cared.
afaik, Raspberry Pis move around 7M units annually.
Based on their first announced product (https://www.arduino.cc/product-uno-q), I think Qualcomm is trying to get into that space, and they bought Arduino for the brand name.
You're right that Qualcomm isn't in the business of small business. But maybe they expect that the market is big enough that it's worth their while to pay a subsidiary (Arduino) to do it.
Yet another example of how corporate consolidation in America is hurting the consumer. FTC needs Lina Khan back to break up the oligopolies.
I had the same knee-jerk reaction, but the optimist in me wants to say "isn't that the point of the acquisition?" Another comment linked to the Uno Q, which looks like a Qualcomm dev kit by Arduino. Perhaps Qualcomm is trying to get better at exactly the kind of thing you're talking about.
Espressif has been eating their lunch, the boards are way more capable and much cheaper. Why would anyone pick an Uno over an ESP32?
They're more fun. The programming is easier (although you can get an Arduino like experience on a ESP32). They have 5V options, which make some projects easier without having to add additional components. The ESP32 API (and the Pico for that matter) are better suited professional programmers.
An Arduino is better if you're doing something and want a quick, easy, simple to program controller. It started as a way for artists to add MCUs to the projects without having to become embedded programmers.
Ain't fun spending $40 for a 'fun' project. ESP32 is like a dollar for WiFi and GPIOs. That's fun.
That's like the cost of two burritos. Unless you're bricking these things on the daily why would $1 vs $40 be the deciding factor for a project that is tens of hours at a minimum?
I'm surprised cheap level shifters with the same pin pitch as various dev boards aren't common.
And a lot of dev boards you will use as a hobbyist even include level shifters on the board, so you will have a 5V pin.
The fact we don't have viable western competition for Espressif is likely to become far more of a headache than all the angst about AI GPU production.
Where can you get a half decent microcontroller with wifi integrated on it? Espressif. All the others are flat out bad in some very important dimension, which isn't to say the Espressif products are perfect, but they fit in the important ways.
Yea... ST, Nordic etc have been sleeping on the Wi-Fi, letting Espressif corner that market. They both now have standalone Wi-Fi ICs, but no MCUs still; and it took them a while to release the ICs.
It’s a shame. Nordic’s chips blow the ESPs out of the water in terms of power consumption. You can get an nRF bluetooth dongle to run for months/years off a coin cell, almost without trying. Getting an ESP32 to behave is much harder
IIRC their standalone wifi chip is pretty good even… just stick them together already c’mon.
MCHP has been slowly coming up with decent radio devices, finally. If you don't use the radio going bare metal is basically effortless, if you need to use the radio the dev Tools are actually improving, though they are still nowhere as good as IDF in hiding the ugliness.
Of course they are more expensive (not much more, really, compared to simillar specced ESPs) but they are western and the peripheral actually work as intended. In my projects with ESP32 i had to basically bitbang every peripheral that i needed to use beyond their simplest mode.
Yes, I've use them for ESPHome and other small jobs like lighting controllers, but not for production. They're cheaper than most Arduino or hobbyist breakout boards like Feather. I can't comment on battle-tested, but I've also bought some pretty shoddy ESP breakouts in the past and I've had trouble with unstable WiFi performance when I've meshed them. The PIOs are cool, and better documented than Beaglebone/TI (maybe that's improved). Toolchain is also decent.
I would probably go Atmega otherwise. It's rare I need something in the gap between 8-bit and a dedicated Raspberry Pi. And I'll take some rough edges to support a local company (though for transparency I do hold some stock in RPI).
Arduino offered tiny, inexpensive, easy-to-program computers and dominated the hobby space at first. This lasted for a few years, but then they started getting competition. The ESP8266 offered comparable performance at a fraction of the price, while the Raspberry Pi was about the same price as an Arduino but way better performance. Hard to compete when other companies are selling better hardware for a lower price.
