> users are now explicitly forbidden from reverse-engineering or even attempting to understand how the platform works unless Arduino gives permission.
I briefly looked at their IDE and CLI repos and GitHub claims they're AGPL and GPL 3 respectively. I didn't see a CLA when I looked at their contribution guide.
Am I missing something here? What basis do they have to restrict users' rights to reverse engineer the software?
A missing piece of the puzzle that i feel is ommitted in Adafruits posting, is that the changes only affect the Arduino Cloud Services, which provide various github-like services for the arduino ecosystem.
Looking over the changes with this in mind, it seems a lawyer just applied the same standard SaaS legal language to what is effectively a SaaS offering, pretty normal in most cases.
None of these changes will affect the Arduino open-source hardware project.
> The Site is part of the platform developed and managed by Arduino, which allows users to take part in the discussions on the Arduino forum, the Arduino blog, the Arduino User Group, the Arduino Discord channel, and the Arduino Project Hub, and to access the Arduino main website, subsites, Arduino Cloud, Arduino Courses, Arduino Certifications, Arduino Docs, the Arduino EDU kit sites to release works within the Contributor License Agreement program, and to further develop the Arduino open source ecosystem (collectively, the “Platform”).
> 8.2 User shall not: translate, decompile or reverse-engineer the Platform, or engage in any other activity designed to identify the algorithms and logic of the Platform’s operation, unless expressly allowed by Arduino or by applicable license agreements
So yeah, it seems like the definition of "Platform" is limited only to their hosted services.
Yeah I already found it odd that it was about what “users uploaded” seeing that Arduino is not necessarily a platform to upload things to, it can be, but not necessarily.
Also Adafruit being a store, isnt there a matter of conflict of interest with posts like this?
The new Arduino UNO Q features a beefy Qualcomm SOC running Linux, alongside an STM32 microcontroller which is programmable from the Arduino IDE. The MCU side is wide open, but the SOC side is full of proprietary firmware blobs, so I assume the lawyers are concerned about those being reverse engineered.
I'm now realising I do not really know where the Arduino IDE gets all the libraries and board definitions from. I assume that's now Qualcomm owned web services with Qualcomm defined TOS?
I also wonder if anyone's backed/scraped the forums?
I think the question is, what use is adding a CLA if the core functionality was under (A)GPL? Unless you go back and get all the OG contributors to sign over their rights, how can you relicense?
I have my own war stories from working at Qualcomm. Gather together, children.
Ahem. One upon a time I was the tech lead for one of the many software components in Qualcomm's GPU software stack. At one point there was customer interest in caching certain blobs of data that were relatively costly to compute, in order to reduce the startup times of a wide range of apps.
Since the caching needed to happen across different processes over time, we needed some sort of persistent storage with some metadata to track stuff like usage stats, limit storage requirements, etc. Simple stuff, right? I decided that we didn't need to reinvent the wheel, and thus suggested to the team's most recent hire to use SQLite.
Oh, Dear Lord. That was a mistake. SQLite worked great, no, no. That wasn't the issue. The problem was obtaining approval from Legal to use SQLite in our little project.
"Does SQLite have one of those viral licenses that require you to open-source your own code?" -- you may ask. No, it doesn't. It is the most lax OSS license that you could ask for. Super friendly to commercial closed-source projects.
No, the obstacle was that Legal wanted to audit SQLite line by line, down to the books and research that was mentioned in the comments, searching for anything from copyright infringement within SQLite itself, to patents that may be associated with any of its features. IIRC, it was going to take months and would require approval by my management chain. And any time we wanted to upgrade the version of SQLite we shipped with would require another extensive review.
Ah so the Oracle syndrome, where the engineering is a sidekick in the lawyer business?
In all seriousness, this is just appalling. This would make a good poison pill to prevent an opensource project from being used in such a corporation /s
Thanks for sharing! The sad part is, it's the qualcomm customers that pay for the end result.
Eh. I used to work for a large corporation that had multiple development sites worldwide. I remember telling someone at another site that I was considering using an OSS library. His jaw dropped, "You can use Open-Source? At our location using OSS is a fireable offence."
As we have in France: Père castor, raconte-nous une histoire !
For the rest of the world: it's a children cartoon with a grandpa beaver telling stories to his grandchildren, and has been immensely popular for decades.
It is a Linux distribution, it just turned out that "let me interrupt for a moment" meme was actually correct and what you wanted was a portable GNU distribution with an open kernel, and instead you got a Linux distribution with Google's user space and now instead of realizing the terminology was wrong from the get to you've misidentified the very trick Google played on us.
Turns out a kernel is just a kernel after all, and you really do want GNU+Linux, not just Linux.
When talking among engineers about Arduino, I find that it always requires a bit of explanation, because there's Arduino, but then there's Arduino.
"Arduino" is the name of the original, humble little microcontroller board.
It's a brand name for a series of boards ranging from simple and cheap, to quite elaborate.
It's a ecosystem of firmware development tools and libraries that revolve around the Arduino API, that has attracted a large community of participants including hobbyists and students but also third party developers. Adafruit and PJRC (Teensy) are exemplars. This may be its most valuable part, at the present time.
I've been developing with microprocessors since around 1984, when I hand-assembled 6502 code for an Apple II. I wrote my own assembler for an early microcontroller, and built my own device programmer. As tooling evolved, I stayed a step behind the most advanced commercial developers, for instance by using a free vendor-supplied assembler, and then following that vendor when they switched to C.
I got one of the original Arduino boards and started playing with it. To be honest, I've always preferred tools that were favored by hobbyists and students, including 8-bit BASIC, Turbo Pascal, HyperCard, Visual Basic, and now Python. For anybody who's familiar with the Python ecosystem, "Arduino" is like that today. It's grown way beyond its original implementation, but I think you have to experience both the technology and the community to fully appreciate it.
I believe the original humble board, and bare bones IDE, still deserve a place, because there's such a huge amount of tutorials and easy designs that use them. They're still a good place for a hobbyist to get started.
Doesn’t this only really affect actual Arduino brand products. There’s tons of just-as-good cheap knockoffs available. See Elegoo kits easily found on Amazon for example. The IDE is open source with the AGPL license.
Can’t we just cut Qualcomm out of the supply chain and keep going as normal without too much disruption? Doesn’t even feel like a hard fork is needed. Just don’t buy Qualcomm’s crap.
ESPs are great, but their hobbyist ecosystem ultimately relies on the goodwill of a Chinese company that could just as easily decide they want to go the way of Qualcomm, or worse.
Any company can "go the way of Qualcomm", as you call it. To my knowledge, there's no indication that there's any more danger of them going that way relative to, say, TI or ST?
Don't get me wrong, the fall of Arduino is a real loss. Espressif is a company in the business of making money, while Arduino's mission was to build a robust tinkerer ecosystem. Absent an acquisition, it's probably fair to say that Arduino would be less likely than Espressif, ST or TI to do bullshit like this.
Espressif has a pretty good Arduino compatibility layer for the ESP32 series. So you can follow Arduino tutorials and almost everything will "just work". This what I use for quick and dirty projects.
For more "serious" things, you have the ESP-IDF, which is a pretty good C-style interface to all sorts of hardware features. Less newbie friendly than the Arduino interface, but gives you more control. And it can be used in combination with the Arduino interface.
And then, as the cherry on top, you have their official Rust HAL for the ESP chips, implementing the standard Rust embedded-hal interfaces so it should "just work" with the growing Rust embedded ecosystem.
It's honestly impressive. The only thing that has kept Arduino competitive is their brand, good reputation, and focus on the education and tinkerer space. I frankly don't understand what value Qualcomm sees in Arduino if they're just gonna throw away that reputation and education friendliness.
Not that anyone's even bothered knocking off their current generation products. The majority of Arduino clones are still using AVR or occasionally SAMD processors - Arduino's newer boards were never really accepted by the community. Some makers have even gone another direction entirely - ESP32-based development boards are popular, and there's a compatibility layer for using the Arduino IDE with those.
"You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' - lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower." - Bryan Cantrill
> The risk is that moats like that are made of trust. If, 12 months from now, people see licenses tightening, non-Qualcomm boards lagging, or Arduino tooling getting tied to Qualcomm accounts, the same community that cheered UNO Q will call it a takeover. Right now the messaging is working — “we stay open, we just get more powerful” — but the community is watching. (facebook.com)
This is not good. Qualcomm are [expletives] anyway, but we need more activity in the connected microcontroller space in the west.
