This article is somewhat misleading. The changed ToS only covers Arduino's hosted cloud services, not the IDE or microcontroller library. This is spelled out in black and white in the first paragraph of the ToS:
> 1.1 The Site is part of the platform developed and managed by Arduino, which allows users to take part in the discussions on the Arduino forum, the Arduino blog, the Arduino User Group, the Arduino Discord channel, and the Arduino Project Hub, and to access the Arduino main website, subsites, Arduino Cloud, Arduino Courses, Arduino Certifications, Arduino Docs, the Arduino EDU kit sites to release works within the Contributor License Agreement program, and to further develop the Arduino open source ecosystem (collectively, the “Platform”). The use of the Site, the Platform, and the Services is governed by these Terms including the other documents and policies made available on the Platform by Arduino.Certifications, Arduino Docs, the Arduino EDU kit sites to release works within the Contributor License Agreement program, and to further develop the Arduino open source ecosystem (collectively, the “Platform”). The use of the Site, the Platform, and the Services is governed by these Terms including the other documents and policies made available on the Platform by Arduino.
(caveat - not a lawyer... but I'll share my opinion)
That list in 1.1 isn’t an exhaustive definition which is IMO, one of the causes of the fire. Again, "IMO", the list is an illustrative set of examples as there is no limiting language like "solely" or "only" and the clause even mixes services and purposes, which again signals it’s descriptive rather than definitive.
Saying that, whilst the list inside the definition of "the Platform" is illustrative, the category it defines seems scoped to Arduino-hosted online properties which could be argued is the intent. But its an argument alas...
Either way, ambiguous policy is being communicated by these T+C updates and that is a real problem.
Yeah no. Wishful thinking. History has shown that huge corporations taking over open source project generally results in a big change how those projects are governed and how the legalese like t&c turns out.
Not a lawyer obviously - but lets see how this plays out.
> The most dangerous change is Arduino now explicitly states that using their platform grants you no patent licenses whatsoever. You can’t even argue one is implied.
> This means Qualcomm could potentially assert patents against your projects if you built them using Arduino tools, Arduino examples, or Arduino-compatible hardware.
Arduino has long been fraught with governance and licensing issues, but at its core has been supported first and foremost by a community of keen amateurs and patient professionals teaching in their off time.
This is a reminder - never sell out your baby unless you're willing to see it squeezed for every penny, community be damned.
Do tinkerers still use Arduino? I have a couple of boards here, but since I moved to ESP32, I never used them again. The last usages I gave an Arduino board was for it to serve as a programmer for my ESP2688. And the Arduino IDE has been replaced with PlatformIO in VS Code.
Not sure if this really counts as tinkering, but the other day I needed a custom HID device for my PC. I ordered an Arduino Micro (I think?), one that supports HID out of the box, and with under 300 lines of code my problem was solved.
The Arduino HAL and the overall comfort of the Arduino IDE are genuinely valuable. I didn’t have to learn new flashing tools or a new debugging toolchain just to light a few LEDs, read some buttons, and emulate keypresses on a PC. The learning curve was basically zero.
I’ve worked with embedded systems before, and this level of simplicity is incredibly useful for people who just want to ship simple solutions to simple problems without fighting through vendor-specific, arcane tooling.
I've got some RP2350s since then with Micropython, now those might be even better for getting stuff done (without network or extreme low power needs)
I don't know if I'll use Arduino in a professional project, but the existence of simavr and in-tree QEMU support means I can at least unit-test my code without dedicated test runners hooked up to hardware or licensing for Wokwi.
Indie devs who need testable builds might be a smaller market than tinkerers, but they're there.
It's a pain anticipating money flow into the future in more ways than one.
> but the existence of simavr and in-tree QEMU support means I can at least unit-test my code without dedicated test runners hooked up to hardware or licensing for Wokwi.
Would you mind elaborating more? I don't quite understand what you mean.
With a similarly priced (sometimes cheaper) platform like the amazing rp2040 / rp2350 which is roughly 100 times more powerful, I have no idea what the niche is for them any more.
The way they dropped the ball with their IDE is amazing. It still looks and feels like something that was rejected during beta testing in 1993
Arduino is following roughly the same trajectory as BlackBerry, with the current phase being "rapidly fading into obscurity"
There's plenty of semi-technical tinkerers out there, doing things like building flight sim cockpits, scraping by on copying ready made code, doing minimal changes and asking forums or LLMs if they get stuck.
They just want something that works, and ideally to keep using the same thing they've always used.
They know what Arduino is, as long as it does the job they aren't interested in researching alternatives. They don't want to get involved in adapting someone's instructions for a different pin layout, or risk that anything they've done up to now stops working.
Yes, we all know it's a massively out of date platform easily outclassed by much cheaper and more flexible solutions, and if you must use the Arduino IDE it can build code for all sorts of boards. But for non-technical people by far the most important factor is to stick with something safe and known.
I'm sure somebody like me would happily take them off your hands. The AVR is still a solid platform for low-level applications. A lot of the Arduino libraries never really took full advantage of what you could do with that chip. Whatever happens with the Arduino IDE, those boards will still be useful tools for quite a while.
I just made the discovery the other day that there are two Arduino IDEs, the old crusty one maintained by Arduino.org and the new hotness maintained by Arduino.cc.
I'd been using the Arduino.org version which had mostly driven me to use PlatformIO and ESPHome.
Unfortunately, but perhaps fortuitously, I needed to use a Library only compatible with Arduino 3.0.0 which is incompatible with PlatformIO. That lead me to discover the Arduino.cc IDE which, while not on par with VSCode, is dramatically better than the Arduino.org IDE.