> while the Raspberry Pi was about the same price as an Arduino but way better performance
If you are cross shopping a full single board computer (Pi) with a microcontroller (arduino/esp32 etc) for a project, it's almost always a sign you don't know what you are doing. With the exception of the recent Pi Pico, non of the raspberry pis are Arduino/microcontroller competitors - they are typically full blown linux computers with all the benefits and drawbacks that provides.
While you can absolutely solve microcontroller-style problems with full blown computers, it's rarely the best/cheapest option.
Right but if you're a hobbyist, "cheap" isn't the priority. I mean, what's the harm of using a $40 SBC instead of a $10 one if you're going to be spending hundreds of dollars and dozens of man-hours on it?
The bigger concern is the overhead of the Linux OS in terms of interacting with it vs just flashing a microcontroller... but linux lets you run an SSH and FTP servers and wifi and a debugger on the thing easily.
So you get easier access to remotely playing with the programming of your gizmo, but you have the OS in the way of just talking to hardware in real-time. I haven't done projects like that since my undergrad, does it really make that much difference?
To me the big deal-breaker would probably be if the thing I was building was battery-powered.
If you're a hobbyist making IoT stuff though, you might want 10 of them. And then the price per piece starts mattering.
FWIIW - The new Uno Q is exactly the midpoint of your comment - a linux based computer WITH a STM32 coprocessor to confuse the heck out of everything.
For a long time I did a lot of Arduino stuff because you could get Nano clones for less than 1 EUR - which pretty much makes them throwaway, if you mess up.
I recently was doing a few projects with the Arduino Every, which is a nice board - but it's just too expensive. I did fry a few - so now I'm just using them as development board (the additional UARTs help a lot there), and for the actual project still use Nanos where I no longer care about the serial debug output, and therefore am fine with just the one serial port.
It's still one of the best boards if you want to do stuff on "bare metal". While I agree they missed a few product innovations, it's still a product that is in demand and gets used by industry for real products.
Am I only the only one who finds ESP better in almost every way? Once I discovered ESP8266 and 32, I basically haven't touched an Arduino board
You can make a low volume product by buying a bunch of Arduinos as your controller. You just stick them in the device. There's no license issue. While I haven't exhaustively looked, one vendor's kit I did look at explicitly stated their boards were not licensed for that kind of commercial use. Qualcomm could very well make their boards for development, test, and evaluation purposes only. And that would be my worry. It wouldn't effect tinkering at home or use in a classroom, but would mean you couldn't buy a stack of Nanos, flash them, and plug them into your project, if it is for a commercial purpose.
> one vendor's kit I did look at explicitly stated their boards were not licensed for that kind of commercial use. Qualcomm could very well make their boards for development, test, and evaluation purposes only.
Under what legal theory?
The "we have lawyers and lots of money to enforce things that are on shaky legal ground and you will likely settle instead of fighting in court" legal theory, I presume.
Patents are exhausted on first sale. If you sell me a board that uses your patent, I can do anything I want with that board. At least that is my understanding, IANAL and all...
However, if they are distributing SDKs or something separately from the hardware, that software could have its own license that forbids commercial use.
> You can make a low volume product by buying a bunch of Arduinos as your controller. You just stick them in the device. There's no license issue.
Note that the Arduino libraries are LGPL licensed. Unless you have a commercial agreement with Arduino, you have to distribute your firmware to your customers as object files so it can be linked to updated/modified versions of the Arduino libraries. This means that I wouldn't use Arduino for a shipping product unless you're fine with the firmware on the device being publicly available.
That's not my reading of https://support.arduino.cc/hc/en-us/articles/4415094490770-L.... The LGPL is usually a requirement to publish your modifications to the LGPL licensed code, but not necessarily your binary blobs. And for some low-volume Arduino based products, the software isn't the valuable part of the project, anyway.