Never have been a fan of the programming style encouraged by the Arduino SDK/API, so hopefully this demise will allow someone to enter the space with something that is actually competitive with the Espressif devices. Have a decent API and connectivity, at the same time, unfathomable stuff. The Picos are closest, but the connectivity situation is a mess.
Right. We also know how to do code signing and deterministic builds so you could build it and ensure the code you see is what is being executed and that is what is certified.
It's just rather boring to get all the ducks in a row to do it.
None of it is a requirement to work on the happy path.
To work as part of a reasonably secure platform that still allows people to develop on it and responsibly sell consumer hardware based on it, yes, it's necessary.
There are other vendors of Wifi chips. I could see Nordic seeing this being a great collaboration to further capture marketplace for IoT connectivity beyond Bluetooth.
The brilliance of the ESP devices is not needing anything not included on a basic dev board for a huge raft of applications. The peripheral design is positively wonky, but they do just work.
> Never have been a fan of the programming style encouraged by the Arduino SDK/API
Can you elaborate on that? I have never done anything with Arduino, and after reading this thread I have my doubts that I ever will. But I am curious to hear your thoughts about it, thanks!
arduino ide is pretty terrible anyway. Swap to your normal ide of choice, and start using PlatformIO. way better experience, and you can actually have all your important config in normal text files on git/etc.. instead of having to tweak UI settings in Arduino studio.
Ah, good point, and likewise for adjacent comment. I was aware of those options, but have been procrastinating on making the switch. What's important to me is the library support, and ability to spin up a boilerplate project that runs on most chips, while providing access to vendor specific libraries when I actually need them.
The only thing of value left in Arduino is the API (which has been ported to non-Arduinos) and the drivers (of which there are hundreds; Adafruit is one of the main developers).
I'll give it a try. Even if it is better, that's might not help noobs since there are tons of tutorials using the Arduino one. That could change over time though.
I should have said "Much more expensive though compared to something like an ESP32 or RPi Pico". You can get something like an ESP32 Wemos D1 Mini on Ali for $4 to $5 USD, and besides solid performance and I/O, you get integrated WiFi and Bluetooth. Not to mention a community that is likely substantially larger than that built up around the Teensy.
As a maker, I've been following Adafruit since they sold a handful of products, probably assembled and boxed on Limor's dining room table.
Adafruit has forked microcontroller libraries and toolchains before, and a huge chunk of their success has been directly due to Arduino and related things. So it will not surprise me if they are gearing up to announce their brand-spanking new Arduino-compatible devices, software, and ecosystem.
Adafruit already sells own-brand Arduino clones. They have a whole line of Uno-shaped boards with various microcontrollers, some drop-in compatible with the original Uno, and others with more modern chips.
Tumblr died around 2013 ~ a lot of the key people I joined for were long gone. Last I logged in (yesterday actually) a lot more people I follow deactivated their accounts. Tumblr was a great platform that was not managed correctly, even the new owners aren't really scratching the original itch of Tumblr.
I think Yahoo was a patsy for more bad acquisitions than anyone. It seemed so bad I wonder if the point was that if you were a well connected teen and had a dad who worked in private equity you could get your dad to pull some favors to get Yahoo to buy your startup to frame yourself as a successful founder in an act of "achievement laundering"
So how the heck does the change in TOS work for the processing.org environment? That was an IDE that wraps around Java and a bunch of libraries. Arduino came along and borrowed the processing IDE put in an older gcc crosscompiler for the fleet of Arduino chips. They are the same IDEs but with different backends. If you can't reverse engineer the Arduino IDE, it was already borrowed from the processing people and open sourced. So are the processing people in danger of TOS violation? Or is it the reverse?
esp32 already exists, so there's a hardware alternative. What's the primary issue -- is it the lack of competition to the Arduino IDE? I have dabbled in Arduino but don't know enough to understand, but my impression was on the hardware side there are already alternatives that are better.
Obviously not discounting what a huge blow this is (and right when I was planning to explore Arduino more), but practically speaking, what can we do to help?
What are the alternatives for aspiring tinkerers now?
My wife (cybernetics engineer) and I are buying a 3D printer and planned getting an Arduino as an entry point. What should we do instead? What are the best communities and resources?
I first got into Raspberry Pi Picos, but I've also been experimenting with Esp32's and some of the nRF chips. I mostly do CircuitPython on them but Arduino is a supported platform on those I believe.
I got a couple of RP2040 boards recently and I'm amazed at how easy it is to just get stuff done. Between the native usb support and the circuit python support it's been a breeze. I just got a couple of boards up and running uart in a daisy chain. It was intimidating, but the circuitpython docs made it relatively simple.
ESP32 - quite a range of dev boards and places like Seeed and Adafruit have a nice selection of accessories. Adafruit develops CircuitPython which is IMO the lowest barrier to entry for programming MCUs. Adafruit even has CircuitPython sketches on their site for how to interface with the components they sell.
Rust on ESP32 is still a bit early - the HAL crate is still pretty unstable, but the toolchain is quite nice and I'm able to be productive enough that I never reach for C or C++.
Everyone I know who is into tinkering with microcontrollers moved onto ESP32 a long time ago now. I actually thought this headline was going to link to an article about ESP32's popularity. VSCode with the PlatformIO extension has been great for me when working with them:
The feather series of boards from Adafruit + Curcuit/Micropython works really well if you just want to make stuff happen instead of tuning a toolchain and, like, setting up clocks with asm.
Echoing the comments there... this seems like a colossally dumb move on their part. Is there any way this doesn't just end with a hard fork and some new player taking over where Arduino left off?
The other option is that Arduino simply fades away. Their hardware doesn't have anything to offer that you can't get on aliexpress or spin yourself for a tenth the cost.
The framework is the only arguably valuable thing they offer, but even that's not enough to prop a business up on.
Most likely everything will continue exactly as-is: Arduino hardware will become increasingly dated and undesirable, and open source Arduino-compatible libraries will continue flourishing until nobody remembers that Arduino was a hardware platform before it was software framework.
I think we've long since passed the point where Wiring will ever go away, but I doubt we'll still be calling it Arduino for too much longer. Arduino is probably dead, and espressif is moving in.
Yeah I personally never really bought into Arduino. I got their Uno back whenever it came out but never really got into their whole IDE experience. Latest projects are on esp32 using embassy which so far has been going great. Interested to check out rp2040 or rp2350 at some point maybe.. There are tons of interesting, easy options out there now
Early Arduino were all AVR 8-bit, at the time it was already on the way out. There were no shifts in industry to those chips.
People who got Arduino, either:
- blinked some LEDs and forgotten about it
- switched to esp32 and/or stm32
- esp32 and esp8266 move is funny because people started buying esp8266 to add Wi-Fi to their arduinos and then realized that they can just throw away arduino all together.
- switched to cheap clones that offer more
- quick connect for that not only want to blink LEDs, but also have some cool graphs to look at (like temperature and humidity)
- boards that specifically designed for their use case (i.e. battery and eInk connectors and circuitry required)
Arduino is inconsequential to industry as whole or even to hobbyist using it.
All they had to do was leave it alone and bridge the gap between Arduino and Snapdragon boards and they would have a good thing going. Was a waste of money to buy up Arduino and ruin it.
>The most striking addition: users are now explicitly forbidden from reverse-engineering or even attempting to understand how the platform works unless Arduino gives permission.
Damn, like that's ever stopped the very people that like to reverse engineer things.
When Qualcomm got its hands on Arduino, the best case scenario was that Arduino influence would encourage Qualcomm to be more open to small developers, and the worst case scenario was that Qualcomm would devour Arduino and its degenerate lawyer culture would ruin all that's good about it.
I got upvoted then downvoted in the acquisition thread where I suggested this would happen. Anyone who thinks the old Arduino still exists is simply naive.
You really shouldn’t be using Arduino over STM32. Low end STM boards that are price matched with Arduino are not only more powerful by almost a magnitude, but also have an excellent debugging IDE.
The only thing to watch out for are 3V3 vs 5V but then again if you’re doing anything worthwhile you’ve got a stash of buffers, op amps and MOSFETs.