I actually use Teensy. I found that the ESP32 and its whole WiFi stack (?) were slowing the device down. It's not bare-bones enough for many of my projects.
Color me skeptical, but I did just order a Uno Q a couple of days ago, right before all this T&C news broke. So I guess I'll still spend at least a modest amount of time fiddling with that when it arrives.
That said, I definitely have some severe reservations about the path that Arduino is on, especially given Qualcomm's history. Old aphorisms like "The leopard doesn't change its spots", and "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree" weigh heavily in mind right now. As does the parable about the scorpion and the frog.
I'm not saying the person(s) who wrote that is(are) lying. It's just that it doesn't seem to come from someone with authority to make decisions like that or even from someone well informed about the global strategy of the corporation.
To me "Arduino Team" is just a bunch of hopeful or even naive employees.
Your comment is/was getting downvoted perhaps because of the last line but this is very true:
> It's just that it doesn't seem to come from someone with authority to make decisions like that or even from someone well informed about the global strategy of the corporation.
Arduino is owned by Qualcomm, Qualcomm is known for being litigious. Whoever wrote that note, unless it was the CEO of Qualcomm, doesn't actually call the shots and if tomorrow the directive comes from above to sue makers they will have to comply.
I mean even if it came from the CEO he could change his mind tomorrow.
It's maybe better to look at incentives, something that blog posts can help illustrate. Does Qualcomm want to mine the maker community for IP or get them to adopt its technology?
> I mean even if it came from the CEO he could change his mind tomorrow.
To a point. Public statements do carry some legal weight, due to the principle of "Promissory Estoppel"[1]. There are limits to that though, but it's not nothing.
I remember 15 years ago when I was in highschool I really wanted to learn how to program 8 bit microcontrollers without Arduino. And everybody looked at me like I was crazy. There was barely any learning material out there about how to do this.
Now, I imagine the bias pushing everyone to learn on arduino is even more intense? Who out there is programming these chips in pure C using open source compilers and bootloaders?
Edit: Of course there's other platforms like Esp32; teensy; seed. But I've only programmed Esp32s using the arduino dev environment. Are there other good ways of doing it?
> Who out there is programming these chips in pure C using open source compilers and bootloaders?
The gcc-arm-none-eabi toolchain is pretty much what you are asking for at least for ARM targets. You can literally use a text editor and gcc-arm-none-eabi, that's it.
And if you want something really bare bones avr-gcc still targets the whole atmel family including those ATtiny chips which are also a lot of fun.
I don't know the state of it nowadays but 'Mbed' is probably worth looking into. The project had _a_lot_ of Middleware libraries to abstract hardware, a few levels below, makes embedded development a little less datasheet dependent, specially if you are just hacking something as a hobbyist.
You can also ditch the space consumed by a bootloader and save the UART for something productive in your designs. This is makes it feasible to use the smaller capacity chips and have more headroom on the larger ones. AVR programmers are cheap and the latest serial port based protocol requires the barest of hardware to support.
15 years ago I think Arduino was the best choice for educational purposes. I still think it's a great choice now. The fact the IDE and board are basically the same as they were 15 years ago, means you can figure out how to set everything up once and focus on teaching, rather than PC trouble-shooting. Which, for basic concepts, or younger kids, is great. And if they find a 5 or 10 year old video on how to do something, it's still relevant.
If I were putting teaching materials today - I would pick something like Micro python. The down side is it isn't as "canned" a solution, meaning there might be something new to figure out every so often. Which means you spend more time helping people trouble shoot why something isn't working, instead of teaching something useful. On the up side, Python is pretty much the introductory language of choice, today. With lots of available materials.
That's not to say Arduino was perfect. Far from it. Just easier to do, and more consistent over time, than other options.
> There was barely any learning material out there about how to do this.
I started playing around with ATmega/ATtiny around 2008, and from what I remember, there were plenty of tutorials and examples out there.
I remember that AVR and PIC were two popular options among hobbyists at that time, but I started with AVR since it was easier to get the programmer, and it had a lot better open source tooling.
I'm working on an ESP32 project right now, and Espressif provides shrink-wrapped toolchains for C/++ and Rust. The latter even comes with a little tool called 'espup' that cleanly installs their fork of Rust and LLVM (for Xtensa support) - I was able to compile and run a blinky in less than half an hour.
I learned how to program the AVR in assembly 25 years ago by reading the datasheet and various articles in Nuts and Volts. For its time the AVR had a very accessible development kit, the STK500, which cost about $100. A few years later avr-libc came along and if you were running linux and knew how to write C it was pretty easy to get started.
> But I've only programmed Esp32s using the arduino dev environment.
Well you can use PlatformIO/VSCode and the ESP-IDF.
If you're ok with the Arduino 2 framework, then you can use PlatformIO as well. Unfortunately Arduino 3 support isn't there yet so a lot of libraries like HomeSpan won't work on PlatformIO at the moment.
From Arduino ecosystem i always have a feeling that they try to do an unnecessary ecosystem lock-in. Most Arduinos are just Atmel AVR MCU with fancy bootloader. You do not need Arduino-this or Arduino-that for programming them, avr-gcc and avr-libc is enough.
From an embedded developer's perspective, Arduino is awful. That hero-loop programming is not what anyone should ever do. And experienced developers can get better results from something like FreeRTOS (or if you're a masochist Zephyr). And ESP32s are cheaper, as are RP2040s. ...
But take a room full of kids and get them to write a program that blinks an LED, or drive a simple 'robot' forward, and it's awesome. Easy to use. I've never burned out a board (even driving considerable current through them). Things are tolerably well marked. Lots of teaching tools. Lots of different suppliers of easy to connect motors, servos, lights, sensors, etc.
