Author Topic: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?  (Read 20822 times)

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Offline james_s

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #100 on: June 29, 2021, 04:59:25 pm »
Imagine in an alternate timeline where PIC18F based Arduino boards reigned supreme instead of ATMEGA boards. I wonder if the world would be much different.

Why would it be? There are already loads of different Arduino boards that are not Atmega based, from the user perspective they are not much different to develop for.
 

Offline SiliconWizard

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #101 on: June 29, 2021, 06:37:10 pm »
Imagine in an alternate timeline where PIC18F based Arduino boards reigned supreme instead of ATMEGA boards. I wonder if the world would be much different.

Why would it be? There are already loads of different Arduino boards that are not Atmega based, from the user perspective they are not much different to develop for.

Yes, indeed!

The question is still "interesting" though, come to think of it, but maybe not in the way it was expressed.

There clearly were like two crowds at the time (probably still the case a little bit, but a lot less obvious ever since ARM-based MCUs became very popular): the PIC users and the AVR users. Each often pretty opiniated about their preferred MCU line, and with a slightly different mindset as far as I can tell.

So a maybe interesting, related, but different question could be: "Could Arduino have been imagined and designed with 8-bit PIC MCUs to begin with, instead of AVR ones?"
It's of course not possible to answer this question, but we can still have an opinion. I for one am not 100% sure this could have happened, again mainly because most PIC users tended to exhibit a different mindset. And even the respective vendors had a different approach, explaining this partly too.
 

Offline james_s

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #102 on: June 29, 2021, 07:20:25 pm »
Of course it could have, although I think it would have required an open source C compiler existing for the PICs, is there such a thing? I got started with AVRs and stuck with them because I know them. I don't think the PIC is any worse but I used the AVR because there was an easy and free BASIC compiler that I was able to get started with now over 20 years ago and PIC at the time meant learning assembly. It all comes down to the software, I don't really care what's going on inside the chip.
 

Offline rstofer

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #103 on: June 29, 2021, 07:58:29 pm »
Imagine in an alternate timeline where PIC18F based Arduino boards reigned supreme instead of ATMEGA boards. I wonder if the world would be much different.

Why would it be? There are already loads of different Arduino boards that are not Atmega based, from the user perspective they are not much different to develop for.
Well, there was the OOPIC based on the 16F877A.  This added an objected oriented approach to PIC programming and was quite powerful and totally unique.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OOPic

It was pretty popular 20 years ago.

https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Customizing-OOPic-Microcontroller-Official/dp/0071420843
« Last Edit: June 29, 2021, 08:00:17 pm by rstofer »
 

Offline Nominal Animal

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #104 on: June 29, 2021, 09:03:03 pm »
frequently seen overconfident Arduino hobbyists
I was so ready to respond, and then you go and say
So I really do see Arduino as an important stepping stone which does mostly good, but like always with any technology, there are traps and you can fall into them.
which leaves me with nothing to do but *nod in agreement*.

The variants of the stated question, for example "If Arduino is killing the electronic hobby, how is it causing that?" and "If Arduino is killing the electronic hobby, should we stop Arduino? How? Is that even possible, or just Quixotic You-Kids-Need-to-Grow-A-Lawn-To-Become-Men-So-You-Too-Can-Shout-At-Kids stuff?" and "If something about or in Arduino is killing the electronic hobby, what could we replace it with that is similarly useful, but would not kill the electronic hobby?" and "Is electronics hobby something we should try to keep as is, or should we let it go as it may and see what comes out after a decade or two, like we do with basically all hobbies outside of organized sports and religion?", plus all reasonable ideas about making Arduino better, or replacing it with something similar but in a some clearly defined way "better", is fun shop talk.  Not idle chat, though, because there is information and experience lurking here; but more fun that way, too.
 
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Offline Mario87

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #105 on: June 29, 2021, 09:33:38 pm »
As a beginner do I look for all sort of funny and strange tasks / functions I can get done by building a circuit.
To do that do I use a lot of time to search the internet for simple solutions and explanations.

I.e.: Blinker, detectors, sound generators, remote control, volume control, dimmer and so on and on.
Unfortunately does it get harder to find a great solution, most are hidden among hundreds or even thousands of "solutions" stating the following: "with an Arduino", "just take an Arduino" or "It's super easy, why don't you simply just use an Arduino?"

To me is an Arduino a finished product you write some code too, while electronic is the assembling of discrete components.
Or if we look at paintings: You use years and years to learn to blend colors, get the stroke perfect to finally paint these amazing landscapes, the day after do I grab a camera, snap a picture and say "look it's much easier", but is it the same, even we both have created a picture of the landscape? I am not saying one thing is better than the other, just that it's two different skills, just like Arduino and Electronic is two different skills.

Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby? What do you think? :-)

Arduino is essentially a hobbyist dev board. Yes it is off the shelf, but does that make an engineer in a company using a £5000 FPGA dev board for prototyping any less of an engineer because they didn’t make it themselves?

Sure, some people take an arduino, program it and say “done”. However that’s doesn’t mean it cannot be used in a more traditional way so that someone uses it to get their project doing what they want on bread board, then they use a free design package like EasyEDA or KiCAD to make up a schematic (including Atmel 328), design a PCB, order the boards from JLCPCB, PCBWay, etc and components from LCSC, Mouser, Farrell, etc and then once the parts arrive they assemble their board, test, program, debug, etc, etc.

Those that do the latter (I have done it in the past) are not simply coding and just because they didn’t build all the logic in their circuit from discrete transistor it doesn’t make what they have done any less than what you do with discrete components.

