Adafruit is wrong here

A missing piece of the puzzle that i feel is ommitted in Adafruits posting, is that the changes only affect the Arduino Cloud Services, which provide various github-like services for the arduino ecosystem. Looking over the changes with this in mind, it seems a lawyer just applied the same standard SaaS legal language to what is effectively a SaaS offering, pretty normal in most cases.

None of these changes will affect the Arduino open-source hardware project.

[EDIT] - confirmed: https://www.arduino.cc/en/privacy-policy/ all the legal language applies to the website, online services, forums, etc.

Arduino is as influential as it is controversial and has been from the beginning.

https://arduinohistory.github.io

https://hackaday.com/2016/03/04/wiring-was-arduino-before-ar...

This is Legal Team not doing their due diligence. Just throwing a blanket terms of service update across all “properties”.

The new Arduino UNO Q features a beefy Qualcomm SOC running Linux, alongside an STM32 microcontroller which is programmable from the Arduino IDE. The MCU side is wide open, but the SOC side is full of proprietary firmware blobs, so I assume the lawyers are concerned about those being reverse engineered.

Arduino repos require a CLA since years, it was introduced 5 or 6 years ago if I remember correctly.

I'm now realising I do not really know where the Arduino IDE gets all the libraries and board definitions from. I assume that's now Qualcomm owned web services with Qualcomm defined TOS?

I also wonder if anyone's backed/scraped the forums?

I could tell you a long, boring story about that; however, it would be long, and boring.

Reminds me of Android. Which is supposed to be a Linux distro.

Rockchip does the same thing with some of their closed source binaries

Teensy, maybe I finally use that stm bluepill I bought, I also have an unopened beagle bone black damn and orange crab

And they officially support Rust!

Qcom is a lawnmower, if you stick your hand in, it'll chop it off.

Espressif was just handed the whole market on a platter. Unless raspberry can significantly expand their market but I doubt it. Year of the RISK V?

> Never have been a fan of the programming style encouraged by the Arduino SDK/API

Can you elaborate on that? I have never done anything with Arduino, and after reading this thread I have my doubts that I ever will. But I am curious to hear your thoughts about it, thanks!

What about ESP32?

Sounds great in theory. But this would put a serious dent in the Arduino opensource community and fragment support.

Arduino is the unifying umbrella that keeps everything together. With that gone the platform will surely lose.

The goal is probably to prevent any knockoffs of the next generation products.

The other option is that Arduino simply fades away. Their hardware doesn't have anything to offer that you can't get on aliexpress or spin yourself for a tenth the cost.

The framework is the only arguably valuable thing they offer, but even that's not enough to prop a business up on.

Most likely everything will continue exactly as-is: Arduino hardware will become increasingly dated and undesirable, and open source Arduino-compatible libraries will continue flourishing until nobody remembers that Arduino was a hardware platform before it was software framework.

I think we've long since passed the point where Wiring will ever go away, but I doubt we'll still be calling it Arduino for too much longer. Arduino is probably dead, and espressif is moving in.

arduino ide is pretty terrible anyway. Swap to your normal ide of choice, and start using PlatformIO. way better experience, and you can actually have all your important config in normal text files on git/etc.. instead of having to tweak UI settings in Arduino studio.

The only thing of value left in Arduino is the API (which has been ported to non-Arduinos) and the drivers (of which there are hundreds; Adafruit is one of the main developers).

You don't actually need the Arduino IDE. I haven't used it in years. You can use any IDE (or just makefiles) and gcc.

Someone needs to step up to fork and maintain it.

I imagine that Adafruit, Sparkfun and some other companies are highly motivated.

Why not just use whatever IDE you prefer and upload via the CLI?

Adafruit already sells own-brand Arduino clones. They have a whole line of Uno-shaped boards with various microcontrollers, some drop-in compatible with the original Uno, and others with more modern chips.

https://www.adafruit.com/category/818

Adafruit also created and maintains CircuitPython, which is targeted very much at the same audience as Arduino. Very beginner friendly, great for quick prototyping/one-offs, but serious enough that one can ship small scale projects with it. And Python is a much better language for that than C++ (which is what Arduino users do not really realize they are using).

FruitDuino was taken

Qualcomm is a comically-evil company. It's a giant law firm with a vestigial engineering department. When Larry Ellison looks at Qualcomm, he mutters, "Damn, son," under his breath, and you can't tell if it's envy or horror that made him say it.

This is the sort of thing they do. It always has been.

Much more expensive though.

Teensy 4.1 is a beast, also quite power efficient.

Was looking for this comment. Long Live Teensy!

Not even “seems like”. That image is AI generated beyond any reasonable doubt.

