Electronics > Microcontrollers

(SOLVED/ANSWERED)Why NOT use an Arduino for professional project?

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tpowell1830:
I was wondering, because I have heard embedded developers say that Arduinos should never be used for a professional product or project. The only reason that I can think of, not being an embedded developer, is that Arduinos are so easy to change the running software. Is that the reasoning behind not using Arduino, even if it is in scope of use, on a product?

Can someone name other reasons why you wouldn't use an Arduino, if it would do the job?

rstofer:
On a product you are unlikely to need all the headers and board space.  More likely, the product would be developed with an Arduino but built with just the ATmega328P chip - assuming the Arduino had sufficient resources.

Then there may be licensing or copyright issues - I wouldn't know anything about that.

If I were going to incorporate an Arduino, it would be the Nano for the form factor.  I would just plug it into a motherboard and call it good.  I tend to do that for my more permanent projects.  I just design the interface board and plug in the uC.  In fact, I have a PCB coming in tomorrow where I built Ben Eater's EEPROM programmer.  The PCB carries the Nano, a ZIF socket and a couple of 74LS595s.  The board it trivial but it should stay together a lot better than a prototype board with jumper wires.  Using the Nano doesn't take up much board space and I can just solder the Arduino right to the PCB.

igendel:
On the hardware side, the cheap clones are unreliable, while the genuine ones are very expensive. Also, for most professional projects you have no use for the  Arduino board that surrounds the microcontroller, it just limits your design and takes up precious space.

I won't even start talking about the software  ;)

rstofer:

--- Quote from: igendel on May 16, 2018, 04:30:21 pm ---I won't even start talking about the software  ;)

--- End quote ---

One way is to do the development with the Arduino libraries and then start over with bare metal for the product.  Most of the library code won't be required and the bits that are can be rewritten.

For modest projects, I think the Arduino is a fast way to do 'proof of concept'.  mbed (and all the variants) is another.  There's a huge leap between an Arduino and an ARM Cortex <whatever> in terms of memory size, speed, peripherals and just about everything else.  I really like the original LPC1768 mbed board.  The online toolchain works well (although it is optional) and just dragging and dropping the executable onto the mbed device is a very slick way to program the device.

Many of the STM32F boards are mbed compatible and supported by the online toolchain.  They also support drag and drop for the executable.  Very easy to work with.

ataradov:
"Never" is not in a sense that is is bad, it is just impractical for majority of production work, so you might just as well not use it at all. Qualified programmer can make things work with much less code with hand-written code, and AVRs are not all that hard to program that you would need an extensive support library. An less code means less effort in supporting and maintaining it.

And this is only about the software, using actual Arduino boards in production devices makes no sense on any level.

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