Arduino raises $32M Series B round
blog.arduino.cc
blog.arduino.cc
I have observed hobbyists innovating in really cool ways in all sorts of corners - musicians, athletes, retro computer collectors, etc
Very glad to see they're being well funded and can continue building
PS - I elect this as the greatest current Arduino contribution to humanity - The Furby Organ - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYLBjScgb7o
You mean Vivado?
So many tv commercials can’t be wrong
This hardware unfortunately doesn't have either of that; it requires Intel Quartus for design and synthesis.
(In the past I've tried running the commercial products under WINE, like most people did at the time, and it worked but was definitely terrible.)
It’s been around for awhile now… more than a decade
Ok, so it came and went. A decade ago.
HDL, Logic Gates, State machines + custom startup code + blah blah blah --> became ???
GP is looking for "???" to materialize.
With that said, I'm learning FPGA's using TinyFPGA just to add it to my tool box.
There are hobbyist who wire up an LED, make it blink and get immense satisfaction out of that. There are also hobbyist who putter around with a scanning electron microscope in their shed, and everything in between.
There are hobbyist who learn the things you mention and more.
> Programming in HDL is fundamentally different from C++ or Python..
Ok? And cheese making is fundamentally different from radio astronomy. Yet there are hobbyist pursuing both.
> I just don't get the allure of fpgas from amateurs who don't need to use them for work.
Let me give you an example. One summer when i was younger I have found a Xilinx Spartan dev board in a dusty bin in our hackspace. Nobody around me did know anything about it, it was probably a donation originally. I spent about two weeks playing with that thing. The most advanced stuff I ever got working was some example code found on the internet which synthetised a pong game through a vga connector. It was generating the video signal through just turning its outputs on and off in the right patterns. That was total magic to me. I spent the time understanding every line of the code and modifying it to do different things. I was goofing off, learning about tech, and having a great time.
I’m not saying this is the only way to enjoy an FPGA, but it certainly illustrates that hobbyist can get value out of one.
Nothing against the Arduino folks; they really opened up a great avenue for exploration. But it doesn't seem cost-competitive at the moment.
We should stick to standard Arduino code that should run on all compatible Arduino devices.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/adafruit-disc...
Why should the entire hobbyist hardware space be an Arduino monoculture?
IMO the Arduino proto-language and framework are quite mediocre and it's time to move on. For beginners, embedded hardware has gotten much more powerful and more familiar languages can be employed. For more advanced users and larger projects, using a real RTOS with a real task system unlocks development velocity in a huge way.
I don't really love CircuitPython, but I don't see how this is comparable to the Wiring/Arduino situation, nor do I really see it as a step backwards.
Arduino created the ecosystem, and while I agree it’s definitely a problematic way to approach things, I don’t really see a replacement for it in the C/C++ space currently. Using something like PlatformIO, which is almost objectively better from a developer perspective, is IMO not what I would consider a replacement. My hope is that eventually embedded Rust will have something beginner friendly like what Arduino offers but I don’t even see the nascent beginnings of something like that currently.
https://blog.adafruit.com/2022/04/20/new-guide-adafruit-esp3... "Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino."
Arduino's approach has historically been to sell breakout boards for commodity microcontrollers. They do not have any history of success in any of the fields they're proposing to enter, and particularly not in IoT services or AI.
Arduino has made approaches to industry before, e.g. with the Portenta series of boards. They have generally been unsuccessful, in large part because their approach to industry has generally been "look, we're using industrial temperature range ICs" -- hardly a compelling offering.
However I assume they'll want to take a chunk out of the Raspberry Pi market -- whose hardware always was shit, but whose execution has lately been terrible as well, what with the years-long scarcity of boards.
The Pi's secret to its success is arguably its community support, and I think only Arduino can match that.
An example for the first group: trying to save a couple hundred USD/EUR and using it where a PLC would be universally better choice (IO protection, EMC assurances, maintenance).
Examples of the second group: delay functions disabling interrupts leading to missed serial data, (L)GPL'd library code, lack of debugging support (until recently), any sleep mode support.
Don't get me wrong- there is a lot of good stuff in there- some of the libraries and projects built around it are really useful but effective use of them requires deeper knowledge than getting an intern "just doing it on an Arduino".
Predictably, the machine was constantly broken (a loose solder joint here, a spurious reset when some other machine was turned on there). Luckily,it did not lead to serious accidents, but eventually all of that was scrapped after wasting a few months and a controls company replaced it with appropriate solution.
Oh, that touches on another interesting and important point.
Most development hardware, including Arduino boards, gets to skip a lot of standard EMI/EMC compliance testing because they're considered subassemblies and/or test equipment. Integrating them into a finished product means the integrator is going to be responsible for doing the testing and making any changes required for compliance -- at which point, they're probably better off building something equivalent themselves.
For some reason I was under the impression they were a non-profit or some corporate supported education related thing.
Outside of selling a few boards that can be hard to get a hold of how do they make all this money back? Just about as soon as I started playing with one Arduino I found other third party hardware better suited my needs. I don't really see any reason to use Arduino's hardware over anyone else's compatible hardware ....
> Arduino's approach has historically been to sell breakout boards for commodity microcontrollers.
Maybe that was compelling around 2010, but it certainly isn't now. The AVR models aren't even that great, many of the alternatives are much, much more performant and feature-packed (ESP8266/32), as well as smaller and available in many form factors.