For the same reason, if you are not an embedded engineer, but need a simple micro-controller to turn something on an off like a heater in a chicken coop, it's fantastic. And if you want, buy the $5 knock-off Uno. It should be the same, except that it doesn't support the (now defunct) foundation.
> From an embedded developer's perspective, Arduino is awful.
Specific AVR Arduino annoyances I remember:
* Strings loaded to RAM instead of program memory, so you use up all your RAM if you have a lot of text. Easily fixed with a macro
* serial.println blocks, so your whole program has to stop and wait for the string to be transmitted. Easily fixed with a buffer and ISR
* Floating-point used everywhere, because fuck you
* No printf(). It's in avr-libc, and it's easy plumbed in, but the first C/C++ function that everybody ever learned to use was somehow too complicated or something.
* A hacked-together preprocessor that concatenated everything, which meant you could only have your includes in one place, thus breaking perfectly good, portable code.
I think they ultimately did a disservice to novice programmers by giving them something that was almost a standard C++ environment, but just not quite.
Modern AVRs have program memory mapped into the RAM address space. The GCC linker scripts for the parts that support this put strings into .rodata within that memory region, obviating the need for special macros to retrieve them. However, you won't find this on most of the usual suspects in the Arduino AVR ecosystem.
I think it's important to understand the early development.
It's true that you can (and always could) use avr-gcc and libc, but the core sale was what makes it not this.
The "locked in"/captured API and IDE were directly extensions of a language and IDE called Processing.
Processing overlaid an art-focussed layer on top of Java, providing a simpler API, and an IDE with just two buttons.
Arduino was based on this - the same IDE format, similar API conventions (just on top of C++), precisely to allow these same artists to move into physical installations and art.
Arduino was not designed initially to be so general, it was tool written by and for this specific group of people, so has opinions and handrails that limit the space to provide the same affordances as Processing specifically.
There is no lock in, you can use avr-gcc with Arduino boards. Arduino is a portable SDK with HAL, you can add support for your own devices to it pretty easily
The lock-in is that it's a big pain in the arse to use anything but their IDE.
Most vendor lock-in isn't "it's impossible to do the thing" but "it's hard enough to do the thing any other way, so this is effectively the only practical way to do it"
But the vendor in this case is Atmel and the hard way has existed before Arduino was created. The contribution of Arduino was that they made the simplified path - it doesn't make sense to accuse them of lock in for that.
It's also possible to import the Arduino libs/headers and build against them with a little bit of Make.
I put together a simple setup to skip the arduino ide on an AVR design, but still be able to use their serial.println and other utilities. You can use it side by side with manual register masks for enabling IO.
The point is ease of use. It was designed for artists and other non-programmers originally. I've seen people who would never figure out how to use a crosscompiler do pretty cool things with Arduino.
I haven't even considered Arduino for anything in years. It's just way overpriced and oversized. For the same price as an Uno you can get a Raspberry Pi 4, or seven Picos.
Nonetheless, this looks like another step toward robbing everyone of something useful and reducing our options... not to mention encouraging others to do the same thing. Depressing.
Sad, I wrote my first ever programs on Arduino, learned C++ through it, and did my first OSS contribution by creating the Arduino MIDI Library, ~16 years ago.
I wouldn't be where I am if it wasn't for Arduino. Thank you to the OSH community for making these boards open to all back then.
What's the point of paying a hefty sum of money for the right to destroy a product and a team neither or whom are in competition with you? Not the first time I see it happening
For some reason most companies never seem to realize that they will destroy their acquisitions. It's always kind of an afterthought. "Oh, right, we have to terrify the new customers and lay off the people who make the products work. Sam, take care of that, will you?"
Acquisitions tend to be done in a haze of dream-state thinking. Maybe that's part of it.
You're buying an established brand to augment yours, regardless of what that brand does. It's a sort of SEO.
In this case, though, I disagree that there was no competition. Ecosystems like Arduino are real threats to large incumbents in adjacent sectors. If all the tooling and products necessary to embedded development end up being easily accessible, expensive options like Qualcomm's become effectively commoditized. Qualcomm basically acted like Bill Gates buying Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net
It doesn't look like they've made any drastic changes that would impel anyone to leave Arduino tomorrow, or in the foreseeable future, but if they keep going down this route I imagine the community will move to RPi. They've always been vastly more performant than Arduino and they can run linux, which is somewhat more approachable than the concept of programming a microcontroller and only being able to talk to it over serial.
I disagree, I think for the average hobbyist Arduino is an abstraction of "thing that can talk to sensors and actuate motors." You're right of course that RPi (excl pico) is very different from Arduino, but for the hobbyist it makes no difference if the processor on the Arduino is an Atmel or an ARM.
> but for the hobbyist it makes no difference if the processor on the Arduino is an Atmel or an ARM.
I don't think anyone was arguing they cared about Atmel vs ARM. In fact, the point of Arduino is to make that not even something a user would need to know.
The argument is Linux vs Bare metal Arduino are vastly different user experiences and complexities.
It won't be just one big move that kills the community. Eventually, I could see it as locked down as the STM32 ecosystem. Nor do I see them continuing to sell the same parts for over a decade. They'll just want to use it to promote new kit. Nor do I see them keeping to board designs open over the long term. That will come one little step at a time.
The patent language would worry me a lot. It would be tough to have to admit, up front, "even if this widget becomes popular I can never build a business on it."
The cool thing about an Arduino is you can just buy the boards and use them in a commercial product. This isn't something you can do with other boards. Some people have said the license requires you to disclose your firmware, but that's not the way I read it and I've never heard of anyone being compelled to release anything (unless they modify any GPL covered code).
