It is hard to think of a more transformative piece of hardware for hackers than Arduino<p>I have observed hobbyists innovating in really cool ways in all sorts of corners - musicians, athletes, retro computer collectors, etc<p>Very glad to see they're being well funded and can continue building<p>PS - I elect this as the greatest current Arduino contribution to humanity - The Furby Organ - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYLBjScgb7o" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYLBjScgb7o</a>
Hot take: I don't see this working out.<p>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.<p>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.
It’s essential to read Hernando Barragán‘s perspective. His ideas and work were stolen and turned into Arduino:<p><a href="http://arduinohistory.github.io/" rel="nofollow">http://arduinohistory.github.io/</a>
I didn't even realize Arduino was a VC venture.<p>For some reason I was under the impression they were a non-profit or some corporate supported education related thing.<p>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 ....
To quote duskwuff:<p>> Arduino's approach has historically been to sell breakout boards for commodity microcontrollers.<p>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.<p>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 <i>is</i> still the simplest way to program a micro controller ... but in my mind Arduino <i>hardware</i> is a legacy offering barely anyone uses.<p>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"?
Which one? Because there was a huge drama with two incorported Arduinos, one by a guy who has nothing to do with a project other than running a PCB house making boards for them and then silently filing trademarks all over Europe and suing original project.
Did the intellectual property stuff ever get ironed out? <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/637755/" rel="nofollow">https://lwn.net/Articles/637755/</a><p>arduino.org redirects to arduino.cc so maybe?
Is this the original team or the venture by the guy who bought the rights to the name? Wasn't there some controversy about the original developers and team being pushed out? Maybe someone else remembers the whole story?
Maybe they can put that towards moderating their forum. Almost every post is a reply from users berating the OP and being generally unhelpful. Ive seen it turn off plenty of people from ever wanting to touch it.<p>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.
Such a central pillar in such a vast ecosystem of mutually compatible hardware and software, their IDE having been used as everything from a hardware design platform with standardized peripherals (Papilio) to being used for supporting the Teensy boards, it’s clear that the Arduino is a ubiquitous icon of our era, the platform that brought embedded computing to the masses.<p>Hooray for Arduino, they deserve to get bigger and more widely accepted.<p>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.<p>You can program the fastest RT Arm processors with it as well…<p>So many offshoots and interwoven webs.
Arduino positively transformed me. I thought code was cool, but then getting an Arduino and being able to blink an LED from software, control a motor, move dials and buttons... it's amazingly empowering.
I bet in a little bit they'll do yet another press release regarding how "excited" they are to sell themselves to Microsoft or Oracle or something similar to "transform" "enhance" "integrate" and "optimize" "enterprise cloud services" with "new AI capabilities" or similar.
I am happy to see them succeeding and expanding into new areas. They have done so much for the tech scene.<p>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.
I <i>highly</i> encourage people to buy knockoff arduinos from aliexpress: <a href="https://www.aliexpress.com/item/2251832778273419.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.aliexpress.com/item/2251832778273419.html</a>
I feel terrible for Hernando Barragán who invented Wiring, only for it essentially to be stolen by his advisor Massimo Banzi and renamed Arduino, leaving out the inventor. Given that Banzi and the Arduino team never referred any credit to Wiring, I can only assume it was due to ego reasons since they credited Banzi's previous project as the source of Arduino.<p><a href="https://arduinohistory.github.io/" rel="nofollow">https://arduinohistory.github.io/</a><p>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.
Arduino is to commercial embedded development as what Javascript is to Java.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.