The only compelling (and really innovative) thing Arduino did was building an abstraction for many different kinds of micro controller boards and building an easy to use IDE for them. This was and is, of course, a huge deal! But here too the landscape isn't what it used to be. Larger projects nowadays use PlatformIO and I could see that increasing, though, to be fair, that is still much more complex to get started with. Arduino is still the simplest way to program a micro controller ... but in my mind Arduino hardware is a legacy offering barely anyone uses.
The focus of this "expansion" is thus correct. I'm not that they'll be able to create much more interesting software. The Arduino IDE wasn't even great, just a good enough thing at the right time paired with a great ecosystem. Maybe that's their offering here ... but how relevant is that in "the enterprise"?
arduino.org redirects to arduino.cc so maybe?
[0] https://techwombat.com/bcmi-acquires-arduino-ag-makers-breat...
Seriously ?
Maybe folks do and it's just me that finds that weird.
It about as useful as their astrological sign.
Youngsters online also seem very keen on referring to older people as boomers, because the online world is smaller and american cultural influence is stronger then it used to be.
Edit: yes, Italian youngsters also forget that gen x exists, much like the US kids do.
There are various community moderators on the Reddit and other places that are also actively hostile looking for their empowerment high. I've been censored and banned for pointing it out when it happens even.
It would easily put off enthusiasts. Many I know just left Arduino and started using NodeMCU platform.
Quite often this falls into the trap of the "XY Problem", where the initial premise starts off wrong. "How do I use this hammer to change the flat tyre on my car?" is best answered with "You should use a wheelbrace. Why do you want to use a hammer?" because it's important to find out how the person asking the question got to that place to begin with.
The answers could be more polite but what’s really missing is something that makes sure new users understand what an XY problem is, understand the limitations of arduino, and understand where to find good tutorials.
Hooray for Arduino, they deserve to get bigger and more widely accepted.
Barring certain libraries that underperform in order to teach their operating principles in a simpler fashion, the general framework has no overhead or runtime to waste computing power, as the original Arduino is a rather small 8bit AVR.
You can program the fastest RT Arm processors with it as well…
So many offshoots and interwoven webs.
At least a few things they did were in use at nearly every job I've ever had, and they did well every time, aside from a few times when a Pi would have been more appropriate.
https://arduinohistory.github.io/
Then the Arduino team had their own further battle about rights. The Arduino folks don't seem to be the most honest of folks. I have always avoided Arduino due to this history.
Want to reign in the lawyers? Start with your governments.
I'm not sure what would be improved by trying to avoid Arduino at this point. Especially considering that it has spawned a very large and versatile ecosystem: all of the open source libraries that have been created for it (some random amazing ones: [0], [1]), the compatible shields and accessories [2], tutorials & courses, etc.
It remains an extremely important and useful platform, and for good reason.
[0] https://github.com/Avamander/arduino-tvout
Also, the first inventor is only one part of any product, and it's hard to argue that Massimo did wrong to the community by popularizing Arduino, and people still know what Wiring is.
Also, Banzi wrote this:
https://blog.arduino.cc/2013/07/10/send-in-the-clones/
lamenting this exact thing when it came to people doing it to Arduino.
Slightly off topic but in Banzi's article (subheading Counterfeits) he mentions the now well known problem of Amazon cohousing different manufacturers products and then effectively sending a random one to the client. I think this is interesting as it still seems to be a problem nearly a decade later.
My day job takes credit for my work, but compensates me in money. Pretty much the only "pay" for the vast majority of open source work is credit.
> it's hard to argue that Massimo did wrong to the community by popularizing Arduino
So who made that argument? I haven't seen anyone claim his marketing efforts were unethical.
But let's say you wrote a significant part of a book. I took your work, completed it, and published it as solely my work. It becomes wildly successful. Have I done anything wrong?
Although lately I've found myself requiring basic IP/wi-fi for almost every usecase, so I've turned to ESP8266/ESP32 boards instead of AVR boards.
Here's hoping for a low-cost wi-fi-enabled Raspberry Pi Pico. I wonder what the wi-fi IP licensing cost is like for companies that actually need to pay attention to things like that.
That explains why I haven’t found many battery powered Arduino options…. it is better on other boards.
TY
Here is one I have seen, but I haven't used or played with it.
https://thepihut.com/products/challenger-rp2040-wifi-chip-an...
I suppose I'm wishing for an Espressif-like approach. A (low-power?) RPxxxx core fully assigned to running a Wi-Fi software stack, in the same RPxxxx chip, along with having the analogue RF aspects handled by the same chip/package.
Recommended movie, Dark Matter [1].
I had the first Arduino model with a COM port bought to me by my late mother to spike my interest into computer stuff when I was in high school.
I grew a bit over confident with what I can do, when on my first job I went on to fix an MP3 player firmware so it don't crash from Russian in ID3 tags.
I told the boss the fix is trivial, then it took me 3 month to find out that whatever you knew of garden variety C++ is not working in the world of hardcore C, and that hardware needs control down to clock cycles, registers, and assembly instructions. It was a sink, or swim experience.
I’ve recently dealt with power-on reset, oscillator start up, and UART timing issues which required digging into 600 page data sheets to resolve the issues. No way in hell I’d ever deploy a product with circuit Python, Wiring, Arduino, etc.