I used to be interested in Arduino, but the hobbyist movement is nothing like it was in the early 2010s. In part, I think, we had amazing technologies (3D Printing! Arduino! CNC! Raspberry Pi!)… but not really that many amazing ideas on what to actually do with it.
What can I build with an Arduino that isn’t better, cheaper, faster, and more complete as a full product on Amazon? Almost nothing. When I’m staring at a screen 8 hours a day as a computer programmer already, my body screams for less screen time, not more. I’d rather learn Spanish or go skiing than start a FOSS project; and I don’t think I’m alone.
I understand there’s an artistic expression aspect to it… but I think at this point I’d rather learn photography or painting, actual art, for expression. Something normal people understand and appreciate. It’s too much of the same for me.
As a hobbyist, it's not about being able to buy it faster, cheaper, or better. It's about learning how to tinker, making something work, and building something that is effectively the artistic expression of my technical skills.
YMMV, but if you aren't loving the hobby element anymore and the itch can be scratched by reaching for a product, that's a shift in what you are enjoying, not an indictment of hobbies :)
> What can I build with an Arduino that isn’t better, cheaper, faster, and more complete as a full product on Amazon?
For an end user maybe not much, but for tinkerers, a lot. Almost everything where you need/want customization, unique features, and so on. This said, you don't strictly need an Arduino for that, I actually (almost) never use them because their software library is so high level that it eats so much resources on the underlying microcontrollers and make things more complex when you want to do more advanced stuff (like handling interrupts). When I use them, is for some quick&dirty thing (e.g. I need to turn on a stripe of "smart" LEDs quickly), but never include them in finished things.
It is almost always better from a practical perspective to buy the complete product over DIY, or even better, not buy at all. Those who claim otherwise are justifying their hobby. Best case scenario, you break even after not counting your time, which is actually great, because most people pay for their hobbies.
The hobbyist movement didn't change, you did, life is like that and that's not a bad thing. The technologies change but the general idea stay the same. For Arduino (the brand), I think it is dying, but that just because you can buy generic ESP32 boards on AliExpress for cheaper and with more variety.
What can you create as a programmer that isn't already a product? For each of us the answer is only limited by our interests and imagination. I use the Arduino development environment to create peripherals for specialized measurment gear, where I absolutly must control the design at the firmware level to make it work.
Almost every song I play on any instrument is available played better, more professionally, and more precisely and more artistically, on any music source possibly available. And yet I still play every day for my own pleasure.
It's the act of playing, where the music itself is an important part, but just a part, that I enjoy.
Arduino and related technologies have revolutionzed scientific instrument making. Things that were either "too hard" or "too expensive" are now straightforward for hobbyist and non-technical scientists.
For example, I build automated microscopes as a hobby and I use arduino products (well, used- now I use ESP32 with micropython, but that still depends on the Arduino API) and it's been tremendous for building high speed interfaces (I need to blink an LED at the same rate/in sync with a camera shutter opening/closing) . Even when I do photography, I'm still building arduino and other related things to help automate the tedious bits. And when that gets boring, I take out my guitar and use arduino or similar products to do audio processing in realtime.
For many of the things I want to do, there is no product on Amazon, or it's obscenely expensive (XY stages typically cost $10K and up).
I've been programming esp32 connected with soil moisture sensors and solenoid valves to water each individual pot of plants according to its own readings, instead of having a centrally controlled irrigation system. Overkill, I know, but with a cost of 8-10usd per set up it is not expensive
This sounds more like your personal journey, and less like some broad trend.
A quick check of just one of your examples shows the term "3d printer" is googled for literally twice as frequently today as it was in 2016, for instance.
In my eyes it's quite the opposite: there is almost nothing that exists as a complete product on Amazon. Faster and cheaper? Yes. Better and more complete? Not a chance. But you have to want it bad enough, and have enough skill to do it.
Arduino is (was?) one of those skills. Practice them enough, and you'll soon find the things you want aren't available for sale, at any price.
My 2c: I got into electronics, firmware, and PCB design during the Pandemic, and haven't used Arduino beyond cursory support for integrations. At the time, it used obsolete chips, and didn't have a practical advantage over STM32, Nordic, Espressif chips (Or dev boards) beyond name recognition. I speculate that there was a time before this when it had innovative UX for new users segment, but this hasn't been true for (at least, from my experience) 6 years.
> What can I build with an Arduino that isn’t better, cheaper, faster, and more complete as a full product on Amazon? Almost nothing.
I mean, my little hobby project is making the LED strips taped to my skis respond to an accelerometer, so they pulse brighter when I make a good turn. Plus Bluetooth control of the patterns. Not gonna find that on Amazon.
Love it, and I agree. I've built two "star skies" for kids, using cheap RGB LED lights, programming them to slowly change color, only use warm colors, and turn off more and more stars over time. Nothing super fancy, but very custom to my needs.
It sounded like OP was saying they couldn't think of any interesting things to tinker with since everything they could think of is already a product on amazon. So in this case it isn't about alternatives to Arduino, it's about alternatives to reactive LED lights for your skis.
Also what can I build with an Arduino that isn't cheaper, faster, and more complete with an STM32 Nucleo or other similar dev board? These days you can get a nice 32-bit ARM MCU for the same price (or cheaper) as an Arduino board. No need to deal with an 8-bit ATMEGA and its quirks.
> When I’m staring at a screen 8 hours a day as a computer programmer already, my body screams for less screen time, not more ... and I don’t think I’m alone.
I don't think in this case that most people who know what Arduino is would be at all mislead by the title. Being "dead" doesn't have to mean that a company ceases to exist. There are plenty of what I would call "dead" companies that still make money every year. "Dead" can be used figuratively. In this case, meaning that though the company continues to exist, the reason for which many people bought their products is now gone.
I was never a fan of the Maker Movement. While it did get people to tinker, there was always this massive gap between lighting up an LED and using EEPROM, JTAG debugging, interrupts, and even designing some of the more intricate circuit designs to pull of intermediate projects. I found that there were people who knew how to do that stuff and the rest just trying to get by.
The last time I used Arduino, I ended up just coding the bare metal out of necessity for the things I was trying to do. Some functionality of the chips was literally not accessible unless you break out of the sandbox. But then I wondered why we didn't just get people set up without shielding them so much from what it actually takes to do embedded development. Ultimately, the failure of the Maker Movement to me is that there is not an upgrade path. You start blinking LEDs and then what? Thus, lots of people end up being eternal beginners, which I don't think is helpful.
To some extent I agree that the upgrade path is lacking. I recently helped a friend move out of the ino file model into building regular c++ applications because his design was getting pretty complicated. Once he realized that he knew more of c++ than he thought he did, it was a game changer for him.
At the same time, people have done some pretty amazing stuff using the Arduino platform without knowing how to use the things you mention. What you call eternal beginners have accomplished a lot. James Bruton does some pretty impressive robotics work using Arduino.
> I was never a fan of the Maker Movement. While it did get people to tinker, there was always this massive gap between lighting up an LED and using EEPROM, JTAG debugging, interrupts, and even designing some of the more intricate circuit designs to pull of intermediate projects. I found that there were people who knew how to do that stuff and the rest just trying to get by.
Intense gatekeeping in the electronics community is precisely why communities such as Arduino could flourish in the first place (and their creators could benefit financially). Ultimately, people just want to get stuff done and Arduino is a way of doing it. If you go to Stack Exchange, someone will tell you to buy a college textbook and come back in six months once you understand Laplace transforms. An artist working on an installation doesn't need that. A person building an automated cat feeder doesn't need that. In fact, almost no one does, it's just something we torture EE students with.
I think a lot of the negativity toward Arduino boils down to saying "nooo, it's supposed to be hard!". But if you want the Arduino crowd to get more interested in your field of expertise, you need to build them a ramp, not to tell them they're not real electrical engineers.
Look at any hobby and there are lots of beginners and casuals and far fewer people who are very skilled at it. The Maker hobby is no different. It's certainly not a problem of the microcontrollers available. Arduino is the simplest, but there are plenty of others.
The "blinky LED" roadblock is really just a result of the fact that more complex "maker" projects require some amount of electrical or engineering or fabrication knowledge and skill, which takes some trial and error and practice -- the same thing that limits progress in lots of other hobbies.