From that support article:
> Last but not least, you need to comply with article 4.d of the LGPL license which has specific and very technical requirements. Complying with such requirements, which derive from the LGPL being used in the Arduino core, is usually a matter of providing end users with some documentation and binary files.
Article 4d of the LGPL requires library users to either:
> 0) Convey the Minimal Corresponding Source under the terms of this License, and the Corresponding Application Code in a form suitable for, and under terms that permit, the user to recombine or relink the Application with a modified version of the Linked Version to produce a modified Combined Work, in the manner specified by section 6 of the GNU GPL for conveying Corresponding Source.
> 1) Use a suitable shared library mechanism for linking with the Library. A suitable mechanism is one that (a) uses at run time a copy of the Library already present on the user's computer system, and (b) will operate properly with a modified version of the Library that is interface-compatible with the Linked Version.
Because the Arduino code is statically linked to your application to create the firmware binary, you're required to use option 0 (distribute your application's object files so it can be relinked with the Arduino library).
> And for some low-volume Arduino based products, the software isn't the valuable part of the project, anyway
That's definitely true! That's why I said I wouldn't use Arduino for a shipping product unless you're fine with the firmware on the device being publicly available.
If you ever wondered, how Arduino came about: The Untold History of Arduino (https://arduinohistory.github.io/).
The software was based on Processing. It was never a secret, just open source working as intended. It doesn't look the same any more.
A non-profit is still a business. Success is necessary for existence.
Think about the number of companies that have been created to make, or heavily specialize in Arduino clones and accessories without having to pay Arduino a cent because the designs were intentionally open-sourced. It doesn't sound like a naked cash grab to me.
I have troubles calling something a "cash grab" when it's been arguably the single most influential project in the hacker/maker/DIY electronics space.
I don't doubt the boards could've been sold cheaper, but they clearly were doing something right given how much it changed the hobbyist landscape
Hopefully it will make Qualcomm behave more like Arduino and not the opposite. Qualcomm is one of the worse companies I have had the pleasure to work with.
Their support model is hellish and they provide very little information and documentation, so usually you’ll end up doing a lot of guessing and reverse engineering. They will tell you to sign a contract with one of their “design partners”, but even they can’t get answers for basic questions.
Seriously, if they want more small cap companies working with them they have to treat them better, I worked with them as a small company and as a larger company and in both cases their support was basically non existent even if we were buying chips from them for more than 10m$ a year.
Qcom is a corporate behemoth, much like Oracle. In the immortal words of Bryan Cantrill, it is a lawnmower and if you stick your hand in it you'll get it chopped off.
The title says - "Qualcomm to Acquire Arduino—Accelerating Developers’ Access to its Leading Edge Computing and AI"
Didn't have it on my bingo card that running AI on a microcontroller is what people are salivating for!
Not sure if the strategy is to cram AI into every little shoe box out there and keeping fingers crossed for the stock price to trend upwards!?
You can actually run TFlite Micro models on esp32-s3 reasonably fast, and it has a csi camera connector.
IIRC some of the ESP boards are "AI Optimised" but its like, facial and license plate recognition, not necessarily LLM stuff.
Yeah, I just did a project at work with an RP2040 and was really impressed with the Pico SDK. It hits a sweet spot in between ST’s insanity and Arduino’s easy-but-not-powerful tradeoff.
No crazy code generation, going from 0 to blinky is quick, but also going from blinky to DMA’s and interrupts is also a breeze.
I will say that I think the hardware peripherals in STM32’s are miles ahead, and PIO’s don’t necessarily make up the difference.
Yep the STM32 has certain advantages, even if they are usually complicated to program. With the Flipper Zero I programmed a low level timer interrupt and had to setup don't know how many registers... And the documentation is lacking. Also I love the fact that the STM32 comes in 5v variants that are great to interface it directly with things like a Commodore 64 or a Spectrum.