Not all platforms give you the right to do this. For example, if you buy a dev board from STM - it's only licensed for research and development. Also, because you might want to continue to sell the same thing for years, and the board designs were open-sourced, you could buy the same part for years and years. So you can continue to sell your CNC kit that uses an Mega 2560 without worrying about Arduino coming after you or that they'd discontinue that part.
Not in the short while since they've purchased Arduino, but I could see them restricting the licensing for commercial use, while keeping it freely usable for education. Like STM.
> "even if this widget becomes popular I can never build a business on it.
With the exception of a handful of applications for their higher-end boards, I would think most of this flotilla of ships has already sailed, just on a cost basis?
There's believing Arduino isn't useful for anything serious. And that might be true, I don't know. But then there's buying the company and making sure it isn't good for anything serious. It's that second part that confuses me.
I often use picos because they're much more capable when it comes to interfacing with hardware.
You can do gpio, pwm etc from a linux pi but the hardware is worse at it and you'll be fighting against the system quite a bit. It's a lot of boring complexity to be allowed to do something simple; and the next update might break it.
If I need a linux system AND hardware interfacing, I'll usually use a regular pi + a pico for the hardware stuff and connect them via serial or something
It looks like they have modern options that run Linux now; it’s no longer the realm of 8-bit Atmel MCUs.
I’m not sure what the value proposition is overall, though. The IDE, perhaps? I never particularly saw the draw, but it clearly met the needs of some real market niche.
Maybe two different things here: SBCs that run Linux versus microcontrollers (MCUs).
MCUs are lower power, have less overhead, and can perform hard real-time tasks. Most of what Arduino focuses on are MCUs. The equivalent is the Raspberry Pi Pico.
In my experience, the key thing is the library ecosystem for the C++ runtime environment. There are a large number of Arduino and third-party high-level libraries provided through their package management system that make it really easy to use sensors and other hardware without needing to write intermediate level code that uses SPI or I2C. And it all integrates and works together. The Pico C/C++ SDK is lower level and doesn’t have a good library / package management story, so you have to read vendor data sheets to figure out how to communicate with hardware and then write your own libraries.
It’s much more common for less experienced users to use MicroPython. It has a package management and library ecosystem. But it’s also harder to write anything of any complexity that fits within the small RAM available without calling gc.collect() in every other line.
Yes. One looming concern here is that if the new Arduino is happy locking stuff down, the Arduino IDE story could end up being murkier like the PlatformIO story.
Is Arduino actually used for anything serious? While I certainly appreciate how their whole ecosystem has made working with microcontrollers more accessible... even the most casual hobbyists I know very quickly move on to something like an ESP32.
Qualcomm wasted no time and tanking this purchase. Not sure how the MBA's thought this would be a good idea to change everything about a project. Wouldn't be surprised to see the prices of the boards go up $200 tomorrow at this rate.
Looks it's time to move on. New platform and tools will emerge, I'm sure of it. The only way we can fight corpos is not giving them money and not talking about them.
It's a completely different thing. Single-board computer versus a microcontroller. It might not matter for some applications, but it's a major tradeoff.
But the only value of Arduino is the community (and the compile-time layer of syntactic sugar, if you like it). Otherwise, it's just an expensive breakout board for a cheap chip you can buy from Mouser or DigiKey. If you know how to solder, you don't really need the board in the first place.
First, the software is available whether you buy the board or not.
Second, there's no real difficulty barrier, not anymore. There are point-and-click tools, free integrated IDEs, cheap programming dongles, etc. There are more tutorials for Arduino than the underlying chip, and I'm not saying that doesn't matter - but it boils down to the community, not the hardware.
This article is somewhat misleading. The changed ToS only covers Arduino's hosted cloud services, not the IDE or microcontroller library. This is spelled out in black and white in the first paragraph of the ToS:
> 1.1 The Site is part of the platform developed and managed by Arduino, which allows users to take part in the discussions on the Arduino forum, the Arduino blog, the Arduino User Group, the Arduino Discord channel, and the Arduino Project Hub, and to access the Arduino main website, subsites, Arduino Cloud, Arduino Courses, Arduino Certifications, Arduino Docs, the Arduino EDU kit sites to release works within the Contributor License Agreement program, and to further develop the Arduino open source ecosystem (collectively, the “Platform”). The use of the Site, the Platform, and the Services is governed by these Terms including the other documents and policies made available on the Platform by Arduino.Certifications, Arduino Docs, the Arduino EDU kit sites to release works within the Contributor License Agreement program, and to further develop the Arduino open source ecosystem (collectively, the “Platform”). The use of the Site, the Platform, and the Services is governed by these Terms including the other documents and policies made available on the Platform by Arduino.
(caveat - not a lawyer... but I'll share my opinion)
That list in 1.1 isn’t an exhaustive definition which is IMO, one of the causes of the fire. Again, "IMO", the list is an illustrative set of examples as there is no limiting language like "solely" or "only" and the clause even mixes services and purposes, which again signals it’s descriptive rather than definitive.
Saying that, whilst the list inside the definition of "the Platform" is illustrative, the category it defines seems scoped to Arduino-hosted online properties which could be argued is the intent. But its an argument alas...
Either way, ambiguous policy is being communicated by these T+C updates and that is a real problem.
Yeah no. Wishful thinking. History has shown that huge corporations taking over open source project generally results in a big change how those projects are governed and how the legalese like t&c turns out.
Not a lawyer obviously - but lets see how this plays out.
> The most dangerous change is Arduino now explicitly states that using their platform grants you no patent licenses whatsoever. You can’t even argue one is implied.