The real "Maker" movement is the demand that drives so many consumer level fabrication tools and components that were only available as expensive industrial and commercial orders in the past -- 3d printers, laser cutters, microcontrollers, IC sensors, brushless motors -- there are so many options now that just weren't available at all 20 years ago.
I'm not a fan because, pedagogically, the structure of how it played out never allowed or helped people actually advance in the craft of it. There are better ways to build a tinker culture where people actually improve over time towards what an experienced EE and such can do. I rarely saw that progression.
What happens as a result of this is that someone spends a lot of time tinkering and then they think they know what they are doing. With that confidence, they might apply for a job or take on a more dangerous project. The job will say they don't actually have the skill, even though they have been putting in the time. And the overconfidence could lead to trying to do more dangerous things than they should on projects.
A tinkering culture is fine, but it needs to have safety and skill progression as its foundation. Most Maker Spaces I have been to have done a good job trying to keep things safe, but ultimately, people are people.
"Approaching" means to go towards the skillset. A home chef can develop better knife skills when cutting vegetables. That is approaching being a more professional cook, yet it does not mean the person could work in a restaurant. Maybe they could. We're talking about asymptotic.
If you are having understanding this distinction, then that is the exact point I am making about the Maker Movement. It is accepted that people progress if they do, and if they don't, then tough. There is a balance between perpetual tinkering, some sort of progression culture, and a full on degree.
Why must they “progress”? Why can’t people have hobbies? If they finish their blinky LED project and decide that’s enough investment into the hobby, why is that a problem?
Think about how many thousands have purchased a musical instrument only to abandon the hobby after a few months. Is that a failure of music-as-a-hobby or just humans being humans?
Most people I know who get into electronics as a hobby aren’t looking at it as a potential career. Myself included! This is the most absurd take I’ve seen all day.
I wonder how many young EEs of today can point to Arduino as their first exposure to electronics. You'll probably have a harder time finding those who don't.
As for "progression", I suppose you're disappointed that very few bicycle owners become professional cyclists.
I don't think Arduino users need to worry too much about safety. Obviously, don't build hobby projects that put lives on the line, but otherwise they're pretty harmless.
Who says a tinkering culture needs to have skill progression? Maybe people just like to tinker. Maybe simple things are still useful.
> I'm not a fan because, pedagogically, the structure of how it played out never allowed or helped people actually advance in the craft of it. There are better ways to build a tinker culture where people actually improve over time towards what an experienced EE and such can do. I rarely saw that progression.
> users are now explicitly forbidden from reverse-engineering or even attempting to understand how the platform works unless Arduino gives permission.
I briefly looked at their IDE and CLI repos and GitHub claims they're AGPL and GPL 3 respectively. I didn't see a CLA when I looked at their contribution guide.
Am I missing something here? What basis do they have to restrict users' rights to reverse engineer the software?
Adafruit is wrong here
A missing piece of the puzzle that i feel is ommitted in Adafruits posting, is that the changes only affect the Arduino Cloud Services, which provide various github-like services for the arduino ecosystem. Looking over the changes with this in mind, it seems a lawyer just applied the same standard SaaS legal language to what is effectively a SaaS offering, pretty normal in most cases.
None of these changes will affect the Arduino open-source hardware project.
[EDIT] - confirmed: https://www.arduino.cc/en/privacy-policy/ all the legal language applies to the website, online services, forums, etc.
More precisely, from the TOS:
> The Site is part of the platform developed and managed by Arduino, which allows users to take part in the discussions on the Arduino forum, the Arduino blog, the Arduino User Group, the Arduino Discord channel, and the Arduino Project Hub, and to access the Arduino main website, subsites, Arduino Cloud, Arduino Courses, Arduino Certifications, Arduino Docs, the Arduino EDU kit sites to release works within the Contributor License Agreement program, and to further develop the Arduino open source ecosystem (collectively, the “Platform”).
> 8.2 User shall not: translate, decompile or reverse-engineer the Platform, or engage in any other activity designed to identify the algorithms and logic of the Platform’s operation, unless expressly allowed by Arduino or by applicable license agreements
So yeah, it seems like the definition of "Platform" is limited only to their hosted services.
And I can't imagine Qualcomms lawyers put much thought into this specific clause.
As soon as it becomes a PR nightmare, they might just take that clause out.
Yeah I already found it odd that it was about what “users uploaded” seeing that Arduino is not necessarily a platform to upload things to, it can be, but not necessarily.
Also Adafruit being a store, isnt there a matter of conflict of interest with posts like this?
If true that's an absolutely gigantic omission, bordering on outright lying.
Yeah renders this whole article kinda dismissible imo
Arduino is as influential as it is controversial and has been from the beginning.
https://arduinohistory.github.io
https://hackaday.com/2016/03/04/wiring-was-arduino-before-ar...
Thanks. I have no qualms about seeing Arduino getting “ripped off” then.
Really appreciate the link. I simply had no idea about this history. Just the sheer intellectual dishonesty is mind-boggling.
Jesus, they just ripped it off whole sale and claimed it was their own.
This is Legal Team not doing their due diligence. Just throwing a blanket terms of service update across all “properties”.
The new Arduino UNO Q features a beefy Qualcomm SOC running Linux, alongside an STM32 microcontroller which is programmable from the Arduino IDE. The MCU side is wide open, but the SOC side is full of proprietary firmware blobs, so I assume the lawyers are concerned about those being reverse engineered.
I'm now realising I do not really know where the Arduino IDE gets all the libraries and board definitions from. I assume that's now Qualcomm owned web services with Qualcomm defined TOS?
I also wonder if anyone's backed/scraped the forums?
iirc the Arduino term is "cores", which implement the HAL for a different family of boards. Been a while since I looked deeper at it
https://docs.arduino.cc/learn/starting-guide/cores/
Arduino repos require a CLA since years, it was introduced 5 or 6 years ago if I remember correctly.
Isn't this quite useless, when they don't have the copyright on the initial version, since they didn't require a CLA back then?
CLA allows them to relicense your contributions under their own license - e.g. proprietary
A DCO would be the more friendly option.
I think the question is, what use is adding a CLA if the core functionality was under (A)GPL? Unless you go back and get all the OG contributors to sign over their rights, how can you relicense?
Welp Qualcomm gonna Qualcomm. It was expected, but I did not expect it to be that blunt.
It takes a serious pair to "forbid reverse-engineering" on a platform aimed at tinkerers.
I could tell you a long, boring story about that; however, it would be long, and boring.
I have my own war stories from working at Qualcomm. Gather together, children.
Ahem. One upon a time I was the tech lead for one of the many software components in Qualcomm's GPU software stack. At one point there was customer interest in caching certain blobs of data that were relatively costly to compute, in order to reduce the startup times of a wide range of apps.
Since the caching needed to happen across different processes over time, we needed some sort of persistent storage with some metadata to track stuff like usage stats, limit storage requirements, etc. Simple stuff, right? I decided that we didn't need to reinvent the wheel, and thus suggested to the team's most recent hire to use SQLite.
Oh, Dear Lord. That was a mistake. SQLite worked great, no, no. That wasn't the issue. The problem was obtaining approval from Legal to use SQLite in our little project.
"Does SQLite have one of those viral licenses that require you to open-source your own code?" -- you may ask. No, it doesn't. It is the most lax OSS license that you could ask for. Super friendly to commercial closed-source projects.
No, the obstacle was that Legal wanted to audit SQLite line by line, down to the books and research that was mentioned in the comments, searching for anything from copyright infringement within SQLite itself, to patents that may be associated with any of its features. IIRC, it was going to take months and would require approval by my management chain. And any time we wanted to upgrade the version of SQLite we shipped with would require another extensive review.
The feature was canned unceremoniously. Fin.
Ah so the Oracle syndrome, where the engineering is a sidekick in the lawyer business?
In all seriousness, this is just appalling. This would make a good poison pill to prevent an opensource project from being used in such a corporation /s
Thanks for sharing! The sad part is, it's the qualcomm customers that pay for the end result.
Eh. I used to work for a large corporation that had multiple development sites worldwide. I remember telling someone at another site that I was considering using an OSS library. His jaw dropped, "You can use Open-Source? At our location using OSS is a fireable offence."
Both of us were in the US, BTW.
