Comment by bluGill
7 days ago
Arduino is used by many professionals. It is cheap enough that you can buy it on your corporate cards and you boss won't ask many questions. As such many products start with an Ardunio based demo, and if/when the demo is a success it moves to a real company project with a real budget.
The question though is does this add value for the owners of Arduino? All too often when a project moves from the demo to real engineering (making a demo something you can sell is typically about ten times harder than the demo) you select all new hardware.
When professionals use Arduinos for such use cases, do they use the Arduino software platform or do they use the chio verndors' toolchains? Just curious how the professionals work with these things.
It depends, really. Mostly on who does the project.
Some people hail from hacker town and will use whatever they have at hand. Some learned on vendor tooling, and would want it to be "proper", and would always try to use a vendor SDK with a vendor IDE. Some learned on vendor tooling and prefer not to use vendor tooling for "familiarity breeds contempt" reasons.
As a degenerate case: I've seen software for an ESP32 board that was prototyped entirely in Arduino IDE, and we almost shipped it that way. Because the prototype team cooked, and when the "make it an actual product team" tried to remake it in ESP-IDF, they ended up with less features and more bugs. They got it together eventually though.
Thank you for sharing. As a hobbyist with a devotion to the field, I'm fascinated by how the actual professionals work. It's a very challenging domain.
From what I've heard (primarily in the music hardware space) is that it depends. Some use Arduino's software and language while others use the lower level toolchains.
This is prototyping mostly so I'm not sure if any of the Arduino code actually gets shipped with production devices.
We use the whole Arduino software packages(IDE/toolchain/flashing tool). It's fast and proven to work.
For ex, we want to prototype a new mux switch, and need to toggle some gpio from computer. We finished in 1 evening, with arduino and python on host.