Tumblr died around 2013 ~ a lot of the key people I joined for were long gone. Last I logged in (yesterday actually) a lot more people I follow deactivated their accounts. Tumblr was a great platform that was not managed correctly, even the new owners aren't really scratching the original itch of Tumblr.

It was Yahoo who bought them, but yeah.

It doesn't stop much, but it sure is a bad sign.

When Qualcomm got its hands on Arduino, the best case scenario was that Arduino influence would encourage Qualcomm to be more open to small developers, and the worst case scenario was that Qualcomm would devour Arduino and its degenerate lawyer culture would ruin all that's good about it.

This is an update towards the latter.

ESP32.

I'm using ESP32 with platformio which has a dedicated community https://community.platformio.org/tag/espressif32

I've used devkit from M5stack, waveshare and adafruit.

(M5Stack has a full line of products for tinkering with many sensors & controllers)

You can also find many cheaper no-brand devkit anywhere but quality & docs can be unreliable.

* RP2040 / RP2350 - If you don't need connectivity, this is a great chip for flexible IO. Good software support, easy to use, well documented.

* ESP32 - Good community support, bluetooth and wifi connectivity, some powerful variants as well for driving screens and other things.

* STM32 - Widely used, and an absolute boatload of chip variants for different tasks, from small little GPIO twiddling cores, to beefy chips running DSPs and outputting high-res images to displays.

* nRF52840 (and other variants) - Good for bluetooth devices, should be lower power than ESP32.

My recommendation would be to buy something like a Xiao RP2040:

https://www.seeedstudio.com/XIAO-RP2040-v1-0-p-5026.html

They're cheap, have USB-C, and are super easy to use. Oh, and they have a reset button which for some reason, the official pico board does not. On top of that, the official pico board uses micro USB, so overall I would recommend NOT buying them, they're annoying to work with. The Xiao boards don't have a ton of IO pins, but they're at least good for learning and if you determine you need more IO you can move to a different dev board, or design your own PCB.

I first got into Raspberry Pi Picos, but I've also been experimenting with Esp32's and some of the nRF chips. I mostly do CircuitPython on them but Arduino is a supported platform on those I believe.

ESP32 - quite a range of dev boards and places like Seeed and Adafruit have a nice selection of accessories. Adafruit develops CircuitPython which is IMO the lowest barrier to entry for programming MCUs. Adafruit even has CircuitPython sketches on their site for how to interface with the components they sell.

Rust on ESP32 is still a bit early - the HAL crate is still pretty unstable, but the toolchain is quite nice and I'm able to be productive enough that I never reach for C or C++.

You are on the right track i.e. stay with an Arduino in the beginning. Note that "Arduino" is a family of boards with different MCUs but all providing a common API (mostly). So you choose the Board/MCU combination best suited for your system and can always move to something else later after you have gotten some experience. The reason is the Arduino Ecosystem. There are thousands of free tutorials, designs, libraries etc. all available for you to try out for your app and more often than not you can have your PoC/MVP by just plugging in some libraries and writing some glue code. You only have to learn the Arduino API and not any specific MCU's datasheets unless and until you are doing something more lower level. It is all way easier.

The Arduino Cloud offering (runs on AWS) makes integrating your Arduino-based system into an end-to-end SaaS app simple (just watch and follow some tutorials on Youtube). There is also the Arduino PRO series of hardware for you if and when you want industrial-grade hardware for demanding systems/environments.

If the Qualcomm c-suites have half a brain amongst themselves they will not kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

The feather series of boards from Adafruit + Curcuit/Micropython works really well if you just want to make stuff happen instead of tuning a toolchain and, like, setting up clocks with asm.

Everyone I know who is into tinkering with microcontrollers moved onto ESP32 a long time ago now. I actually thought this headline was going to link to an article about ESP32's popularity. VSCode with the PlatformIO extension has been great for me when working with them:

https://platformio.org/

I'd like to use apps out there for model railroading - locomotive control and accessory automation, especially 3-rail. There is a LOT written for Arduino; I wonder if any other platforms come close. Someone mentioned some sort of Arduino emulation layer on top of ESP32.

STM32 boards and PlatformIO.

ESP32 is quite popular (as seen by other suggestions) but I find the quality of Espressif, hardware/software/support, is widely varied.

FWIW PlatformIO works with Arduino and ESP32 (and will give you a better experience in so many ways)

ESP32 or RP2 based boards with for example MicroPython/CircuitPython, or platform.io + VSCode. Though the good old Arduino IDE seems to be unaffected by this change though.

In this reply thread I see no mention of TinyGo or Gobot. Are they not so good in this space ?

This is fantastic. Thank you all!