Well, Qualcomm is Oracle of hardware world.
Don't threaten me with a good time
As we have in France: Père castor, raconte-nous une histoire !
For the rest of the world: it's a children cartoon with a grandpa beaver telling stories to his grandchildren, and has been immensely popular for decades.
So yeah, please do! War stories are always cool
Grandpa telling war stories!
Please do
Reminds me of Android. Which is supposed to be a Linux distro.
It is a Linux distribution, it just turned out that "let me interrupt for a moment" meme was actually correct and what you wanted was a portable GNU distribution with an open kernel, and instead you got a Linux distribution with Google's user space and now instead of realizing the terminology was wrong from the get to you've misidentified the very trick Google played on us.
Turns out a kernel is just a kernel after all, and you really do want GNU+Linux, not just Linux.
I said distro not gnu/linux for a reason, but yeah what I wanted out of Android is a tinkerer friendly OS. I've long since abandoned Android anyway.
What did to accept in Androids place, and did you find your tinkerer friendly OS?
Stallman appreciates you saying so. :)
Rockchip does the same thing with some of their closed source binaries
When talking among engineers about Arduino, I find that it always requires a bit of explanation, because there's Arduino, but then there's Arduino.
"Arduino" is the name of the original, humble little microcontroller board.
It's a brand name for a series of boards ranging from simple and cheap, to quite elaborate.
It's a ecosystem of firmware development tools and libraries that revolve around the Arduino API, that has attracted a large community of participants including hobbyists and students but also third party developers. Adafruit and PJRC (Teensy) are exemplars. This may be its most valuable part, at the present time.
I've been developing with microprocessors since around 1984, when I hand-assembled 6502 code for an Apple II. I wrote my own assembler for an early microcontroller, and built my own device programmer. As tooling evolved, I stayed a step behind the most advanced commercial developers, for instance by using a free vendor-supplied assembler, and then following that vendor when they switched to C.
I got one of the original Arduino boards and started playing with it. To be honest, I've always preferred tools that were favored by hobbyists and students, including 8-bit BASIC, Turbo Pascal, HyperCard, Visual Basic, and now Python. For anybody who's familiar with the Python ecosystem, "Arduino" is like that today. It's grown way beyond its original implementation, but I think you have to experience both the technology and the community to fully appreciate it.
I believe the original humble board, and bare bones IDE, still deserve a place, because there's such a huge amount of tutorials and easy designs that use them. They're still a good place for a hobbyist to get started.
Damn. I mean it's was expected I guess. Anyway, back to my Chinese esp32 since they've been better for a while anyway.
Teensy, maybe I finally use that stm bluepill I bought, I also have an unopened beagle bone black damn and orange crab
Raspbery Pi Picos are extremely capable for their price as well! It isn't like we are out of options these days.
Sounds crazy, but I just get full pi zero 2s for any little hobby projects. It’s just simpler to have everything even if I’m only blinking leds.
I actually have a KB2040 too from Adafruit, they snuck it in there (free) I think from when I ordered 20 of these metal gear servos
We all really should be supporting the Teensy guy.
They are expensive but damn the IO is insane, I made a robot with a Teensy 4.0 and the clock speed damn base is 600Mhz
I think I know all those words but as an outsider I have no idea what you're saying :D
Just a bunch of microcontroller providers, the last one is an FPGA, I still haven't learned FPGAs yet or how to design my own PCB but on the list
edit: beagle bone black is an SBC apparently
And they officially support Rust!
Doesn’t this only really affect actual Arduino brand products. There’s tons of just-as-good cheap knockoffs available. See Elegoo kits easily found on Amazon for example. The IDE is open source with the AGPL license.
Can’t we just cut Qualcomm out of the supply chain and keep going as normal without too much disruption? Doesn’t even feel like a hard fork is needed. Just don’t buy Qualcomm’s crap.
Sounds great in theory. But this would put a serious dent in the Arduino opensource community and fragment support.
Arduino is the unifying umbrella that keeps everything together. With that gone the platform will surely lose.
Esp32 is just as big if not bigger.
ESPs are great, but their hobbyist ecosystem ultimately relies on the goodwill of a Chinese company that could just as easily decide they want to go the way of Qualcomm, or worse.
Any company can "go the way of Qualcomm", as you call it. To my knowledge, there's no indication that there's any more danger of them going that way relative to, say, TI or ST?
Don't get me wrong, the fall of Arduino is a real loss. Espressif is a company in the business of making money, while Arduino's mission was to build a robust tinkerer ecosystem. Absent an acquisition, it's probably fair to say that Arduino would be less likely than Espressif, ST or TI to do bullshit like this.
They could, but they have not, and I don't perceive that risk to be particularly enhanced just because they are chinese.
This is just FUD you are spreading.
And a dev board only costs a couple of dollars on AliExpress.
dev board with wifi and bluetooth no less
Espressif has a pretty good Arduino compatibility layer for the ESP32 series. So you can follow Arduino tutorials and almost everything will "just work". This what I use for quick and dirty projects.
For more "serious" things, you have the ESP-IDF, which is a pretty good C-style interface to all sorts of hardware features. Less newbie friendly than the Arduino interface, but gives you more control. And it can be used in combination with the Arduino interface.
And then, as the cherry on top, you have their official Rust HAL for the ESP chips, implementing the standard Rust embedded-hal interfaces so it should "just work" with the growing Rust embedded ecosystem.
It's honestly impressive. The only thing that has kept Arduino competitive is their brand, good reputation, and focus on the education and tinkerer space. I frankly don't understand what value Qualcomm sees in Arduino if they're just gonna throw away that reputation and education friendliness.
ESP32 is fantastic. I just ordered four more today for various projects. Barely cracked $20 CAD and free shipping from Ali.
I wish there was a esp32 board with optically isolated 24v level shifters and screw terminals…
There are optoisolated mosfet modules available on aliexpress, or what exactly do you mean by “level shifters”? What’s your application?
You can search through AliExpress, but I am afraid that your request is so specific that you will need to design something yourself.
Thanks to the open source nature of the Arduino ecosystem, you can make it so!
Ars longa, vita brevis
The goal is probably to prevent any knockoffs of the next generation products.
Not that anyone's even bothered knocking off their current generation products. The majority of Arduino clones are still using AVR or occasionally SAMD processors - Arduino's newer boards were never really accepted by the community. Some makers have even gone another direction entirely - ESP32-based development boards are popular, and there's a compatibility layer for using the Arduino IDE with those.
>Qualcomm-owned Arduino
That's all you need to know. The old company no longer exists.
Qcom is a lawnmower, if you stick your hand in, it'll chop it off.
"You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' - lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower." - Bryan Cantrill
[0] https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s
> The risk is that moats like that are made of trust. If, 12 months from now, people see licenses tightening, non-Qualcomm boards lagging, or Arduino tooling getting tied to Qualcomm accounts, the same community that cheered UNO Q will call it a takeover. Right now the messaging is working — “we stay open, we just get more powerful” — but the community is watching. (facebook.com)
https://entropytown.com/articles/2025-10-07-qualcomm-to-acqu...
Only a month...
This is not good. Qualcomm are [expletives] anyway, but we need more activity in the connected microcontroller space in the west.
Never have been a fan of the programming style encouraged by the Arduino SDK/API, so hopefully this demise will allow someone to enter the space with something that is actually competitive with the Espressif devices. Have a decent API and connectivity, at the same time, unfathomable stuff. The Picos are closest, but the connectivity situation is a mess.
Espressif was just handed the whole market on a platter. Unless raspberry can significantly expand their market but I doubt it. Year of the RISK V?
> Unless raspberry can significantly expand their market but I doubt it. Year of the RISK V?
The RP2350 has two RISC-V cores (and two Cortex M33 cores).
The ESP32-C3 also has a RISC-V core.
It's one of those things you need a benevolent billionaire to bootstrap which will probably never make money.
The CPU cores aren't the problem (just use Hazard3) - it's all the rest, particularly the WiFi.
I know the code for the Wi-Fi side is a blob infested mess, as usual. But by now, ESP32 has an open source MAC implementation, blob free.
So we know with certainty that it's possible to make Wi-Fi hardware work in a blob-free fashion on a production grade MCU.
Right. We also know how to do code signing and deterministic builds so you could build it and ensure the code you see is what is being executed and that is what is certified.