> This means Qualcomm could potentially assert patents against your projects if you built them using Arduino tools, Arduino examples, or Arduino-compatible hardware.
Yep, the complete opposite of "open".
Arduino has long been fraught with governance and licensing issues, but at its core has been supported first and foremost by a community of keen amateurs and patient professionals teaching in their off time.
This is a reminder - never sell out your baby unless you're willing to see it squeezed for every penny, community be damned.
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...
Go back to Wiring. Is it possible?
Do tinkerers still use Arduino? I have a couple of boards here, but since I moved to ESP32, I never used them again. The last usages I gave an Arduino board was for it to serve as a programmer for my ESP2688. And the Arduino IDE has been replaced with PlatformIO in VS Code.
Not sure if this really counts as tinkering, but the other day I needed a custom HID device for my PC. I ordered an Arduino Micro (I think?), one that supports HID out of the box, and with under 300 lines of code my problem was solved.
The Arduino HAL and the overall comfort of the Arduino IDE are genuinely valuable. I didn’t have to learn new flashing tools or a new debugging toolchain just to light a few LEDs, read some buttons, and emulate keypresses on a PC. The learning curve was basically zero.
I’ve worked with embedded systems before, and this level of simplicity is incredibly useful for people who just want to ship simple solutions to simple problems without fighting through vendor-specific, arcane tooling.
I've got some RP2350s since then with Micropython, now those might be even better for getting stuff done (without network or extreme low power needs)
The Arduino IDE works for many other devices as well if you really want it.
I don't know if I'll use Arduino in a professional project, but the existence of simavr and in-tree QEMU support means I can at least unit-test my code without dedicated test runners hooked up to hardware or licensing for Wokwi.
Indie devs who need testable builds might be a smaller market than tinkerers, but they're there.
It's a pain anticipating money flow into the future in more ways than one.
> but the existence of simavr and in-tree QEMU support means I can at least unit-test my code without dedicated test runners hooked up to hardware or licensing for Wokwi.
Would you mind elaborating more? I don't quite understand what you mean.
No we don't.
I have dozens of Arduinos that I will never use.
With a similarly priced (sometimes cheaper) platform like the amazing rp2040 / rp2350 which is roughly 100 times more powerful, I have no idea what the niche is for them any more.
The way they dropped the ball with their IDE is amazing. It still looks and feels like something that was rejected during beta testing in 1993
Arduino is following roughly the same trajectory as BlackBerry, with the current phase being "rapidly fading into obscurity"
There's plenty of semi-technical tinkerers out there, doing things like building flight sim cockpits, scraping by on copying ready made code, doing minimal changes and asking forums or LLMs if they get stuck.
They just want something that works, and ideally to keep using the same thing they've always used. They know what Arduino is, as long as it does the job they aren't interested in researching alternatives. They don't want to get involved in adapting someone's instructions for a different pin layout, or risk that anything they've done up to now stops working.
Yes, we all know it's a massively out of date platform easily outclassed by much cheaper and more flexible solutions, and if you must use the Arduino IDE it can build code for all sorts of boards. But for non-technical people by far the most important factor is to stick with something safe and known.
>No we don't
Why do you speak for everyone? I use my 2009 Arduino when I need something quick and simple.
I'm sure somebody like me would happily take them off your hands. The AVR is still a solid platform for low-level applications. A lot of the Arduino libraries never really took full advantage of what you could do with that chip. Whatever happens with the Arduino IDE, those boards will still be useful tools for quite a while.
I just made the discovery the other day that there are two Arduino IDEs, the old crusty one maintained by Arduino.org and the new hotness maintained by Arduino.cc.
I'd been using the Arduino.org version which had mostly driven me to use PlatformIO and ESPHome.
https://www.arduino.cc/en/software/#ide
Unfortunately, but perhaps fortuitously, I needed to use a Library only compatible with Arduino 3.0.0 which is incompatible with PlatformIO. That lead me to discover the Arduino.cc IDE which, while not on par with VSCode, is dramatically better than the Arduino.org IDE.
Same, esp32. Not liking the path that Arduino is on currently.
I tried to get into it; built some simple LED thingies. Then kind of fatigued.
I semi-attribute this to my lack of willpower but perhaps arduino also isn't as tinker-epic as I thought it may be.
Yup. Esp32 is just better.
I actually use Teensy. I found that the ESP32 and its whole WiFi stack (?) were slowing the device down. It's not bare-bones enough for many of my projects.
Arduino official response - https://blog.arduino.cc/2025/11/21/the-arduino-terms-of-serv...
Color me skeptical, but I did just order a Uno Q a couple of days ago, right before all this T&C news broke. So I guess I'll still spend at least a modest amount of time fiddling with that when it arrives.
That said, I definitely have some severe reservations about the path that Arduino is on, especially given Qualcomm's history. Old aphorisms like "The leopard doesn't change its spots", and "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree" weigh heavily in mind right now. As does the parable about the scorpion and the frog.
Same :) I haven't touched electronics since college and the Uno was pretty cheap. No regrets though, just want to hack and learn on something.
arduino's response to the discourse is here:
https://blog.arduino.cc/2025/11/21/the-arduino-terms-of-serv...
I don't trust that reply.
I'm not saying the person(s) who wrote that is(are) lying. It's just that it doesn't seem to come from someone with authority to make decisions like that or even from someone well informed about the global strategy of the corporation.
To me "Arduino Team" is just a bunch of hopeful or even naive employees.
Your comment is/was getting downvoted perhaps because of the last line but this is very true:
> It's just that it doesn't seem to come from someone with authority to make decisions like that or even from someone well informed about the global strategy of the corporation.
