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.

https://arduinohistory.github.io

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

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

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!

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

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

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.

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++.

https://platformio.org/

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)

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.

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.

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

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 :)

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.

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.

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).

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.