It's just rather boring to get all the ducks in a row to do it.
Since when is any of that a requirement?
None of it is a requirement to work on the happy path.
To work as part of a reasonably secure platform that still allows people to develop on it and responsibly sell consumer hardware based on it, yes, it's necessary.
I'm a big fan of just getting it to work on the happy path. In this case, the rest of it sounds like doing extra work for no reason.
If you don't use the "happy path" builds, the choice is yours, and the consequences are your own. Simple as.
That tinkering attitude is the root of the problem in the Arduino ecosystem.
Just do things properly - it only has to be done by the vendor anyway, and no one else needs to touch it.
There are other vendors of Wifi chips. I could see Nordic seeing this being a great collaboration to further capture marketplace for IoT connectivity beyond Bluetooth.
The brilliance of the ESP devices is not needing anything not included on a basic dev board for a huge raft of applications. The peripheral design is positively wonky, but they do just work.
> Never have been a fan of the programming style encouraged by the Arduino SDK/API
Can you elaborate on that? I have never done anything with Arduino, and after reading this thread I have my doubts that I ever will. But I am curious to hear your thoughts about it, thanks!
What about ESP32?
"Espressif devices" = ESP32
the 8266 is pretty nice as well
The new terms are entirely unacceptable for any use.
It was nice while it lasted. RIP, Arduino.
How's this affect the Arduino IDE and libraries? At this point those seem more important than Arduino-branded hardware.
arduino ide is pretty terrible anyway. Swap to your normal ide of choice, and start using PlatformIO. way better experience, and you can actually have all your important config in normal text files on git/etc.. instead of having to tweak UI settings in Arduino studio.
Ah, good point, and likewise for adjacent comment. I was aware of those options, but have been procrastinating on making the switch. What's important to me is the library support, and ability to spin up a boilerplate project that runs on most chips, while providing access to vendor specific libraries when I actually need them.
The only thing of value left in Arduino is the API (which has been ported to non-Arduinos) and the drivers (of which there are hundreds; Adafruit is one of the main developers).
You don't actually need the Arduino IDE. I haven't used it in years. You can use any IDE (or just makefiles) and gcc.
Why not just use whatever IDE you prefer and upload via the CLI?
Certainly an option. The IDE is nice for beginners, which seemed like a major point to Arduino.
Get VSCode and install PlatformIO extension. Its way better
I'll give it a try. Even if it is better, that's might not help noobs since there are tons of tutorials using the Arduino one. That could change over time though.
Getting started is really easy.
https://docs.platformio.org/en/latest/integration/ide/vscode...
And esp32 can use the same Arduino library.
Someone needs to step up to fork and maintain it.
I imagine that Adafruit, Sparkfun and some other companies are highly motivated.
Didn’t everyone kind of migrate to more capable chips like ESP32 and STM32 in the intervening decade since Arduino got big and commercial?
"the press release seems like it was made by ChatGPT when you put it through those AI detectors?"
so does the image at the end of your post, guys, I'm an artist who's bought blinky stuff from Adafruit in the past and this makes me sad.
Not even “seems like”. That image is AI generated beyond any reasonable doubt.
Teensy is the best imo...would love to see that expand into more boards/specific use cases.
Much more expensive though.
Are they?
$24 for a Teensy 4.0 over at Sparkfun. That seems reasonable to me.
I do miss the older Teensy 3's and 2's.
I should have said "Much more expensive though compared to something like an ESP32 or RPi Pico". You can get something like an ESP32 Wemos D1 Mini on Ali for $4 to $5 USD, and besides solid performance and I/O, you get integrated WiFi and Bluetooth. Not to mention a community that is likely substantially larger than that built up around the Teensy.
Depends which model. Arduino Mega retails in Europe for around 50 euro.
Teensy 4.1 is a beast, also quite power efficient.
Was looking for this comment. Long Live Teensy!
As a maker, I've been following Adafruit since they sold a handful of products, probably assembled and boxed on Limor's dining room table.
Adafruit has forked microcontroller libraries and toolchains before, and a huge chunk of their success has been directly due to Arduino and related things. So it will not surprise me if they are gearing up to announce their brand-spanking new Arduino-compatible devices, software, and ecosystem.
They could call it Adaduino.
Adafruit already sells own-brand Arduino clones. They have a whole line of Uno-shaped boards with various microcontrollers, some drop-in compatible with the original Uno, and others with more modern chips.
https://www.adafruit.com/category/818
I know, I'm talking about the rest.
FruitDuino was taken
It's like Verizon buying Tumblr and suddenly realizing they bought a porno site.
Tumblr died around 2013 ~ a lot of the key people I joined for were long gone. Last I logged in (yesterday actually) a lot more people I follow deactivated their accounts. Tumblr was a great platform that was not managed correctly, even the new owners aren't really scratching the original itch of Tumblr.
It was Yahoo who bought them, but yeah.
I think Yahoo was a patsy for more bad acquisitions than anyone. It seemed so bad I wonder if the point was that if you were a well connected teen and had a dad who worked in private equity you could get your dad to pull some favors to get Yahoo to buy your startup to frame yourself as a successful founder in an act of "achievement laundering"
Verizon bought them out eventually.
So how the heck does the change in TOS work for the processing.org environment? That was an IDE that wraps around Java and a bunch of libraries. Arduino came along and borrowed the processing IDE put in an older gcc crosscompiler for the fleet of Arduino chips. They are the same IDEs but with different backends. If you can't reverse engineer the Arduino IDE, it was already borrowed from the processing people and open sourced. So are the processing people in danger of TOS violation? Or is it the reverse?
I thought this was going to be an article about the ESP-32s
esp32 already exists, so there's a hardware alternative. What's the primary issue -- is it the lack of competition to the Arduino IDE? I have dabbled in Arduino but don't know enough to understand, but my impression was on the hardware side there are already alternatives that are better.
Obviously not discounting what a huge blow this is (and right when I was planning to explore Arduino more), but practically speaking, what can we do to help?
What are the alternatives for aspiring tinkerers now?
My wife (cybernetics engineer) and I are buying a 3D printer and planned getting an Arduino as an entry point. What should we do instead? What are the best communities and resources?
ESP32.
I'm using ESP32 with platformio which has a dedicated community https://community.platformio.org/tag/espressif32
I've used devkit from M5stack, waveshare and adafruit.
(M5Stack has a full line of products for tinkering with many sensors & controllers)
You can also find many cheaper no-brand devkit anywhere but quality & docs can be unreliable.
I first got into Raspberry Pi Picos, but I've also been experimenting with Esp32's and some of the nRF chips. I mostly do CircuitPython on them but Arduino is a supported platform on those I believe.
I got a couple of RP2040 boards recently and I'm amazed at how easy it is to just get stuff done. Between the native usb support and the circuit python support it's been a breeze. I just got a couple of boards up and running uart in a daisy chain. It was intimidating, but the circuitpython docs made it relatively simple.
ESP32 - quite a range of dev boards and places like Seeed and Adafruit have a nice selection of accessories. Adafruit develops CircuitPython which is IMO the lowest barrier to entry for programming MCUs. Adafruit even has CircuitPython sketches on their site for how to interface with the components they sell.
Rust on ESP32 is still a bit early - the HAL crate is still pretty unstable, but the toolchain is quite nice and I'm able to be productive enough that I never reach for C or C++.
Everyone I know who is into tinkering with microcontrollers moved onto ESP32 a long time ago now. I actually thought this headline was going to link to an article about ESP32's popularity. VSCode with the PlatformIO extension has been great for me when working with them:
https://platformio.org/
STM32 boards and PlatformIO.
ESP32 is quite popular (as seen by other suggestions) but I find the quality of Espressif, hardware/software/support, is widely varied.
FWIW PlatformIO works with Arduino and ESP32 (and will give you a better experience in so many ways)
The feather series of boards from Adafruit + Curcuit/Micropython works really well if you just want to make stuff happen instead of tuning a toolchain and, like, setting up clocks with asm.
Echoing the comments there... this seems like a colossally dumb move on their part. Is there any way this doesn't just end with a hard fork and some new player taking over where Arduino left off?
The other option is that Arduino simply fades away. Their hardware doesn't have anything to offer that you can't get on aliexpress or spin yourself for a tenth the cost.
