Comment by pclmulqdq
7 days ago
People are making so much of this when it seems so much simpler. Qualcomm likes buying high-margin businesses, and Arduino is a high-margin business. Gross margin on their boards is over 90% (hence why you can buy a Chinese clone of a $30 board for $3) and this trend shows no signs of slowing down. The TI equivalent of the $30 Arduino Uno is $5, and it's a true gateway product.
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.
Long live Teensy [1]!
I just wanted that someone mentioned these Arduino-likes in the comments. I suspect many of you have come across them though.
[1] https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/
The teensy is so weird though. At least back when I played with them. They put a secondary chip which let's you flash over USB but they cover the debug pins and the only way to get serial over the USB port is to have a whole USB stack as part of your application. As a development board I would rather go with one of those STM32 backed boards and a knock off STLink, you need the STLink to flash, if you want DFU you can add that yourself, and you get a debug adapter.
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Yes, the Teensy is pretty impressive too. I've used one in a project and came away impressed.
Do you mean the Uno specifically? There are a lot of Arduino boards with varying capabilities.
For everything Arduino offers that I've ever used I know of a cheaper board with better specs.
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.
>people who don't know anything about microcontrollers are not going to look online for Chinese Arduino clones.
But high chance they will look it up on Amazon/Ebay/whatever e-store and buy a clone without knowing.
This has 100% been my experience, even with in-person shopping.
You ask for an Arduino, and the follow up question is: 'genuine or generic?'.
I don't think the Arduino trademark is that valuable, it's already well underway genericization.
I think a key part of a gateway product is community. That is what Arduino has, and what RPi has. It can also exist separate to products (e.g. micropython)
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.
A competent engineer designing a devkit as simple as an arduino needs about 1 day of work. Give it a week to include debugging. Amortize that cost over a million units and engineering time comes out to less than one cent per board.
> A competent engineer designing a devkit as simple as an arduino needs about 1 day of work.
Hah! I like to underestimate scope as well, but this is really something else. Definitely a competent engineer could make something like this. But a couple of months maybe. You won't even read the documentation for the chip in a day.
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I have been modifying Arduino libraries for weeks, there is much more work in them than just a single day. Granted replacing the Arduino IDE with Autoconf took 3 days. (2 and a half of which were spend on analyzing what the IDE does.)
It’s not quite that easy, and besides the hard part is the SW. arduino spent years writing SW code and still does to make it easy to run, debug issues and provide support.
Also a million dev kits is unrealistic for vast majority of companies 5-20k is more the number I hard.
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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?
Various launchpads, on the very low end MSP430