Whither "Arduino"?

My feeling (which may be completely wrong-headed) is that “Arduino” (in all its different meanings) is going into a new phase which will be increasingly characterized by a lack of central authority from Massimo et al., and a lot of splintering and forking of the project and ideas in the project in many different and likely divergent directions. Which I believe would not be all a bad thing, by any means.

Consider this new stm32duino site. Nice little splinter group, focusing on the cheap stm32 devices, Maple clones etc., which has the sense of something fresh and exciting about it. I suspect many more sites like this will spring up. Whether any sense of a “core” to the Arduino project will re-emerge is hard to say. But my feeling is that arduino.cc/arduino.org etc. will just become increasingly irrelevant, steadily losing influence and authority.

But one way or another, the IDE software will continue to develop, although perhaps in many different directions. Personally, I’d like to see a fork of Arduino at about 1.6.1 that basically avoids all the ill-conceived board manager nonsense, and just starts finally fixing some of the real long-standing problems in the whole thing that have been largely ignored since day 1. Then introduce a few more advanced features as you’d expect in a “real” IDE, to appeal to more experienced programmers.

Whether something like that could gain traction, I have no idea. But it is an experiment I’d like to see!

-Mark

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“The new development system Arduino IDE-alpha based entirely on javascript.”
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federico (I’m guessing Federico Musto ?)

The reason I’ve found the Arduino useful is that it used to be a stable platform that made it easy to write about, write to and present your projects on a hardware / software platform other people could easily obtain. New electronics wantabees could feel some comfort that if they purchased a board from Adafruit or Sparkfun and some components they would be able to reproduce projects they find on the Internet.

Compare that with the fragmented STM32 clone board world that we have. You buy a board from china and you really don’t know what you are going to get. I have different boards that all have different issues. Of course, all those problems can be solved with some software changes or board modifications. However, that is different to my first Arduino experience. I think back happily to 6 years ago when I first bought an Arduino Duemilanove. It was easy, it just worked. Would I have persevered If I had to change the bootloader, or resolder some of the SMT chips or replace some resistors? It certainly would have taken me a lot longer to experience that first taste of physical computing success.

I think the Arduino crew is still in a good spot today. You can still buy a real Arduino or an Arduino clone and get it going pretty easily regardless of your OS. Their competitors still have some work to do with that regard. Arduino will have problems if it gets to the point that you have to think about where to get the latest IDE or where to buy something that works with that IDE, that is when this thing we have will all fall apart.

-rick

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“The new development system Arduino IDE-alpha based entirely on javascript.”
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federico (I’m guessing Federico Musto ?)

I think the Arduino crew is still in a good spot today. You can still buy a real Arduino or an Arduino clone and get it going pretty easily regardless of your OS. Their competitors still have some work to do with that regard. Arduino will have problems if it gets to the point that you have to think about where to get the latest IDE or where to buy something that works with that IDE, that is when this thing we have will all fall apart.

-rick

Prior to the Arduino port, it was a complete pain to develop for, as you needed to use one of two different VM’s (and XP or Linux VM), which were generally a pain to use.

There are so many small startup companies that want to use IoT and wifi in niche projects, that the Arduino IDE is an easy entry point for them.

I also know of companies who use BASIC interpreters on embedded devices, just because its the cheapest and quickest way to get stuff to market.

So I’d not underestimate the impact of “Wiring” on commercial projects, especially things like IoT where the amount of non library code is probably quite small.

Interesting.
I’ve never to have worked for an organization like that, though I can totally understand why they’d do that.

I also see a difference to saying, you cant install the Arduino IDE, to saying, you can’t use VS + Visual Micro.

Just using any source code that is open source is bound to be a risk, but I can’t see how it can be avoided unless you happen to be Microsoft etc.

As far as I can tell most devices now have a large percentage of open source code in them, even if the final product is closed source

Roger,
Consider yourself blessed and avoid such highly gravitational environments that not even enlightenment can escape!

Ray

This is typically the point where the company implodes, as more and more talent is shed in order to sustain a less and less competent management team… i.e. the dense matter concentrates in the center and the more enlightened individuals spin off at high velocity before the inevitable happens.

Don’t Arduino.cc have a store? But I notice virtually everything is out of stock.

The usa store is on the same Arduino.cc domain, but doesn’t seem to show the most popular boards e.g. Uno , but does show boards like the teensy which are not even in the boards manager by default.

I thought possibly teensy still used their own custom version of the IDE, but its not something I’m up to date on.

I could understand if they’d setup a site on a different domain e.g if they had Arduino.com, but Arduino.com seems to be a site selling TShirts (possibly a ploy with the hope of selling the domain in the long term ???)

As ever, IMHO, the Arduino.cc guys don’t make decisions that seem logical to me

http://makezine.com/2015/05/16/arduino- … g-genuino/

Genuino implies of course that other brands may be not-genuine…..

That’s interesting.

I did wonder if anyone would complain about me calling this site STM32duino, but if they do, I will just move it elsewhere.

I did wonder why PJRC called his product a Teensy and not something with Ard, or Duino in the name, as they are firmly inside the Arduino sphere of compatible devices.

Perhaps we should suggest that the Arduino store USA should start selling the Mini Maple clones ( they could buy in bulk from AilEpress and then do quick despatch to US customers – and probably still make a small profit)

Actually, getting hold of some more F103VET’s may also be worthwhile

I just looked on AliExpress and the price is holding around $4.00 USD. So, still looks like a glut of the boards on the mainland. I do not think Adafruit/Arduino would bother with the BAITE boards mainly because of the noisy analog 2-layer board. i could easily see Ms. Fried building her own version with the Adafruit branding; however. This is if the STM32 really catches on in the Arduino world. At this moment, the old forum still seems to be dealing with AVR issues and Due dialog. The U.S. store is likely to keep new users away from China, not because of pricing, but the long and uncertain delivery times.

Just out of curiosity, why does one need 64K of SRAM? Are you still hacking away on the video camera… a frame buffer would be a likely use, I suspect.

Ray