Comment by pclmulqdq 7 days ago
People are making so much of this when it seems so much simpler. Qualcomm likes buying high-margin businesses, and Arduino is a high-margin business. Gross margin on their boards is over 90% (hence why you can buy a Chinese clone of a $30 board for $3) and this trend shows no signs of slowing down. The TI equivalent of the $30 Arduino Uno is $5, and it's a true gateway product.
Long live Teensy [1]!
I just wanted that someone mentioned these Arduino-likes in the comments. I suspect many of you have come across them though.
The teensy is so weird though. At least back when I played with them. They put a secondary chip which let's you flash over USB but they cover the debug pins and the only way to get serial over the USB port is to have a whole USB stack as part of your application. As a development board I would rather go with one of those STM32 backed boards and a knock off STLink, you need the STLink to flash, if you want DFU you can add that yourself, and you get a debug adapter.
Could you clarify what you mean about getting serial over the USB port in the context of debug pins?
I've been using Teensy devices for over a decade and have always had it just recognize the device as if it were a USB to serial adapter and I can talk to it as what I'd call "serial over the USB port". But that obviously doesn't involve what I think software people usually mean when they're talking about firmware debug -- which usually entails stepping through execution, right?
I'm used to just printing debug statements to the Serial.println() function, I learned on the 8051 where the best bet was to toggle different pins when code lines are passed, so even Serial.println() was a huge step up.
It wasn't specifically in the context of debug pins.
On a "normal" arduino, an FTDI chip on the board handles the job of exposing a serial adapter to your computer over USB. The atmel chip on the other side of the FTDI chip runs your code and getting serial out from your firmware is a short codepath which directly uses the UART peripheral.
On a teensy, there is still a secondary chip, but its just a small microcontroller running PJRC code. This microcontroller talks over the debug pins of the main chip, and those pins aren't broken out (at least back when I last used a teensy). Despite covering the debug pins, this chip only handles flashing and offers no other functionality. Since there is no USB serial adapter, for hobbyists trying to use it for running code with an arduino HAL, the HAL has to ship an entire USB driver just for you to get serial over USB. And this itself means you can't use the USB for other purposes.
For advanced users, this makes debugging much harder, and god forbid you need to debug your USB driver.
It's kind of just a bunch of weird tradeoffs which maybe don't matter too much if you are just trying to run arduino sketches on it but it was annoying for me when I was trying to develop bare metal firmware for it in C.
Do you mean the Uno specifically? There are a lot of Arduino boards with varying capabilities.
You seem to equate gateway product = affordable but, IMHO, a gateway product is something that people who are not in the field are likely to stumble upon. I recently saw Arduino kits for kids at a small local bookstore, I can imagine someone thinking "hey this electronic thingy looks cool I'll buy one for my niece's birthday". On the flip side, people who don't know anything about microcontrollers are not going to look online for Chinese Arduino clones.
>people who don't know anything about microcontrollers are not going to look online for Chinese Arduino clones.
But high chance they will look it up on Amazon/Ebay/whatever e-store and buy a clone without knowing.
clone relies on hardware being designed and software written - this takes a lot of money, so you can't just count the final price of parts as the price.
Arduino is open sourced in hard and software which allows this cheap cloning to exist. It also helps a lot with software and docs, which makes it cheaper for them.
> A competent engineer designing a devkit as simple as an arduino needs about 1 day of work.
Hah! I like to underestimate scope as well, but this is really something else. Definitely a competent engineer could make something like this. But a couple of months maybe. You won't even read the documentation for the chip in a day.
Have you seen the schematics for these boards? They are exceptionally simple. Many devkits are much more complicated.
I have actually done embedded engineering in the past and I was being generous with "a day." Skimming a datasheet is a skill and it certainly will not take a day to get the information you need off of it.
I have been modifying Arduino libraries for weeks, there is much more work in them than just a single day. Granted replacing the Arduino IDE with Autoconf took 3 days. (2 and a half of which were spend on analyzing what the IDE does.)
It’s not quite that easy, and besides the hard part is the SW. arduino spent years writing SW code and still does to make it easy to run, debug issues and provide support.
Also a million dev kits is unrealistic for vast majority of companies 5-20k is more the number I hard.
To be frank, the Arduino ide was a fork of Processing's and the compiler suite was GCC. They 'simply' glued the pre-existing pieces together. I'm not saying that it's trivial to do that but it's also not exactly a herculean task. Even the bootloader was a fork of Hernando Barragán's pre-existing Wiring project.
>but it's also not exactly a herculean task.
To me it sounds like maybe 10 software engineers for a year. You gotta do a bootloader, test it out thoroughly, setup compiler to work, glue all the pieces together, write the missing pieces, test it all some more…
It’s expensive…
The Raspberry Pi Pico blows the Arduino out of the water in terms of computational speed, available RAM and so on, and it costs a fraction. I don't remember using an Arduino since the Pi Pico came out. And if the Pico isn't enough there are the bigger family members waiting in the wings. For me Arduino is mostly over. And then there is Espressif as well, they make some neat boards.