With their goal of 50/50 handset/non-handset revenue split by 2030, and their recent acquisitions pointing in the same direction, it stands to reason that they will do a lot of high capex investments into things like chiplet/chiplet communication for datacenters, automation/automotive, as well as edge AI. We can also observe they're baking in a lot of fpga-style configurability into a lot of these product lines - the connectivity fabric they acquired along with alphawave semi, their hexagon dsp, nuvia(oryon which they won the legal case for recently), etc,. which is another hint for the type of market they're targeting.
My opinion is that they should productize ESP [1] (no, not that one) which will be super harmonious with their goals.
Arduino acquisition, IMO, is putting one foot into manufacturing automation/automotive/sensors field. They have done similar in the past, arriver was an ADAS compute thing.
Personally I don't believe they will take the execution risk and scale up on all of these things. They will probably wait for the right time and chop off a few of these things and focus on whatever looks like it's going to be a cash cow.
Finance wise, there will be near term margin pressure but long term (IMO) they will execute superbly on a portion of their bets.
The main problem is the clock is ticking, handsets becoming commodified leading to vertical integration, licensing losing value, etc. Apple modem agreement running out soon too, and 6G modems too will not be as high margin due to diminishing improvements in telecom tech, even operator uptake at this point is looking unlikely after the 5G... debacle.
Which explains the very diverse bets they have made.
Will be interesting to see what they execute in this limited timeframe.
I moved to using Arduino compatibles due to the "two Arduino companies" drama a while back. I don't even recall how they resolved that dispute (or even if they did), but luckily I don't have to care as long as compatibles still work in the dev environment (or some fork thereof)
theyre going to push "AI on the edge" and "IoT" nonsense again
absolutely unbelievably cooked. anyone pushing that nonsense, short with leverage.
low latency connectivity + goliath data centres will always beat on-device inference/training.
> low latency connectivity
That's not exactly easy. I doubt on-device training will become much of a thing. But on-device inference is desirable in all sorts of distributed use cases. We're still a long way off from reliable internet everywhere. Especially when you want to start pushing large quantities of sensor data down the pipe.
I can't even get reliable internet on my phone in the centre of London.
Not necessarily. There are lots of use cases for on device AI inference. I run YOLO on an Nvidia Jetson powered Lenovo Think Edge, which processes incoming video at full frame rates on four channels with recognition and classification for a bespoke premises security system. No clouds involved other than the Nix package manager etc. Make sure your argument May carry more weight when you're talking about ultra low power devices like an Arduino running AI inference locally that seems like more of a stretch.
SOOOO buy Qualcomm. The second they start talking about AI-IOT stock is gonna sky rocket.
We live in a broken world.
tf are you on. just look at meta display glasses. it s all on board compute
its cool... but thats not gonna last long at all. soon theyre gonna put their own custom soc into it, just like google did.
especially for such a specific, space/power/thermal constrained platform. itd be weird if meta didnt put their own custom soc into it.
running a big tech company these days, theres enough custom work going around that basically all the big players have internal silicon teams. hell, even fintech shops with ~100 employees are doing tape-outs these days!
> privacy is a thing people care about.
Sadly, it seems that privacy is something that HN readers care about, but precious few others.
Look at the success of Facebook. The covers have been off that stinker for years, yet people still regularly use it; often to the exclusion of more traditional media. I have quite a few friends that I don't get invited to their occasions, because they only advertise them on FB. They invite a bunch of randos they've never met, but not those of us, they see all the time.
To be fair, if I sit down, and describe exactly what the ramifications of the "always on, always open" Facebook presence means, people will usually suddenly value privacy, but it seems that no one actually ever does that, at a level most folks can understand.
Hysterical rantings (even when well-founded), by geeks, don't get through to most folks. It needs to be done in the vernacular, and via media they actually consume.
This is desperation and I think it will go nowhere good.
Arduino has neither technical (standards, form-factor, pinouts), nor mindshare among developers that can be useful for high-speed, modern and upcoming AI-on-the-edge applications.
