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Comment by estimator7292

7 days ago

Shame to see Arduino go, but honestly how relevant are they anymore? The Arduino framework is one of the worst ways possible to write firmware for any slightly serious use, and their hardware is... quaint in the era of Espressif and the Cambrian explosion of devboards with any number of highly advanced features.

Arduino was a great way to get into microcontrollers back when the only alternative was vendors' native libraries in straight undocumented C and wiggling CPU registers manually. But that's not really a niche anymore, there's plenty of other, better designed, frameworks and libraries. Arduino has always been the worst, slowest framework available.

Honestly it's high time to replace Arduino with something else that doesn't instill such awful habits in new engineers.

There's still relevance in making it stupidly easy to make an LED blink and make basic apps on circuit boards. Education + weekend hardware hackers might look for something different in a framework than a professional.

But certainly for pro use cases the hardware specific frameworks are way more powerful (but also complex).

I wrote up a bit on Arduino vs ESP-IDF here https://bitclock.io/blog/esp-idf-vscode

  • The native AVR libraries are really good. It's not quite as idiomatic as Arduino, but it's really not all that different.

    Beginners can learn frameworks more complicated than Arduino and I think they should. Before Arduino, beginners were expected to write plain C or assembly, and the industry got along just fine. There were still countless hackers and weekend tinkerers. They just had to learn more, which is not a bad thing

    • If by native AVR, you mean avr-libc, it's nothing at all like Arduino.

      Instead of analogRead, you need to write your own busy loop watching certain bits in a register (or ISR), you need to twiddle bits in several registers to set up the ADC the way you want it, etc.

      Serial.write? Nope, gotta read the docs, twiddle some bits again, and then you actually do get to use printf.

      Those two right there are big hurdles to someone new to microcontrollers. In fact, they're a hurdle to me and I've read AVR datasheets for fun.

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  • > There's still relevance in making it stupidly easy to make an LED blink and make basic apps on circuit boards. Education + weekend hardware hackers might look for something different in a framework than a professional.

    This group is has been moving to circuitpython, which is much less performant, but even easier to use. The more serious cross-platform development environments, like Zephyr, have also become much better.

Curious what the better frameworks are these days? Are they tied to specific hardware like arduino was? And what language do they use?

  • FreeRTOS is pleasant to use.

    I've recently been getting into Rust + Embassy + Probe-rs and in my opinion it's been the best embedded experience by far.

  • Broad support for many different chips is precisely why Arduino is so bad. It has to check pin numbers against a gigantic table for every gpio call.

    You want chip-specific libraries. When the software is designed for the hardware everything works better.

    The native AVR and esp-IDF frameworks are very good. There's also micropython and circuit python. I've heard good things, but I don't partake in Python.

    Personally I think attempting to provide a cross-platform library for microcontrollers is an enormous mistake. This is not x86, you can't rely on any CPU feature existing, which results in awful branching code in places that in a sane framework is a single instruction updating a CPU register

    • I feel like this has to be a toolchain issue, there's no reason the pin number -> register table couldn't be resolved at compile time, similar with conditionally compiling certain things based on the CPU features.

      I'm not saying it's not a real or an easy problem, just that I wonder if it truly is the reason Arduino is "bad"

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  • If you want a "framework", Zephyr is the only thing i can think of, that is somewhat hardware agnostic, have great software packages, and fairly widely used.