The Untold History of Arduino (2016)

One year later:<p>&quot;Arduino Welcomes Hernando Barragán as Arduino Chief Design Architect&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.globenewswire.com&#x2F;news-release&#x2F;2017&#x2F;05&#x2F;19&#x2F;988294&#x2F;0&#x2F;en&#x2F;Arduino-Welcomes-Hernando-Barrag%C3%A1n-as-Arduino-Chief-Design-Architect.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.globenewswire.com&#x2F;news-release&#x2F;2017&#x2F;05&#x2F;19&#x2F;988294...</a>

Prior discussion here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11212021" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11212021</a>

I built some things with Wiring back in the day (2005 through 2006-ish) and was very impressed with it. I had considered Arduino for the project, but I believe I decided against it because it didn&#x27;t support USB at the time.<p>There seemed to be fundamentally different philosophies to the two projects. Arduino at the time was catering to the maker crowd--selecting only through-hole components so people could assemble their own boards without having to deal with SMD soldering. I think they didn&#x27;t even sell pre-assembled boards back then. Wiring was definitely more polished, trading low cost and ease of assembly for additional features like USB.<p>Of course now you can buy fully assembled Arduino boards and a bunch of them even use SMD components, which may be evidence validating the Wiring philosophy...

(2016)<p>See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ArduinoHistory&#x2F;arduinohistory.github.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ArduinoHistory&#x2F;arduinohistory.github.io</a>

I owe Arduino a lot though I never bought one (real or clone). I retired from commercial development in Java, saw these discussed, but looking at them I thought - that&#x27;s just an Atmel chip on a board. Not quite true, but with a £10 programmer I got a range of DIP Atmel chips and found it was easy to program them with avr-gcc. It is a bit more complex, but not much, and very satisfying to know what everything is doing.<p>Ironically I do use the Arduino IDE with the esp8266 but I consider I will never fully know what those things are doing.

Arm have finally started making a decent offline mBed IDE so hopefully in a year or two there will be no reason to use Arduino at all. The mBed API is <i>much</i> better and the range and price of boards is generally better too.<p>E.g. ST Nucleo boards are around £10. Or the nRF52 device board is £30 - that gets you a proper BLE&#x2F;Thread&#x2F;etc board with a fully documented radio peripheral. You can write your own radio protocol if you want.

And this is why I buy Chinese made clones of Arduino.

I couldn&#x27;t tell from the article who was Arduino SRL and who was Arduino LLC.<p>It&#x27;s great that Hernando is now Chief Design Architect, but how does that fit with the rest of the story? Did his opponent have to take him on as part of a settlement? Is this a win for the little guy?