I will say I'd eventually love to have my day job environment on Proxmox but it isn't quite ready to be there today. No shade to anyone who is able to be there by any means, but I think it's fair to say hypervisors aren't something you want to choose on vibes alone.
It sounds like Adafruit are just trying to sow some outrage here.
> Chief microcontroller rival Adafruit
Implying that Adafruit makes their own competing microcontrollers, which sure would have been news to me.
Edit: sees sibling posted at the same time. Well that would explain it.
This is different now that Arduino is Qualcomm-owned and ships Qualcomm silicon, of course.
As other pointed out, companies like Google demonstrate, how open source can be used in a rather aggressive commercial strategy. However, I think the good news is that that the open hardware stuff is not rocket science and maintenance hell at this point (without the new Qualcomm bits). I guess it is now for others to step up and make the ecosystem resilient. That is IMHO the power of open source in case it works.
Now contemplate open Android and Google Play Services.
Or even that they forbid to use different clients for YouTube
If your target audience is school kids, you really can't go past the micro:bit and Makecode[3].
2. https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects/getting-started...
(Disclosure: I know the Adafruit founder, but haven't discussed this matter with her.)
Why do you think it isn't?
Code is copyright without any licensing. The hardware is not licensed, I don't sign a license or agree to one when buying a car or microwave.
You can find edge cases, but the point is no licensing is actually required.
At the very least, you need some sort of user agreement to specify the things you can do with their content, otherwise you can't really do it because it's their content and you're not allowed to mess with it by default. (Like you said, code is copyrighted by default.) You also need to specify the things that are necessary by law because you are hosting that code and therefore in part responsible for it. You also don't want to make the user sign a new agreement every other week if you add some new feature that they need to agree to use, because the cost of all those legal documents is prohibitive, and it's also very bad UX.
Added to this the fact that lawyers are naturally very conservative as a profession (generally only doing things that have been proven successful, rather than avoiding things that have been proven unsuccessful), and it's easy to see why these sorts of agreements tend to be more expansive than they perhaps need to be, in order to ensure the company is fully protected.
They are PCB brands. The microcontrollers are made by the usual manufacturers like ST, Renesas, Infineon...
But of course Arduino historically also didn't make the Atmel or Pico chips, so I can sort of see what they were going for.
Prototyping platforms have tiny markets, but lead to downstream sales. Many a company were brought down by more developer-friendly platforms ignoring the "tiny" userbase of people who want to do unconventional things.
Most IC vendors provide free samples and support because of this. That's a market size of close to zero -- electronic engineers -- but leads to a market size of "massive." I can get an application engineer to visit my office for free to help me develop if I want.
Arguably, iPhone and Android won by supporting the tiny market of developers, who went on to build an ecosystem of applications, some long-tail, and some unexpected successes.
And arguably, x86 won for the same reason.
Atmel had shipped 500 million AVR flash microcontrollers, due in large part to the ecosystem created by Arduino.
Balmer said "Developers! developers! developers!" Visual Studio was not a major revenue driver for Microsoft; what was developed in it was.
How do you know the 500 million sales is due to the Arduino ecosystem?
I used to work in embedded for 10+ years and in the 4 companies I worked at so far, none of the products ever featured AVR microcontrollers. The microcontroller of choice for production was always based on the feature/cost ratio for each application, never on the "is it part of the Arduino ecosystem?" question.
Tinkering with Arduino at home, and building products for mass production, have widely different considerations.
A surprising amount of embedded SoCs target the Arduino IDE either as the main IDE, or one of the main ones. And for those the setup is still pretty easy for non technical users - "Download IDE, paste this into the boardmanager, compile the sketch, upload". That's the main reason I'm still using the Arduino IDE for stuff I publish and expect less technical people to use.
The problem with the IDE is that it doesn't offer a gradual path to more advanced usage. You're pretty much stuck with a single file main project. You can split off functionality into libraries, but the way library resolving works is way worse compared to "proper" build systems. There are projects to provide makefiles for Arduino projects, but it's a bit of a pain to set up - I use that for CI on some of my stuff, but it clearly is on the other end of difficulty scale.
And of course the editor is horrible - but thanks to file watching and automatic reloads that isn't much of an issue nowadasy.
The process of getting a binary onto the board is just dragging a file, and on linux at least you can script it with picotool
I think you're missing the point of what made arduino so popular. It's not the HW itself, it's that you can plug in whatever display, sensor or motor driver out there, and there's ready made templates in the IDE that gets you running immediately, without you having to know anything about how the HW or SW works under the hood.
The lack of dual cores or "fun IO coprocessor" whatever fun is in that context, was never an issue for the arduino.
There's a virtually unlimited number microcontrollers and boards out there for tinkering or production, that are more powerful and have more features, but they all have a higher technical barrier to entry than the standard Arduino out of the box.
I don't wanna have to read datasheets and erratas just to learn how to use a second core, deal with shared memory between cores, or how to configure the GPIO of the "fun IO coprocessor" just for the LED blinking to work. That's not what fun is to a lot of people. I just want to get the motor spinning until my coffee finishes brewing and that's where the Arduino ecosystem USP was versus other more powerful platforms.
Are they more in number and easier to use than the Arduino libraries?
>If anything, with the drag-n-drop flashing it is even easier to work with than an Arduino.
Why do you think the Arduino is more difficult than "drag-n-drop flashing" by comparison? Do you think one click is more difficult?
They are great for basic hobbyist projects, but they just can't compare to something like an STM32 for more complicated applications.
They are a pleasure to work with and I think that they are great MCUs, but every time I try to use them for nontrivial applications I end up being disappointed.
I did a bit of searching and found some sketchy documentation that just leaves me with more questions. It sounds like Arduino’s new web editor programs boards wirelessly somehow? Does it assume the board has WiFi? What is this new, networked system? What Internet protocols does it use? How do you pair it with the web editor?
I kind of drifted off. So curious about what people here think is the best "Arduino when it still was open source" contender. Preferably something Arduino compatible because of the sheer amount of projects already out there.
That said I've heard a fair bit about Adafruit criticism as well, but that's more on the company level and no personal experience there.
But yeah, Arduino is in a weird place right now. I knew people there (kind of lost track), quite liked their IDE and how accessible it made a lot of things, but the recent turn on events is just… weird.
RobotToaster•3h ago
Running a proprietary SaaS doesn't really show commitment to open source.
_ache_•2h ago
And btw, the "reverse engineering" close was already here too. You can check the archive.org of Jan 2025, months before the Qualcomm acquisition.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250120145427/https://www.ardui...
So this citation, is basically fake news and FUD. The *now* part is false and this hide the fact that the "platform" is only the SaaS.
> Phillip Torrone had warned [...] Arduino’s users were now “explicitly forbidden from reverse engineering or even attempting to understand how the platform works unless Arduino gives permission.”
RobotToaster•1h ago
They released their first closed source "pro" boards in 2021
https://blog.adafruit.com/2023/07/12/when-open-becomes-opaqu...