The framework is the only arguably valuable thing they offer, but even that's not enough to prop a business up on.
Most likely everything will continue exactly as-is: Arduino hardware will become increasingly dated and undesirable, and open source Arduino-compatible libraries will continue flourishing until nobody remembers that Arduino was a hardware platform before it was software framework.
I think we've long since passed the point where Wiring will ever go away, but I doubt we'll still be calling it Arduino for too much longer. Arduino is probably dead, and espressif is moving in.
Yeah I personally never really bought into Arduino. I got their Uno back whenever it came out but never really got into their whole IDE experience. Latest projects are on esp32 using embassy which so far has been going great. Interested to check out rp2040 or rp2350 at some point maybe.. There are tons of interesting, easy options out there now
Related:
New Arduino T&C: "user shall not [...] reverse-engineer the platform"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45971039
Does this mean we might see an industry shift to RISC-V?
Early Arduino were all AVR 8-bit, at the time it was already on the way out. There were no shifts in industry to those chips.
People who got Arduino, either:
- blinked some LEDs and forgotten about it
- switched to esp32 and/or stm32
Arduino is inconsequential to industry as whole or even to hobbyist using it.That didn't take long. RIP Arduino.
Time for a large industry shift to RISC-V?
As usual, the answer to this headline's question is no.
All they had to do was leave it alone and bridge the gap between Arduino and Snapdragon boards and they would have a good thing going. Was a waste of money to buy up Arduino and ruin it.
I’ve been a supporter of refunds over change to terms and conditions for this specific reasons
>The most striking addition: users are now explicitly forbidden from reverse-engineering or even attempting to understand how the platform works unless Arduino gives permission.
Damn, like that's ever stopped the very people that like to reverse engineer things.
It doesn't stop much, but it sure is a bad sign.
When Qualcomm got its hands on Arduino, the best case scenario was that Arduino influence would encourage Qualcomm to be more open to small developers, and the worst case scenario was that Qualcomm would devour Arduino and its degenerate lawyer culture would ruin all that's good about it.
This is an update towards the latter.
I got upvoted then downvoted in the acquisition thread where I suggested this would happen. Anyone who thinks the old Arduino still exists is simply naive.
Probably not a bad thing. Arduino have been resting on their laurels for at least a decade.
>integration of all user data (including minors) into Qualcomm’s global data ecosystem. Military weird things and more.
Would be very curious to learn what "Military weird things" means exactly..
The fact that they added some AI generated image to this is the cherry on top.
Raspberry Pi Pico and ESP32 will have to be my new toolbox mains
Well, China will supply XiDuino in no time.
Not sure if you're joking, but of course they already have:
https://www.seeedstudio.com/xiao-series-page
I can't speak to all their products, but their nRF52840 offering is very good for those who want to build BLE based devices.
Thanks for the summary, since I avoid LinkedIn like the plague...
Oh my god, we are forbidden from reverse engineering Arduino SW. That's it, forbidden, we cannot literally do it, because some C-suit buffoon said so.
See, open their SW in Ghidra or IDA and see for yourself, big pop-up and blank PE decompilation.
"By Qualcomm CEO buffoon, you cannot reverse engineer my software, muhahaha."
Qualcomm should sell this idea, VMProtect and others will go broke over night.
You really shouldn’t be using Arduino over STM32. Low end STM boards that are price matched with Arduino are not only more powerful by almost a magnitude, but also have an excellent debugging IDE.
The only thing to watch out for are 3V3 vs 5V but then again if you’re doing anything worthwhile you’ve got a stash of buffers, op amps and MOSFETs.
For anyone else who can’t get to LinkedIn right now:
https://archive.ph/05KK2
I used to be interested in Arduino, but the hobbyist movement is nothing like it was in the early 2010s. In part, I think, we had amazing technologies (3D Printing! Arduino! CNC! Raspberry Pi!)… but not really that many amazing ideas on what to actually do with it.
What can I build with an Arduino that isn’t better, cheaper, faster, and more complete as a full product on Amazon? Almost nothing. When I’m staring at a screen 8 hours a day as a computer programmer already, my body screams for less screen time, not more. I’d rather learn Spanish or go skiing than start a FOSS project; and I don’t think I’m alone.
I understand there’s an artistic expression aspect to it… but I think at this point I’d rather learn photography or painting, actual art, for expression. Something normal people understand and appreciate. It’s too much of the same for me.
As a hobbyist, it's not about being able to buy it faster, cheaper, or better. It's about learning how to tinker, making something work, and building something that is effectively the artistic expression of my technical skills.
YMMV, but if you aren't loving the hobby element anymore and the itch can be scratched by reaching for a product, that's a shift in what you are enjoying, not an indictment of hobbies :)
> What can I build with an Arduino that isn’t better, cheaper, faster, and more complete as a full product on Amazon?
For an end user maybe not much, but for tinkerers, a lot. Almost everything where you need/want customization, unique features, and so on. This said, you don't strictly need an Arduino for that, I actually (almost) never use them because their software library is so high level that it eats so much resources on the underlying microcontrollers and make things more complex when you want to do more advanced stuff (like handling interrupts). When I use them, is for some quick&dirty thing (e.g. I need to turn on a stripe of "smart" LEDs quickly), but never include them in finished things.
You are just becoming old.
Less time, more money, changing hobbies, etc...
It is almost always better from a practical perspective to buy the complete product over DIY, or even better, not buy at all. Those who claim otherwise are justifying their hobby. Best case scenario, you break even after not counting your time, which is actually great, because most people pay for their hobbies.
The hobbyist movement didn't change, you did, life is like that and that's not a bad thing. The technologies change but the general idea stay the same. For Arduino (the brand), I think it is dying, but that just because you can buy generic ESP32 boards on AliExpress for cheaper and with more variety.
What can you create as a programmer that isn't already a product? For each of us the answer is only limited by our interests and imagination. I use the Arduino development environment to create peripherals for specialized measurment gear, where I absolutly must control the design at the firmware level to make it work.
Almost every song I play on any instrument is available played better, more professionally, and more precisely and more artistically, on any music source possibly available. And yet I still play every day for my own pleasure.
It's the act of playing, where the music itself is an important part, but just a part, that I enjoy.
Arduino and related technologies have revolutionzed scientific instrument making. Things that were either "too hard" or "too expensive" are now straightforward for hobbyist and non-technical scientists.
For example, I build automated microscopes as a hobby and I use arduino products (well, used- now I use ESP32 with micropython, but that still depends on the Arduino API) and it's been tremendous for building high speed interfaces (I need to blink an LED at the same rate/in sync with a camera shutter opening/closing) . Even when I do photography, I'm still building arduino and other related things to help automate the tedious bits. And when that gets boring, I take out my guitar and use arduino or similar products to do audio processing in realtime.
For many of the things I want to do, there is no product on Amazon, or it's obscenely expensive (XY stages typically cost $10K and up).
I've been programming esp32 connected with soil moisture sensors and solenoid valves to water each individual pot of plants according to its own readings, instead of having a centrally controlled irrigation system. Overkill, I know, but with a cost of 8-10usd per set up it is not expensive
Photos? If you have a blog post, it may be a good post for HN. (Bonus points if the plants survived :) .)
This sounds more like your personal journey, and less like some broad trend.
A quick check of just one of your examples shows the term "3d printer" is googled for literally twice as frequently today as it was in 2016, for instance.
And for another n=1 input, from my perspective, 3d printing is MUCH BIGGER now than it was back then. Weird take from the parent comment!
In my eyes it's quite the opposite: there is almost nothing that exists as a complete product on Amazon. Faster and cheaper? Yes. Better and more complete? Not a chance. But you have to want it bad enough, and have enough skill to do it.
Arduino is (was?) one of those skills. Practice them enough, and you'll soon find the things you want aren't available for sale, at any price.
My 2c: I got into electronics, firmware, and PCB design during the Pandemic, and haven't used Arduino beyond cursory support for integrations. At the time, it used obsolete chips, and didn't have a practical advantage over STM32, Nordic, Espressif chips (Or dev boards) beyond name recognition. I speculate that there was a time before this when it had innovative UX for new users segment, but this hasn't been true for (at least, from my experience) 6 years.
