New Arduino T&C: "user shall not [...] reverse-engineer the platform"
What can I build with an Arduino that isn’t better, cheaper, faster, and more complete as a full product on Amazon? Almost nothing. 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. I’d rather learn Spanish or go skiing than start a FOSS project; and I don’t think I’m alone.
I understand there’s an artistic expression aspect to it… but I think at this point I’d rather learn photography or painting, actual art, for expression. Something normal people understand and appreciate. It’s too much of the same for me.
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.
To your reply-writer, how do you think those products came to be, many of them are productization of hobbiest projects.
The arduino project jumpstarted a whole ecosystem, but I don't that ecosystem needs arduino anymore.
Sure. I'm responding to this bit:
> better, cheaper, faster, and more complete as a full product on Amazon
Mine's on a nRF52840 board. My point is less about Arduino and more about tinkering.
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.
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 :)
Isn't there a term for that: wage slavery[1]?
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.
It's the act of playing, where the music itself is an important part, but just a part, that I enjoy.
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.
That's all you need to know. The old company no longer exists.
It was nice while it lasted. RIP, Arduino.
Can’t we just cut Qualcomm out of the supply chain and keep going as normal without too much disruption? Doesn’t even feel like a hard fork is needed. Just don’t buy Qualcomm’s crap.
Arduino is the unifying umbrella that keeps everything together. With that gone the platform will surely lose.
For more "serious" things, you have the ESP-IDF, which is a pretty good C-style interface to all sorts of hardware features. Less newbie friendly than the Arduino interface, but gives you more control. And it can be used in combination with the Arduino interface.
And then, as the cherry on top, you have their official Rust HAL for the ESP chips, implementing the standard Rust embedded-hal interfaces so it should "just work" with the growing Rust embedded ecosystem.
It's honestly impressive. The only thing that has kept Arduino competitive is their brand, good reputation, and focus on the education and tinkerer space. I frankly don't understand what value Qualcomm sees in Arduino if they're just gonna throw away that reputation and education friendliness.
I briefly looked at their IDE and CLI repos and GitHub claims they're AGPL and GPL 3 respectively. I didn't see a CLA when I looked at their contribution guide.
Am I missing something here? What basis do they have to restrict users' rights to reverse engineer the software?
https://arduinohistory.github.io
https://hackaday.com/2016/03/04/wiring-was-arduino-before-ar...
The news describe an important shift, but just describe that it is, no need for "youtubefication" of titles here.
Stuff like https://www.adafruit.com/product/4062
Never have been a fan of the programming style encouraged by the Arduino SDK/API, so hopefully this demise will allow someone to enter the space with something that is actually competitive with the Espressif devices. Have a decent API and connectivity, at the same time, unfathomable stuff. The Picos are closest, but the connectivity situation is a mess.
The CPU cores aren't the problem (just use Hazard3) - it's all the rest, particularly the WiFi.
The RP2350 has two RISC-V cores (and two Cortex M33 cores).
It takes a serious pair to "forbid reverse-engineering" on a platform aimed at tinkerers.
The last time I used Arduino, I ended up just coding the bare metal out of necessity for the things I was trying to do. Some functionality of the chips was literally not accessible unless you break out of the sandbox. But then I wondered why we didn't just get people set up without shielding them so much from what it actually takes to do embedded development. Ultimately, the failure of the Maker Movement to me is that there is not an upgrade path. You start blinking LEDs and then what? Thus, lots of people end up being eternal beginners, which I don't think is helpful.
What happens as a result of this is that someone spends a lot of time tinkering and then they think they know what they are doing. With that confidence, they might apply for a job or take on a more dangerous project. The job will say they don't actually have the skill, even though they have been putting in the time. And the overconfidence could lead to trying to do more dangerous things than they should on projects.
A tinkering culture is fine, but it needs to have safety and skill progression as its foundation. Most Maker Spaces I have been to have done a good job trying to keep things safe, but ultimately, people are people.
That also seems to have very little to due with the safety concerns you express in your last two paragraphs.
If you are having understanding this distinction, then that is the exact point I am making about the Maker Movement. It is accepted that people progress if they do, and if they don't, then tough. There is a balance between perpetual tinkering, some sort of progression culture, and a full on degree.
Did you help establish it?
Who says a tinkering culture needs to have skill progression? Maybe people just like to tinker. Maybe simple things are still useful.
Let people do things. Let people enjoy things.
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.
My wife (cybernetics engineer) and I are buying a 3D printer and planned getting an Arduino as an entry point. What should we do instead? What are the best communities and resources?
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.
Damn, like that's ever stopped the very people that like to reverse engineer things.
https://entropytown.com/articles/2025-10-07-qualcomm-to-acqu...
Only a month...
so does the image at the end of your post, guys, I'm an artist who's bought blinky stuff from Adafruit in the past and this makes me sad.
chermi•1h ago
ge96•56m ago