> fully irrevocable license to all user content arduino now owns perpetual, world-wide rights to modify, translate, redistribute, and commercially exploit anything users upload. including code, libraries, photos, designs, and comments. non-revocable, non-expiring.

I don't understand how that works. So I have an Arduino library that has various Copyright messages including from Arduino and me. The licenses are a mix of MIT, GPL and ad-hoc license messages. How is Arduino able to change rights by updating terms of service? As to my understanding they don't even have the exclusive rights to begin with?

> forbids translating, decompiling, or reverse-engineering the platform unless arduino explicitly allows it. that was never the arduino ethos.

What does that mean for activities, that are already ongoing? And how can it be "reverse-engineering", when the board layouts are public and "decompiling", when the code is open-source?

How is the "Platform" defined? Every repository, that has Arduino in the name? Does Arduino assert ownership about random peoples Github Accounts? Because that is where the official libraries are hosted.

I work closely with an educational institution that uses Arduino intensively - I'm trying to sound the alarm, and your points are incredibly useful; would you happen to have reference to the specific paragraphs/sentences in the agreement that each of your points reference?

People are basically telling me I'm too paranoid about this.

Secret is Qualcomms motto. NDA is us.

Early Arduino were all AVR 8-bit, at the time it was already on the way out. There were no shifts in industry to those chips.

People who got Arduino, either:

- blinked some LEDs and forgotten about it

- switched to esp32 and/or stm32

  - esp32 and esp8266 move is funny because people started buying esp8266 to add Wi-Fi to their arduinos and then realized that they can just throw away arduino all together.

 - switched to cheap clones that offer more
  
   - quick connect for that not only want to blink LEDs, but also have some cool graphs to look at (like temperature and humidity)

   - boards that specifically designed for their use case (i.e. battery and eInk connectors and circuitry required)

Arduino is inconsequential to industry as whole or even to hobbyist using it.

Not sure if you're joking, but of course they already have:

https://www.seeedstudio.com/xiao-series-page

I don't think in this case that most people who know what Arduino is would be at all mislead by the title. Being "dead" doesn't have to mean that a company ceases to exist. There are plenty of what I would call "dead" companies that still make money every year. "Dead" can be used figuratively. In this case, meaning that though the company continues to exist, the reason for which many people bought their products is now gone.

Arduino's hackability was its unique selling point. When it is no longer hackable, what is left (of the company)?

As a hobbyist, it's not about being able to buy it faster, cheaper, or better. It's about learning how to tinker, making something work, and building something that is effectively the artistic expression of my technical skills.

YMMV, but if you aren't loving the hobby element anymore and the itch can be scratched by reaching for a product, that's a shift in what you are enjoying, not an indictment of hobbies :)

You are just becoming old.

Less time, more money, changing hobbies, etc...

It is almost always better from a practical perspective to buy the complete product over DIY, or even better, not buy at all. Those who claim otherwise are justifying their hobby. Best case scenario, you break even after not counting your time, which is actually great, because most people pay for their hobbies.

The hobbyist movement didn't change, you did, life is like that and that's not a bad thing. The technologies change but the general idea stay the same. For Arduino (the brand), I think it is dying, but that just because you can buy generic ESP32 boards on AliExpress for cheaper and with more variety.

> What can I build with an Arduino that isn’t better, cheaper, faster, and more complete as a full product on Amazon?

For an end user maybe not much, but for tinkerers, a lot. Almost everything where you need/want customization, unique features, and so on. This said, you don't strictly need an Arduino for that, I actually (almost) never use them because their software library is so high level that it eats so much resources on the underlying microcontrollers and make things more complex when you want to do more advanced stuff (like handling interrupts). When I use them, is for some quick&dirty thing (e.g. I need to turn on a stripe of "smart" LEDs quickly), but never include them in finished things.

What can you create as a programmer that isn't already a product? For each of us the answer is only limited by our interests and imagination. I use the Arduino development environment to create peripherals for specialized measurment gear, where I absolutly must control the design at the firmware level to make it work.

Arduino and related technologies have revolutionzed scientific instrument making. Things that were either "too hard" or "too expensive" are now straightforward for hobbyist and non-technical scientists.

For example, I build automated microscopes as a hobby and I use arduino products (well, used- now I use ESP32 with micropython, but that still depends on the Arduino API) and it's been tremendous for building high speed interfaces (I need to blink an LED at the same rate/in sync with a camera shutter opening/closing) . Even when I do photography, I'm still building arduino and other related things to help automate the tedious bits. And when that gets boring, I take out my guitar and use arduino or similar products to do audio processing in realtime.

For many of the things I want to do, there is no product on Amazon, or it's obscenely expensive (XY stages typically cost $10K and up).