It sounds like Qualcomm is making a belated move towards robotics, but acquiring these assets is only going to distract them from becoming a successful player.
My takeaway from this announcement is that are going to ruin Arduino's current IDE and replace it with... something called Arduino App Lab? They didn't go into specifics as to what this is, other than it will integrate AI, somehow.
The other thing they announced is that they are going to sell at least one of their SBCs under the Arduino brand. That's kind of cool, I guess.
This announcement was very difficult to read. The whole thing sounds like it was written by chatGPT and it and it really shows. It took them roughly four pages to announce these two things and nothing else. I can't help but feel there is some level of malice to this, like they are taking out of Microsoft's playbook of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish".
No they won't. I've seen them coming a looooong way. I even re-baptised arduidiots [0] quite a while ago. Since the "branding" fiasco I've stayed well clear of them.
[0]: https://github.com/buserror/simavr/blob/master/examples/shar...
you can't say no on this website, downvoted until you change it to `yes, they won't`
I hope this will make Arduino more suitable as a quick & easy dev tool for professional products.
I recently tried it out, with an STM32 board, but found out that the USB communication buffer is overwritten when data comes in too quickly. This is quite disappointing because the relevant communication protocol is perfectly capable of stalling transfers. Some internet searching revealed that many people are complaining about this. And the proposed solution of increasing the buffer size is of course not really a solution.
Someone should fix this. I know Arduino is marketed as hobbyist, and I can live with not being able to squeeze the juice out of my hardware to the fullest, but I was surprised to see that apparently they don't take correctness seriously.
Fucking hell.
Qualcomm is one of the worst vendors out there to deal with if you're a small hardware developer - let alone the kind of hobbyist who wants to use Arduino boards.
In a perfect world? Qualcomm would use Arduino to bring some of their chipsets and devices to public, and have the Arduino team open them up to small developers. Essentially doing what Pi Foundation is doing for Broadcom - package their unpalatable ICs into something that people actually use.
But we're not in a perfect world. We're in the kind of world where Qualcomm exists in the first place.
The pessimist in me fully expects Qualcomm to make Arduino worse rather than Arduino to make Qualcomm better.
Is arduino even relevant at all in 2025? I mean i gotta hand it to em they're getting an insane amount of life out of marketing a 20 year old chip but I haven't seriously considered using one for a decade or so because of how much better in literally every way the esp32 is. I mean it's like $10 for three of them, they're dual core, have a radio on board and you can even use the arduino IDE for em, what's the downside? I especially love the two cores because I can have a web stack and bluetooth on one core, and whatever realtime actual programming i need to do on the second core.
My first instinct to this piece of news is a five-char word starting with 'S'.
But reading through the news, it seems to be fine?
> Arduino will preserve its open approach and community spirit while unlocking a full‑stack platform for modern development—with Arduino UNO Q as the first step.
> The new Arduino UNO Q is a next-generation single board computer featuring a “dual brain” architecture—a Linux Debian-capable microprocessor and a real-time microcontroller—to bridge high-performance computing with real-time control.
Looks like they want to use the brand to push out their own stuffs, which seems to be reasonable. As long as they don't touch the education/OSS part I guess it will benefit both.
> Looks like they want to use the brand to push out their own stuffs, which seems to be reasonable. As long as they don't touch the education/OSS part I guess it will benefit both.
Given the current market for Qualcomm, it honestly wouldn't surprise me if in a few years they drop that education and OSS platform in favour of a paid approach. Recent Slack news doing the same has tainted my confidence.
33 Million audrino users, you can guarantee they want a piece of their wallets.
OK that makes sense, but I guess educational arduino stuffs doesn't have a deep moat, so it was already copied else where and can be done further.
Whenever a VC backed company is acquired, the press release says "nothing will change, except for all these wonderful new things that the parent company will let us now do". A year later, things start to change. Two years later, the situation is unrecognizable. Qualcomm has no immediate financial incentive to support the education/OSS portion, and so they'll let it die. That's how these things always go.