Arduino is owned by Qualcomm, Qualcomm is known for being litigious. Whoever wrote that note, unless it was the CEO of Qualcomm, doesn't actually call the shots and if tomorrow the directive comes from above to sue makers they will have to comply.
I mean even if it came from the CEO he could change his mind tomorrow.
It's maybe better to look at incentives, something that blog posts can help illustrate. Does Qualcomm want to mine the maker community for IP or get them to adopt its technology?
> I mean even if it came from the CEO he could change his mind tomorrow.
To a point. Public statements do carry some legal weight, due to the principle of "Promissory Estoppel"[1]. There are limits to that though, but it's not nothing.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppel#Promissory_estoppel
I remember 15 years ago when I was in highschool I really wanted to learn how to program 8 bit microcontrollers without Arduino. And everybody looked at me like I was crazy. There was barely any learning material out there about how to do this.
Now, I imagine the bias pushing everyone to learn on arduino is even more intense? Who out there is programming these chips in pure C using open source compilers and bootloaders?
Edit: Of course there's other platforms like Esp32; teensy; seed. But I've only programmed Esp32s using the arduino dev environment. Are there other good ways of doing it?
> Who out there is programming these chips in pure C using open source compilers and bootloaders?
The gcc-arm-none-eabi toolchain is pretty much what you are asking for at least for ARM targets. You can literally use a text editor and gcc-arm-none-eabi, that's it.
And if you want something really bare bones avr-gcc still targets the whole atmel family including those ATtiny chips which are also a lot of fun.
I don't know the state of it nowadays but 'Mbed' is probably worth looking into. The project had _a_lot_ of Middleware libraries to abstract hardware, a few levels below, makes embedded development a little less datasheet dependent, specially if you are just hacking something as a hobbyist.
You can also ditch the space consumed by a bootloader and save the UART for something productive in your designs. This is makes it feasible to use the smaller capacity chips and have more headroom on the larger ones. AVR programmers are cheap and the latest serial port based protocol requires the barest of hardware to support.
15 years ago I think Arduino was the best choice for educational purposes. I still think it's a great choice now. The fact the IDE and board are basically the same as they were 15 years ago, means you can figure out how to set everything up once and focus on teaching, rather than PC trouble-shooting. Which, for basic concepts, or younger kids, is great. And if they find a 5 or 10 year old video on how to do something, it's still relevant.
If I were putting teaching materials today - I would pick something like Micro python. The down side is it isn't as "canned" a solution, meaning there might be something new to figure out every so often. Which means you spend more time helping people trouble shoot why something isn't working, instead of teaching something useful. On the up side, Python is pretty much the introductory language of choice, today. With lots of available materials.
That's not to say Arduino was perfect. Far from it. Just easier to do, and more consistent over time, than other options.
> There was barely any learning material out there about how to do this.
I started playing around with ATmega/ATtiny around 2008, and from what I remember, there were plenty of tutorials and examples out there.
I remember that AVR and PIC were two popular options among hobbyists at that time, but I started with AVR since it was easier to get the programmer, and it had a lot better open source tooling.
> Are there other good ways of doing it?
I'm working on an ESP32 project right now, and Espressif provides shrink-wrapped toolchains for C/++ and Rust. The latter even comes with a little tool called 'espup' that cleanly installs their fork of Rust and LLVM (for Xtensa support) - I was able to compile and run a blinky in less than half an hour.
See https://docs.espressif.com/projects/rust/book/ - it also wasn't too hard for me to whip up a Nix Flake with the same toolchain, if that's your jam.
> Who out there is programming these chips in pure C using open source compilers and bootloaders?
Everyone using Arduino, for a start.
I learned how to program the AVR in assembly 25 years ago by reading the datasheet and various articles in Nuts and Volts. For its time the AVR had a very accessible development kit, the STK500, which cost about $100. A few years later avr-libc came along and if you were running linux and knew how to write C it was pretty easy to get started.
Small MCUs like the low-end PICs are best programmed in Asm.
Whats the motorola ecosystem like these days? Its been a good 16 years for me
> But I've only programmed Esp32s using the arduino dev environment.
Well you can use PlatformIO/VSCode and the ESP-IDF.
If you're ok with the Arduino 2 framework, then you can use PlatformIO as well. Unfortunately Arduino 3 support isn't there yet so a lot of libraries like HomeSpan won't work on PlatformIO at the moment.
https://github.com/platformio/platform-espressif32/issues/12...
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45984143
This article is much, much better than the LinkedIn article though.
Thanks, we'll put that in the top text as well.
From Arduino ecosystem i always have a feeling that they try to do an unnecessary ecosystem lock-in. Most Arduinos are just Atmel AVR MCU with fancy bootloader. You do not need Arduino-this or Arduino-that for programming them, avr-gcc and avr-libc is enough.
From an embedded developer's perspective, Arduino is awful. That hero-loop programming is not what anyone should ever do. And experienced developers can get better results from something like FreeRTOS (or if you're a masochist Zephyr). And ESP32s are cheaper, as are RP2040s. ...
But take a room full of kids and get them to write a program that blinks an LED, or drive a simple 'robot' forward, and it's awesome. Easy to use. I've never burned out a board (even driving considerable current through them). Things are tolerably well marked. Lots of teaching tools. Lots of different suppliers of easy to connect motors, servos, lights, sensors, etc.
For the same reason, if you are not an embedded engineer, but need a simple micro-controller to turn something on an off like a heater in a chicken coop, it's fantastic. And if you want, buy the $5 knock-off Uno. It should be the same, except that it doesn't support the (now defunct) foundation.
> From an embedded developer's perspective, Arduino is awful.