Almost every song I play on any instrument is available played better, more professionally, and more precisely and more artistically, on any music source possibly available. And yet I still play every day for my own pleasure.

It's the act of playing, where the music itself is an important part, but just a part, that I enjoy.

This sounds more like your personal journey, and less like some broad trend.

A quick check of just one of your examples shows the term "3d printer" is googled for literally twice as frequently today as it was in 2016, for instance.

I've been programming esp32 connected with soil moisture sensors and solenoid valves to water each individual pot of plants according to its own readings, instead of having a centrally controlled irrigation system. Overkill, I know, but with a cost of 8-10usd per set up it is not expensive

In my eyes it's quite the opposite: there is almost nothing that exists as a complete product on Amazon. Faster and cheaper? Yes. Better and more complete? Not a chance. But you have to want it bad enough, and have enough skill to do it.

Arduino is (was?) one of those skills. Practice them enough, and you'll soon find the things you want aren't available for sale, at any price.

My 2c: I got into electronics, firmware, and PCB design during the Pandemic, and haven't used Arduino beyond cursory support for integrations. At the time, it used obsolete chips, and didn't have a practical advantage over STM32, Nordic, Espressif chips (Or dev boards) beyond name recognition. I speculate that there was a time before this when it had innovative UX for new users segment, but this hasn't been true for (at least, from my experience) 6 years.

> What can I build with an Arduino that isn’t better, cheaper, faster, and more complete as a full product on Amazon? Almost nothing.

I mean, my little hobby project is making the LED strips taped to my skis respond to an accelerometer, so they pulse brighter when I make a good turn. Plus Bluetooth control of the patterns. Not gonna find that on Amazon.

Also what can I build with an Arduino that isn't cheaper, faster, and more complete with an STM32 Nucleo or other similar dev board? These days you can get a nice 32-bit ARM MCU for the same price (or cheaper) as an Arduino board. No need to deal with an 8-bit ATMEGA and its quirks.

> When I’m staring at a screen 8 hours a day as a computer programmer already, my body screams for less screen time, not more.

Can sympathise. When I worked in SW I avoided computer games and hobby coding like the plague. During bouts of unemployment I dived back in.

There's limits to being a glassy-eyed inert lump of protoplasm.

> When I’m staring at a screen 8 hours a day as a computer programmer already, my body screams for less screen time, not more ... and I don’t think I’m alone.

Isn't there a term for that: wage slavery[1]?

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery

That's a pretty condescending take.

To some extent I agree that the upgrade path is lacking. I recently helped a friend move out of the ino file model into building regular c++ applications because his design was getting pretty complicated. Once he realized that he knew more of c++ than he thought he did, it was a game changer for him.

At the same time, people have done some pretty amazing stuff using the Arduino platform without knowing how to use the things you mention. What you call eternal beginners have accomplished a lot. James Bruton does some pretty impressive robotics work using Arduino.

> I was never a fan of the Maker Movement. While it did get people to tinker, there was always this massive gap between lighting up an LED and using EEPROM, JTAG debugging, interrupts, and even designing some of the more intricate circuit designs to pull of intermediate projects. I found that there were people who knew how to do that stuff and the rest just trying to get by.

Intense gatekeeping in the electronics community is precisely why communities such as Arduino could flourish in the first place (and their creators could benefit financially). Ultimately, people just want to get stuff done and Arduino is a way of doing it. If you go to Stack Exchange, someone will tell you to buy a college textbook and come back in six months once you understand Laplace transforms. An artist working on an installation doesn't need that. A person building an automated cat feeder doesn't need that. In fact, almost no one does, it's just something we torture EE students with.

I think a lot of the negativity toward Arduino boils down to saying "nooo, it's supposed to be hard!". But if you want the Arduino crowd to get more interested in your field of expertise, you need to build them a ramp, not to tell them they're not real electrical engineers.

Look at any hobby and there are lots of beginners and casuals and far fewer people who are very skilled at it. The Maker hobby is no different. It's certainly not a problem of the microcontrollers available. Arduino is the simplest, but there are plenty of others.

The "blinky LED" roadblock is really just a result of the fact that more complex "maker" projects require some amount of electrical or engineering or fabrication knowledge and skill, which takes some trial and error and practice -- the same thing that limits progress in lots of other hobbies.

The real "Maker" movement is the demand that drives so many consumer level fabrication tools and components that were only available as expensive industrial and commercial orders in the past -- 3d printers, laser cutters, microcontrollers, IC sensors, brushless motors -- there are so many options now that just weren't available at all 20 years ago.

Attitudes like this are genuinely toxic. If you think there are problems, volunteer your time to help people learn. Don't sit in judgement.

you aren't a fan because some people never built anything advanced with it? thats a pretty wild take.