Arduino is over. In reality, as soon as they took VC funding, it was over.
Yes! Including a null-terminator '\0'
:P thought someone is going to ask but great that people on HN figured it out already
This news is making me much sadder than maybe it should.
Arduino is what pulled me into electronics. I have such fond memories of those old chonkers blinking LEDs. It felt like magic.
Unless they've had a major staffing and leadership shakeup, there is a zero percent chance Qualcomm is going to suddenly become some kind of open, sharing, culture. The company DNA is patent troll.
The recent joint ventures are a perfect example. I got so excited by those newish super powerful penta-whatever Qualcomm chips from Arduino a few years ago.
Then learned the chips were unobtainable outside the Arduino modules.
Complete garbage move by a garbage company.
I heard the rumor quite some months ago but it was mostly speculation, altough it made sense after they acquired Edge Impulse.
I'm not sure whether to be happy or not to be fair. Main issues with Arduino while I was there was the leadership lack of vision and the unwillingness to support projects coming from the engineers. It was a company kinda coasting and unsure where to go.
If they replace leadership with people that have an clear vision and focus this might be good.
My greatest hope is that people with stocks don't get screwed over though, they used to distribute them quite "easily" at a certain point to avoid raising salaries.
Seems like a shrewd move. Historically Qualcomm products were only available to the top 5 phone vendors. You couldn't even steal a datasheet... If they're serious about opening up their products to more potential customers this might be a great way. Follow the raspberry pi model. You never know when a garage product will grow into the next multi-billion dollar socket. TI/ST/NXP/etcc could do this too and all it takes is cheap PCB's (mass produce at scale) and lots of documentation.....
Professional embedded developer and Arduino afficionado here: the amount of misinformation and hot takes here is astounding. First, Arduino is aimed at making technology usable for non-engineers. The ease of use makea them a breeze for engineers though. There's nothing wrong with making something serious with Arduino as long as the project fits within the confines of Arduino.
Arduino refers to a company as well as a hardware and software platform. It doesn't only mean an ATMega based board. You can have an ESP32 based Arduino board.
Arduino boards aren't designed for high performance or very high speed signal integrity.They are designed to be easy to use by non technical people.
I see people saying stuff like the ESP IDF and FreeRTOS are easy enough to use for most people. First, Arduino on ESP32 is built on the FreeRTOS based IDF, so people who would rather use FreeRTOS don't exactly know what they are talking about. Second, anyone who thinks FreeRTOS is easy enough to use for Arduino's core audience is delulu.
Use the proper tool for the job. Arduino is for beginners, non-technical people, and for projects with undemanding requirements. Stop pretending that it's a half baked solution for engineers; that completely misses the point of Arduino.
You also now who misses the point? Qualcomm. Why? Well just read the headline qualcomm itself provides.
Guess the corporate development team needed to justify its existence. We've been through many dubious acquisitions in the tech sector for the last 5 years or so.
Arduino wasn't strictly confined to Atmel/Microchip for a while now. Their newest mainstream boards roll with Renesas chips.
And Qualcomm itself is not in the business of making mass market MCUs. Does Qualcomm want to be?
They can, they already have the kind of dies they could put into those. But they would be competing against the likes of ST, and they wouldn't have the wide ass margins they're used to.
They would also have to be writing public documentation, and dealing with hobbyists and small developers. And the impression I got from dealing with Qualcomm? They'd rather douse themselves in gasoline and set themselves on fire than acknowledge that small developers exist.
They has added other vendors for years now. The Uno R4 uses Renesas MCU and espressif module.
Arduino is an open-source platform — both its hardware and software are open to everyone, right?
The first Arduino I built cost me just $5. I assembled all the parts on a breadboard, and it worked perfectly with the Arduino IDE, just like the ESP32 does nowadays.