Specific AVR Arduino annoyances I remember:
* Strings loaded to RAM instead of program memory, so you use up all your RAM if you have a lot of text. Easily fixed with a macro
* serial.println blocks, so your whole program has to stop and wait for the string to be transmitted. Easily fixed with a buffer and ISR
* Floating-point used everywhere, because fuck you
* No printf(). It's in avr-libc, and it's easy plumbed in, but the first C/C++ function that everybody ever learned to use was somehow too complicated or something.
* A hacked-together preprocessor that concatenated everything, which meant you could only have your includes in one place, thus breaking perfectly good, portable code.
I think they ultimately did a disservice to novice programmers by giving them something that was almost a standard C++ environment, but just not quite.
> Strings loaded to RAM
Modern AVRs have program memory mapped into the RAM address space. The GCC linker scripts for the parts that support this put strings into .rodata within that memory region, obviating the need for special macros to retrieve them. However, you won't find this on most of the usual suspects in the Arduino AVR ecosystem.
I think it's important to understand the early development.
It's true that you can (and always could) use avr-gcc and libc, but the core sale was what makes it not this.
The "locked in"/captured API and IDE were directly extensions of a language and IDE called Processing.
Processing overlaid an art-focussed layer on top of Java, providing a simpler API, and an IDE with just two buttons.
Arduino was based on this - the same IDE format, similar API conventions (just on top of C++), precisely to allow these same artists to move into physical installations and art.
Arduino was not designed initially to be so general, it was tool written by and for this specific group of people, so has opinions and handrails that limit the space to provide the same affordances as Processing specifically.
There is no lock in, you can use avr-gcc with Arduino boards. Arduino is a portable SDK with HAL, you can add support for your own devices to it pretty easily
The lock-in is that it's a big pain in the arse to use anything but their IDE.
Most vendor lock-in isn't "it's impossible to do the thing" but "it's hard enough to do the thing any other way, so this is effectively the only practical way to do it"
But the vendor in this case is Atmel and the hard way has existed before Arduino was created. The contribution of Arduino was that they made the simplified path - it doesn't make sense to accuse them of lock in for that.
> The lock-in is that it's a big pain in the arse to use anything but their IDE.
How so? It uses bog standard avr-gcc and avrdude. There is nothing stopping you from using those yourself.
What's hard about it?
It's also possible to import the Arduino libs/headers and build against them with a little bit of Make.
I put together a simple setup to skip the arduino ide on an AVR design, but still be able to use their serial.println and other utilities. You can use it side by side with manual register masks for enabling IO.
Yes, i mean more like educational lock-in, trying to push their own tools and SDKs so people get used to them.
The point is ease of use. It was designed for artists and other non-programmers originally. I've seen people who would never figure out how to use a crosscompiler do pretty cool things with Arduino.
I haven't even considered Arduino for anything in years. It's just way overpriced and oversized. For the same price as an Uno you can get a Raspberry Pi 4, or seven Picos.
Nonetheless, this looks like another step toward robbing everyone of something useful and reducing our options... not to mention encouraging others to do the same thing. Depressing.
Sad, I wrote my first ever programs on Arduino, learned C++ through it, and did my first OSS contribution by creating the Arduino MIDI Library, ~16 years ago.
I wouldn't be where I am if it wasn't for Arduino. Thank you to the OSH community for making these boards open to all back then.
What's the point of paying a hefty sum of money for the right to destroy a product and a team neither or whom are in competition with you? Not the first time I see it happening
For some reason most companies never seem to realize that they will destroy their acquisitions. It's always kind of an afterthought. "Oh, right, we have to terrify the new customers and lay off the people who make the products work. Sam, take care of that, will you?"
Acquisitions tend to be done in a haze of dream-state thinking. Maybe that's part of it.
You're buying an established brand to augment yours, regardless of what that brand does. It's a sort of SEO.
In this case, though, I disagree that there was no competition. Ecosystems like Arduino are real threats to large incumbents in adjacent sectors. If all the tooling and products necessary to embedded development end up being easily accessible, expensive options like Qualcomm's become effectively commoditized. Qualcomm basically acted like Bill Gates buying Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net
That's sad. Perhaps a fork may be created, but right now I think it is true that arduino is dead. Guess we need an alternative now.
It doesn't look like they've made any drastic changes that would impel anyone to leave Arduino tomorrow, or in the foreseeable future, but if they keep going down this route I imagine the community will move to RPi. They've always been vastly more performant than Arduino and they can run linux, which is somewhat more approachable than the concept of programming a microcontroller and only being able to talk to it over serial.
RPi is not a good analog compared to Arduino.
The main feature of classic Arduino boards has always been a thin abstraction layer on bare metal. RPi is not that at all.
(As mentioned by the other commenter, I'm referring to their Linux boards, not the Pico)
I disagree, I think for the average hobbyist Arduino is an abstraction of "thing that can talk to sensors and actuate motors." You're right of course that RPi (excl pico) is very different from Arduino, but for the hobbyist it makes no difference if the processor on the Arduino is an Atmel or an ARM.
> but for the hobbyist it makes no difference if the processor on the Arduino is an Atmel or an ARM.
I don't think anyone was arguing they cared about Atmel vs ARM. In fact, the point of Arduino is to make that not even something a user would need to know.
The argument is Linux vs Bare metal Arduino are vastly different user experiences and complexities.
RPi Picos are certainly bare metal.
Yes, their MCU offerings are. And I generally think that Micropython is a better "modern" Arduino.
But most people know them for their Linux boards. And that's what OC was talking about.
It won't be just one big move that kills the community. Eventually, I could see it as locked down as the STM32 ecosystem. Nor do I see them continuing to sell the same parts for over a decade. They'll just want to use it to promote new kit. Nor do I see them keeping to board designs open over the long term. That will come one little step at a time.