> What can I build with an Arduino that isn’t better, cheaper, faster, and more complete as a full product on Amazon? Almost nothing.
I mean, my little hobby project is making the LED strips taped to my skis respond to an accelerometer, so they pulse brighter when I make a good turn. Plus Bluetooth control of the patterns. Not gonna find that on Amazon.
Love it, and I agree. I've built two "star skies" for kids, using cheap RGB LED lights, programming them to slowly change color, only use warm colors, and turn off more and more stars over time. Nothing super fancy, but very custom to my needs.
Please blog and post about this. I need a how to.
There are plenty of not-arduino microcontrollers that can do this.
To your reply-writer, how do you think those products came to be, many of them are productization of hobbiest projects.
The arduino project jumpstarted a whole ecosystem, but I don't that ecosystem needs arduino anymore.
> There are plenty of not-arduino microcontrollers that can do this.
Sure. I'm responding to this bit:
> better, cheaper, faster, and more complete as a full product on Amazon
Mine's on a nRF52840 board. My point is less about Arduino and more about tinkering.
It sounded like OP was saying they couldn't think of any interesting things to tinker with since everything they could think of is already a product on amazon. So in this case it isn't about alternatives to Arduino, it's about alternatives to reactive LED lights for your skis.
Also what can I build with an Arduino that isn't cheaper, faster, and more complete with an STM32 Nucleo or other similar dev board? These days you can get a nice 32-bit ARM MCU for the same price (or cheaper) as an Arduino board. No need to deal with an 8-bit ATMEGA and its quirks.
> When I’m staring at a screen 8 hours a day as a computer programmer already, my body screams for less screen time, not more ... and I don’t think I’m alone.
Isn't there a term for that: wage slavery[1]?
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery
Can we please avoid the clickbait meta of "Death of" / "Is __ Dead?" for things that are obviously not?
The news describe an important shift, but just describe that it is, no need for "youtubefication" of titles here.
I don't think in this case that most people who know what Arduino is would be at all mislead by the title. Being "dead" doesn't have to mean that a company ceases to exist. There are plenty of what I would call "dead" companies that still make money every year. "Dead" can be used figuratively. In this case, meaning that though the company continues to exist, the reason for which many people bought their products is now gone.
Arduino's hackability was its unique selling point. When it is no longer hackable, what is left (of the company)?
Plenty out there to fill the void.
Stuff like https://www.adafruit.com/product/4062
Fair enough, not a unique selling point. But an important one. Without it, who are the customers?
I was never a fan of the Maker Movement. While it did get people to tinker, there was always this massive gap between lighting up an LED and using EEPROM, JTAG debugging, interrupts, and even designing some of the more intricate circuit designs to pull of intermediate projects. I found that there were people who knew how to do that stuff and the rest just trying to get by.
The last time I used Arduino, I ended up just coding the bare metal out of necessity for the things I was trying to do. Some functionality of the chips was literally not accessible unless you break out of the sandbox. But then I wondered why we didn't just get people set up without shielding them so much from what it actually takes to do embedded development. Ultimately, the failure of the Maker Movement to me is that there is not an upgrade path. You start blinking LEDs and then what? Thus, lots of people end up being eternal beginners, which I don't think is helpful.
That's a pretty condescending take.
To some extent I agree that the upgrade path is lacking. I recently helped a friend move out of the ino file model into building regular c++ applications because his design was getting pretty complicated. Once he realized that he knew more of c++ than he thought he did, it was a game changer for him.
At the same time, people have done some pretty amazing stuff using the Arduino platform without knowing how to use the things you mention. What you call eternal beginners have accomplished a lot. James Bruton does some pretty impressive robotics work using Arduino.
> I was never a fan of the Maker Movement. While it did get people to tinker, there was always this massive gap between lighting up an LED and using EEPROM, JTAG debugging, interrupts, and even designing some of the more intricate circuit designs to pull of intermediate projects. I found that there were people who knew how to do that stuff and the rest just trying to get by.
Intense gatekeeping in the electronics community is precisely why communities such as Arduino could flourish in the first place (and their creators could benefit financially). Ultimately, people just want to get stuff done and Arduino is a way of doing it. If you go to Stack Exchange, someone will tell you to buy a college textbook and come back in six months once you understand Laplace transforms. An artist working on an installation doesn't need that. A person building an automated cat feeder doesn't need that. In fact, almost no one does, it's just something we torture EE students with.
I think a lot of the negativity toward Arduino boils down to saying "nooo, it's supposed to be hard!". But if you want the Arduino crowd to get more interested in your field of expertise, you need to build them a ramp, not to tell them they're not real electrical engineers.
Look at any hobby and there are lots of beginners and casuals and far fewer people who are very skilled at it. The Maker hobby is no different. It's certainly not a problem of the microcontrollers available. Arduino is the simplest, but there are plenty of others.
The "blinky LED" roadblock is really just a result of the fact that more complex "maker" projects require some amount of electrical or engineering or fabrication knowledge and skill, which takes some trial and error and practice -- the same thing that limits progress in lots of other hobbies.
The real "Maker" movement is the demand that drives so many consumer level fabrication tools and components that were only available as expensive industrial and commercial orders in the past -- 3d printers, laser cutters, microcontrollers, IC sensors, brushless motors -- there are so many options now that just weren't available at all 20 years ago.
you aren't a fan because some people never built anything advanced with it? thats a pretty wild take.
I'm not a fan because, pedagogically, the structure of how it played out never allowed or helped people actually advance in the craft of it. There are better ways to build a tinker culture where people actually improve over time towards what an experienced EE and such can do. I rarely saw that progression.
What happens as a result of this is that someone spends a lot of time tinkering and then they think they know what they are doing. With that confidence, they might apply for a job or take on a more dangerous project. The job will say they don't actually have the skill, even though they have been putting in the time. And the overconfidence could lead to trying to do more dangerous things than they should on projects.
A tinkering culture is fine, but it needs to have safety and skill progression as its foundation. Most Maker Spaces I have been to have done a good job trying to keep things safe, but ultimately, people are people.
You’re expecting tinkerers to approach the skill level of an experienced EE? Then what is the education and career experience for?
That also seems to have very little to due with the safety concerns you express in your last two paragraphs.
"Approaching" means to go towards the skillset. A home chef can develop better knife skills when cutting vegetables. That is approaching being a more professional cook, yet it does not mean the person could work in a restaurant. Maybe they could. We're talking about asymptotic.
If you are having understanding this distinction, then that is the exact point I am making about the Maker Movement. It is accepted that people progress if they do, and if they don't, then tough. There is a balance between perpetual tinkering, some sort of progression culture, and a full on degree.
Why must they “progress”? Why can’t people have hobbies? If they finish their blinky LED project and decide that’s enough investment into the hobby, why is that a problem?
Think about how many thousands have purchased a musical instrument only to abandon the hobby after a few months. Is that a failure of music-as-a-hobby or just humans being humans?
Most people I know who get into electronics as a hobby aren’t looking at it as a potential career. Myself included! This is the most absurd take I’ve seen all day.
I wonder how many young EEs of today can point to Arduino as their first exposure to electronics. You'll probably have a harder time finding those who don't.
As for "progression", I suppose you're disappointed that very few bicycle owners become professional cyclists.
Long fan of Classic VB6. While you are in the happy path, you fly. But if you try something outside that, it's almost impossible.
But there are a lot of real world problems that can be solved with a form and a few buttons, and you look like a magician for normal people.
I still have one project in production, but the compiler is getting harder and harder to install.
Anyway, there is room for beginers tools, in spite they may have a tall second step.
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Is there a good tutorial for upgrading from Arduino to a proffesional microcontroler? (Or you can write one.)
I don't think Arduino users need to worry too much about safety. Obviously, don't build hobby projects that put lives on the line, but otherwise they're pretty harmless.
Who says a tinkering culture needs to have skill progression? Maybe people just like to tinker. Maybe simple things are still useful.
Let people do things. Let people enjoy things.
> I'm not a fan because, pedagogically, the structure of how it played out never allowed or helped people actually advance in the craft of it. There are better ways to build a tinker culture where people actually improve over time towards what an experienced EE and such can do. I rarely saw that progression.
Did you help establish it?
Attitudes like this are genuinely toxic. If you think there are problems, volunteer your time to help people learn. Don't sit in judgement.