Is Qualcomm basically paying for the brand? I didn’t even realize Arduino was a brand at first.
The brand. All of their other stuff is essentially open, so they're just going to start adding new features that aren't open to force people to use their brand and probably claim ownership of any code that is published through their app or something, or make it so that builds will only work on their qualcomm chips.
Oh, and likely there will be telemetry and user data acquisition in the arduino app so they'll probably also get some juicy user data to sell along the way.
They'll sell a few more chips while they're at it.
I'm glad there's nothing I need to do that an ESP32 or ESP8266 can't do.
Currently, no. But currently, the only gateway drug to Qualcomm chips is being a large enough company that your company can beat Qualcomm into submission.
Qualcomm may want to change that? But if Qualcomm's treatment of small developers remains the usual Qualcomm scorn, they'll get nowhere.
This reminds me of Intel and Samsung's brief forays into the microcontroller world (Edison and Artik, if anyone's wondering what to Google). Maybe Qualcomm is in it for the long haul though. IoT is going to grow, and Intel and Samsung just lost focus.
I'm a bit baffled by this. For those of you who were paying attention there was a big controversy when Arduino split with Arduino and filed a lawsuit[1]. That made it hard to get hardware and resulted in a bunch of open source folks who had been contributing to redouble their efforts to insure that all of the copyrights and licenses were FOSS so that this couldn't happen again.
And that makes me wonder what Qualcomm "bought." Was it the trademark? The form factor? Presumably this won't affect things that leveraged the infrastructure like platform.io ? Was there money involved? Who got it and how much?
Part of me wonders if this is in response to Qualcomm being unable to acquire the Raspberry Pi foundation, and given their focus on the new 'Q' and "Linux-Debian"[2] its not much different than a Raspberry Pi[3]. So many questions and "We heard you liked AI so we put some AI in your AI" kinds messaging?
This is really baffling to me.
[1] Arduino, LLC v. Arduino S.R.L. et al -- https://dockets.justia.com/docket/massachusetts/madce/1:2015...
[2] I always chuckle at distro specific Linux as a 'thing.'
[3] "Hey look we have this computer that runs Linux and has a connector on the board so you can plug I/O devices into the top of it! Isn't that neat and unique?"
Seems natural as both Qualcomm and Arduino feel like companies that have struggled to keep up in markets they previously were at the forefront of. Maybe they can work better together.
Hope good things come out of it.
My favorite thing from Arduino was the UNO R3, highly versatile for "hardware" stuff at way back then.
I heard Espressif / ESP32 was its spiritual "successor".
rpi is owned by broadcom since the begining the moment they stop selling them their closed source firmware’s cpu, be the end of rpi project anyway, rpi is just a PR stunt to push brand recognition among nerds, so they buy real business broadcom products for real profits
qualcomm are pos.
after more than a decade of releasing CPUs for Linux based Android they released Snapdragon X CPU with Windows only support, intentionally not providing Linux drivers, to chum up with M$.
it was one of the rare opportunities to break the AMD / Apple duopoly for PC CPUs/SoCs.
Well that seems like a worst case scenario. Qualcomm not known for open source legacy.
I don't have any faith in them doing anything good. Feels like the microcontroller ecosystem is going to get replaced with a quad core application CPU running Kubernetes on Linux while a companion microcontroller runs 5 lines of c code to blink an LED.
Are we going to get datasheets or are we getting Raspberry Pi 2: nodatasheet boogaloo and the community has to spend the next 5 years reverse engineering the fuckin thing while loading binary blobs.
How does this work when Qualcomm hides its technical documentation?
call me cynical but I can't imagine this ending very well. Even if qualcomm does nothing to alter the operations at Arduino, what happens if they go belly-up in a decade?
IDK, what kind of innovation we need from Arduino now? Arduino IDE exists and is open source. Arduino Uno exists and is open source. Arduino cores, both from Arduino itself and third-party exist and are open source. Not sure how they made money recently, I hope they are up to something good with Qualcomm.
