Comment by bjt2n3904 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bjt2n3904 | Hacker News Reader

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In short, the Arduino was popular because how bad everything else was. Travel back ten years, and look for an embedded development kit. This is what you'll find.

Average cost is gonna be about $100 for the board. Oh, did I mention you'll need another $80 for the programmer? It only runs on Windows XP, by the way. Closed source custom USB driver that no one understands. Wine chokes out, so no running it on Mac or Linux. PS: The programmer was the "student edition". You'll only be able to program their low end series of chips, and hardware debugging is disabled.

I forgot to mention. You're limited to the free assembler / IDE, that only allows you to use 4k of space. If you want to use any more, you need to purchase a license for $250. And by "integrated", I mean no using your own makefiles or editors.

There's no "stack overflow" style community, either. Your support is limited to poorly written app notes behind a crumby web portal.

And then the Arduino came out. $20 gives you the board, and programmer. No licenses. No drivers. Open documentation. Works with a fork of GCC. Want to use VIM and Makefiles? An Eclipse based IDE? Work on a Mac? Comes with a vibrant community, a repository of examples, and inexpensive addon hardware.

TL;DR - Want your product to die? Force me to use your crumby closed source / "evaluation period" tools from the 90's, lock everything away behind NDA's and web portals, and provide no support community for your product.

Looking at you, FPGA manufacturers. Does your revenue come from selling chips, or selling crap development environments?

The magic of AVR was that it always had a great, opensource toolkit in the form of avr-gcc and plenty of community support around it. The AVR Freaks forum started well before stack overflow and offered a tremendous volume of support.

I do agree about the expensive programmers though. However, there were people out there who wired up their own using the STK200 configuration and put the schematics online for the community's use.

Programmers (irrespective of micros) have always been relatively expensive - even the home-brew ones. It's only recently (say in the past 5-8 years) they've become cheaper thanks to people's interest in hobby boards like the Rasberry Pi.

The biggest problem was the availability of JTAG debuggers. Atmel had the reference, closed-source implementation. Although the community managed to eventually reverse engineer their implementation and cheaper ones became available on eBay (usually from China).

I have the same experience with FPGA development boards. I wanted to learn VHDL but gave up after 2 days with the "getting started" tutorial.

The assumption here is that if you go for FPGA design you should already have at least some knowledge of embedded applications.

FPGA development process is aimed squarely at corporations and rightly so.

There is very few hobbyist projects that really require FPGA. Most of cases where I saw FPGA in use was not because it was needed but because the person didn't know how to achieve the result using other, more appropriate means.

> FPGA development process is aimed squarely at corporations and rightly so.

Sure, I wouldn't burn too much money advertising FPGAs to makers and hackers. But I wouldn't design my platform to exclude them.

The accessibility and hackability of the Arduino and the Raspberry Pi helped create the IOT field (for better or for worse). The only reason the Raspberry Pi exists is because there was an insider at broadcom that was able to convince them to sell a smaller quantity of chips.

> We were able to get our foot in the door to discuss buying chips in much smaller numbers than they usually sell (you’re right about millions of chips) because Eben works there and was able to get access to the right people, who were right on side once we had explained the goals of the charity. [1]

Alienating and raising the barrier for smaller players hinders business development. What cool projects would exist now if FPGA vendors weren't so stuffy?

[1] - https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/qa-with-our-hardware-team/

I think FPGAs are not like general purpose MCUs.

I think the comparision is like between CPU and GPU. GPUs are fantastic at solving some of the problems but you don't see people rushing to use GPUs in every computing application.

Chances are, if you can implement it on MCU you will want to implement it on MCU because:

1) you need an MCU anyway either separate or FPGA based one

2) FPGA programming is sucha a hassle and not because of the tools but because it is genuinely hard

3) learning FPGA development well is a major effort as it requires different type of thinking. It is much more of a change that going from one programming language to another as entire concept of what is a program changes.

4) if you need more power, it is typically easier to step to more powerful MCU than to FPGA.

As I understand, we need some number of very specialized people that can invest the time to learn hardware design on FPGA and the rest is better off spending that time thinking of fun MCU-based projects:)

A GPU is much closer to a CPU and a MCU, than any of these is to a FPGA.

VHDL is a different thing entirely from any programming language. It's not ranked as a programming language by the way. It might be easier to learn if you don't know any programming but know how to make integrated circuit boards.

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