Comment by geerlingguy

The Raspberry Pi Pico blows the Arduino out of the water in terms of computational speed, available RAM and so on, and it costs a fraction. I don't remember using an Arduino since the Pi Pico came out. And if the Pico isn't enough there are the bigger family members waiting in the wings. For me Arduino is mostly over. And then there is Espressif as well, they make some neat boards.

You seem to equate gateway product = affordable but, IMHO, a gateway product is something that people who are not in the field are likely to stumble upon. I recently saw Arduino kits for kids at a small local bookstore, I can imagine someone thinking "hey this electronic thingy looks cool I'll buy one for my niece's birthday". On the flip side, people who don't know anything about microcontrollers are not going to look online for Chinese Arduino clones.

clone relies on hardware being designed and software written - this takes a lot of money, so you can't just count the final price of parts as the price.

Arduino is open sourced in hard and software which allows this cheap cloning to exist. It also helps a lot with software and docs, which makes it cheaper for them.

It's probably simpler, Arduino knows the market has no future and wanted to get out and did a sales pitch to Qualcomm and Qualcomm accepted.

What's the TI equivalent?

Note that both Bluepill and ESP32 can be programmed in the Arduino IDE, using the Arduino library, and the vast library of Arduino sketches and 3rd party libraries (as long as they don't use AVR assembly language.

So can the Pi Pico, the Milk-V Duo (one 64 bit Linux core, one 64 bit microcontroller core), and many others.

> Some years back when bluepills ran $2, Arduinos seemed to have no point.

But you still used the Arduino SDK with the bluepill, so clearly Arduino had a point. Unless you were one of the few masochist who dealt with the STM32 toolchain directly for fun?

The Pi Pico is such a breath of fresh air in that regard. Finally a decent-enough toolchain for a decent-enough performing ARM MCU!

If I had a dollar for every time a Qualcomm rep promised me something that never actually happened, I'd be a hundredaire.

Here's hoping. Qualcomm hardware would be fun to play with if it wasn't attached to, you know. The rest of Qualcomm.

Wait, does that mean QXDM/QPST on Western Internet without complimentary malware?

I'm pretty it was sarcasm. Qualcomm is known for shitty docs.

Which is kind of sad, since the Uno pinout is horrible for high-speed signals

STM32 is 3v3 logic.

Early versions crashed when I was demoing blinking an LED.

To me the benefits of an MCU have to do with latency on things like interrupts. A real OS sometimes gets in the way, if you're trying to run things on very tight timing, or want to go super low power. That's why even though I'm drowning in under-used Pis, I'm using Picos to drive the lights I'm making. (Trying to coordinate multiple 3w RGB LED floods with < 10ms of latency for fancy lighting effects - because as a maker - I can do it for as little as 10 times the cost of buying it). Also, I would rather release the magic blue smoke out of a $5 Pico than a $40+ RPi. Although the Zeros were nice. We should have another round of zeros.

Shame to still see newly released products using a 13 year old core design. How has there been such little progress on low power ARM cores that it still makes sense to build a Cortex-A53 based soc on a modern node.

There are some advantages to Arduino. Like <100ms boot times, you can go from power on to running within a blink of an eye.

This _is_ possible with Linux, but not at all trivial and likely impossible with general-purpose distros.

Interrupt handling and (on RP2040) dedicated multicore code is also nice.

The GPU on the RPi is a _lot_ slower