> Not sure how they made money recently,
That's an easy riddle to answer: Nothing sold by Arduino is particularly inexpensive. They've got room for profit margin. It's easier to make money when the things are several times more expensive than the competitors.
To pick an example: I can get a sketchy-feeling ESP32 board that was manufactured by some nameless entity and sold by a company that calls themselves "QQQMFXFDCX" or something. It'll probably generally work, but the pins will be in whatever order, labeled however, and I might have to spend some time documenting its unknown [mis]features. It will cost me a few dollars.
Or, I mean: I can get one from Arduino with their name on it (and with a ublox-branded module) in their Nano form-factor for ~$20. It will work fine. The pins will be [mostly] in numeric order, and labeled on both sides of the board. It will cost me about $20.
There's a lot more potential profit margin in a $20 sale than there is in a $3 sale.
(Do they add enough value to make me want to spend $20 instead of $3? Not necessarily, but I'm pretty cheap.)
Arduino wasn't in the best shape some months ago to be fair, quite some people took offers to lower their working hours with a lower salary too.
They have the PCB files and schematics linked from here: https://store-usa.arduino.cc/products/arduino-uno-rev3 It says "Arduino Uno is open-source hardware! You can build your own board using the following files"
Found some licensing info here: https://support.arduino.cc/hc/en-us/articles/4415094490770-L...
Thanks! That doesn't seem like a tempting target for patent trolling (which wasn't your assertion).
Arduino lost the narrative when official Arduino boards were $35, and a clone was $5, if that.
Arduino Megas? $110 official, $12 on Ali. Extra $10 gets you a RAMPS 1.4 board for full 3d printer platform. Yeah, a whoile Marlin-capable 3d printer board for $20. Id argue that THIS is what caused the 3d printer boom.
Arduino nano? Officially? Who knows. I bought them in bulk $1.40 and were pin compatible, and breadboardable.
And this was all true back in 2012 and up. Even their "Motor Shield" official driver was a pile of crap. Used an LM298 iirc. I would just go buy an a4988 stepper driver for a whole $.99 and run steppers.
They made the ecosystem, but they haven't properly stewarded or oversaw it. And now that Qualcomm is now owner, eh, fuck it. Stick with clones or ESP. (And for those who've had the displeasure of dealing with Qualcomm, yeah, just dont.)
This means Arduino is no longer European, but American instead. This is relevant and unfortunate as Trump has made everything American taste bitter.
Any article that uses 'empower' is automatically in my books bullshit and bad for downstream receivers of the news. This uses it Five times. I can see their strategy; data-center with VMware and now Arduino on the edge, but in the first case unless you have massive budget you're leaving ASAP, and really many Arduino users are precisely in that bracket, so they are 'already left'. Platform.io maybe? What are other OSS alternatives?
What I was actually hoping for.. and so far turned out disappointed, is a half-decent LTE/4/5G module that can be Arduino compatible.
Just like ESP8266 (and later -32) variant opened up the IoT over WiFi, there is a potential industry-wide opportunity space for a decent, low-cost, always-online (just bring SIM) hobby board. Without awful vendor tooling. And ideally without "modem-to-something" bridge (which almost always means AT+ and vendor tooling..)
I like https://www.makerfabs.com/maduino
It uses Simcomm modules...
Thank goodness I switched to nrf + embassy before this happened
Already in their future plans I can see the seeds of enshittification. I loved Arduino and built many projects with it. Hoping I am wrong about their future.
Hmm... maybe not less, but IMHO majority of the startups now focus on "discrupting the market" and colleting enough VC money that they could survive to be bought up by the bigger player.
The whole landscape is put on the head - instead of promoting creating something new that could survive on its own and be useful and provitable for the creator we are now in the market of creating a fodder for the BigCorp
ESP stuff is so damn cheap and capable now I'm not sure what you would use Arduino for these days.