The patent language would worry me a lot. It would be tough to have to admit, up front, "even if this widget becomes popular I can never build a business on it."
But I'm not using Arduino, so idk.
The cool thing about an Arduino is you can just buy the boards and use them in a commercial product. This isn't something you can do with other boards. Some people have said the license requires you to disclose your firmware, but that's not the way I read it and I've never heard of anyone being compelled to release anything (unless they modify any GPL covered code).
Not all platforms give you the right to do this. For example, if you buy a dev board from STM - it's only licensed for research and development. Also, because you might want to continue to sell the same thing for years, and the board designs were open-sourced, you could buy the same part for years and years. So you can continue to sell your CNC kit that uses an Mega 2560 without worrying about Arduino coming after you or that they'd discontinue that part.
Has Qualcomm changed that?
Not in the short while since they've purchased Arduino, but I could see them restricting the licensing for commercial use, while keeping it freely usable for education. Like STM.
> "even if this widget becomes popular I can never build a business on it.
With the exception of a handful of applications for their higher-end boards, I would think most of this flotilla of ships has already sailed, just on a cost basis?
Especially lately. So much more choice.
There's believing Arduino isn't useful for anything serious. And that might be true, I don't know. But then there's buying the company and making sure it isn't good for anything serious. It's that second part that confuses me.
I often use picos because they're much more capable when it comes to interfacing with hardware.
You can do gpio, pwm etc from a linux pi but the hardware is worse at it and you'll be fighting against the system quite a bit. It's a lot of boring complexity to be allowed to do something simple; and the next update might break it.
If I need a linux system AND hardware interfacing, I'll usually use a regular pi + a pico for the hardware stuff and connect them via serial or something
Full-size RPi isn't Arduino's competition, surely (except for the newest Uno Q, which is a novel take on a Pi-type SBC).
There are meaningful disadvantages to replacing an Arduino with even the Pi Zero.
Yeah, makers will move to Raspberry Pi products for the ecosystem and documentation, but it will be to the RP2040/2350 products.
But also the ESP32 series, particularly Adafruit's kit.
It looks like they have modern options that run Linux now; it’s no longer the realm of 8-bit Atmel MCUs.
I’m not sure what the value proposition is overall, though. The IDE, perhaps? I never particularly saw the draw, but it clearly met the needs of some real market niche.
Maybe two different things here: SBCs that run Linux versus microcontrollers (MCUs).
MCUs are lower power, have less overhead, and can perform hard real-time tasks. Most of what Arduino focuses on are MCUs. The equivalent is the Raspberry Pi Pico.
In my experience, the key thing is the library ecosystem for the C++ runtime environment. There are a large number of Arduino and third-party high-level libraries provided through their package management system that make it really easy to use sensors and other hardware without needing to write intermediate level code that uses SPI or I2C. And it all integrates and works together. The Pico C/C++ SDK is lower level and doesn’t have a good library / package management story, so you have to read vendor data sheets to figure out how to communicate with hardware and then write your own libraries.
It’s much more common for less experienced users to use MicroPython. It has a package management and library ecosystem. But it’s also harder to write anything of any complexity that fits within the small RAM available without calling gc.collect() in every other line.
Yes. One looming concern here is that if the new Arduino is happy locking stuff down, the Arduino IDE story could end up being murkier like the PlatformIO story.
Please, before commenting on this article, be sure to read Qualcomm's reply posted by adhoc_slime: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46007805
Qualcomm blew this up in record time, impressive stuff.
Arduino merda.
Well, I'd say the Qualcommisation of Arduino is happening as expected and apace.
I see Gianluca Martino let arduino.com lapse/is squatting it. Maybe the experiment is done? Is Adafruit no longer #TeamArduinoCC ?
good find, i can say that we are (adafruit) always #teamopensourcearduino which is what cc _was_
Is Arduino actually used for anything serious? While I certainly appreciate how their whole ecosystem has made working with microcontrollers more accessible... even the most casual hobbyists I know very quickly move on to something like an ESP32.
https://github.com/arduino/arduino-ide
License: GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
Who does the fork? Paging e.g. Adafruit and Sparkfun.
This was already covered in the previous thread you mentioned. Just merge the threads.
Dang added the previous thread to the description. I don't know why he didn't merge them.
Qualcomm would force arduino to focus at enterprise offering
its happy ending for both investor
Qualcomm wasted no time and tanking this purchase. Not sure how the MBA's thought this would be a good idea to change everything about a project. Wouldn't be surprised to see the prices of the boards go up $200 tomorrow at this rate.
Looks it's time to move on. New platform and tools will emerge, I'm sure of it. The only way we can fight corpos is not giving them money and not talking about them.
BeagleBone has been great and is going strong
It's a completely different thing. Single-board computer versus a microcontroller. It might not matter for some applications, but it's a major tradeoff.
But the only value of Arduino is the community (and the compile-time layer of syntactic sugar, if you like it). Otherwise, it's just an expensive breakout board for a cheap chip you can buy from Mouser or DigiKey. If you know how to solder, you don't really need the board in the first place.
Aren't you forgetting about the software that makes it so easy and straightforward for newcomers to flash programs and experiment the microcontroller?
First, the software is available whether you buy the board or not.
Second, there's no real difficulty barrier, not anymore. There are point-and-click tools, free integrated IDEs, cheap programming dongles, etc. There are more tutorials for Arduino than the underlying chip, and I'm not saying that doesn't matter - but it boils down to the community, not the hardware.
It's not cheap but I really enjoy tinkering with their RISCV boards.
Esp32; teensy; seed