Arduino can be looked at in 2 ways, something you just buy add-on boards for that you program and use to learn C (the view you have taken) or something that opens up a cheap and easy way for people to start developing their own AVR based electronics projects (hardware & software).
 

Offline Nominal Animal

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #106 on: June 29, 2021, 09:48:48 pm »
"Could Arduino have been imagined and designed with 8-bit PIC MCUs to begin with, instead of AVR ones?"
Very good question.  I've wondered that too, and in my own particular case, it really came down to AVR having a free and libre working development environment I could use on my Linux machines.  (I haven't had Windows on any of my machines since 2005 or thereabouts; and between 1997 and 2005, dual-booted only because I had expensive commercial software (Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Shockwave Internet Studio) without alternatives and could squeeze more value out of generic Intel/AMD hardware than I could of similar investment in Mac hardware.)

I don't know if Linux matters in this picture –– it might, because so many interested in software development outside the Windows environment end up having Linux and/or BSDs installed or dual-bootable –– but probably doesn't.  I believe the Arduino developers focused on WinAVR, and don't know their early history to know if any/how many of them used Linux at the time at all.

I suspect that in the high performance computing crowd, the split between CUDA and OpenCL folks is the same 'free' that made the decision between PICs and AVRs for me.
One is a proprietary, closed, single-provider environment; the other is less polished, some ways even 'not as good', but fundamentally not strictly controlled by the hardware manufacturer or vendor.

The mass appeal, however, probably stemmed from the other 'free', i.e. 'no cost'.

So, I propose that the 'free' that directed the developers of the Arduino environment, was different to the 'free' that made Arduino appealing to the masses, but both are required for such an environment to appear in the first place.

The prices of AVRs and PICs meant either one would have been similarly appealing to the masses, but to the developers who created the environment in the first place, who wanted the freedom and avoid vendor lock-in and vendor-enforced boundaries, the two were light years separated, with an obvious choice –– and I suspect they made the same choice I made for the same reasons I did.

In particular, even from the beginning, the Arduino developers knew that even if Atmel tried (and their track record showed they wouldn't, but Microchip/PIC might) to force them to reject any competing microcontrollers, it would be completely and even legally safe to ignore such requests, because of the clear legality and provenance of the base projects.  (Atmel supported AVR GCC ports, where Microchips attitude is... problematic to say the least, up to straight up lying to their customers what they are legally and contractually allowed to do, namely remove any license-based restrictions on their GCC-based compilers.)

[When Microchip bought Atmel, I was saddened, because I knew I would from there on do stuff despite the vendor, rather that with the vendor, because I am just not the type to sit in a walled garden producing officially sanctioned stuff using only officially sanctioned materials.  I'm a monkey; either the walls break, or they're covered in poo before the day is over.]

Purely based on observing Microchip business practices, I do not think anyone could have done Arduino based on Microchip products.
This is not based on anything to do with PICs themselves; it is just an extrapolation of observed business behaviour, to attempts of creating an Arduino-like environment around PICs.

Indeed, even now, Microchip is trying pretty damned hard to steer their customers away from any multiplatform solutions, directing them to the Microchip-controlled Walled Garden instead (what with their proprietary compilers and Hardware Abstraction Libraries and so on).  Just go look at their Arduino page.  I do believe my characterisation of Microchip business practices is correct and warranted, although they are only based on external observation by a hobbyist; I do not have any of their internal memoes or directives.

I would go so far that if anyone trying to create an Arduino-like environment dedicated to PICs right now, should be prepared to deal with Microchip lawyers and business folks.  (Things like "trademark dilution" is something you'd need to talk about with a lawyer before even considering such a project, because if you cannot publish it without infringing on registered trademarks, it will be pretty hard for even interested people to find it in the first place.)

If you disagree, let me direct your attention on the authorship on existing Arduino cores for different architectures.  Most of them are the work product of individuals without any real links to the hardware vendor, with many having some very nice contributions from engineers working for various hardware vendors but not in any kind of controlling capacity, just submitted like they were by anyone else; with specific cores having a suprisingly tightly controlled authorship... I'll leave it for you to find out which cores that might be, or indeed if any (since it depends on what you consider "surprisingly tight control").

Also, may I ask that instead of stating disagreement based on beliefs based on the scent of jasmine in the wind and calling me a "copyleft zealot commie" or similar, please check if your beliefs are in agreement with the abovementioned, easily verified and observable claims first.

I am not claiming that free/open source is better, because I do not think so – I personally like it more, but that is like liking vanilla over chocolate or something, a matter of a personal quirk and nothing more – but that for anyone intending to build something intended to be used by others to build something, the libre-versus-vendor-controlled proposition is, and because of copyrights and software licensing, has to be important.  (Also, basically all software developers whose work product spans multiple operating systems and hardware architectures, has been bitten by vendor lock-in at least once.  It ain't fun.  So, some of us tend to avoid vendor-locked environments because the risk of that bite at the end makes any temporary gains just not worth it.)

So, I say Arduino came about on AVRs because they were libre, and Arduino itself became popular because it was basically no-cost.  Microchip PIC fulfills the latter, but not the former, because of how Microchip the company runs its business.
No value judgments here, only an understanding of why it happened the way it happened.

(Yes, I'm UTTERLY fed up being labeled a zealot, just because I very slightly prefer one thing over another, and am completely honest about it and my reasons.  Whenever GPL or copyleft licensing comes up, it seems that it so occupies the minds of some that they can no longer fathom that someone could actually just only slightly prefer it over others and at the same time be completely relaxed and willing to use any other license or business model as long as it makes sound business sense.  Put bluntly, I've been happy to work on code licensed under one of at least a dozen different licenses spanning from CC0-1.0 to GPL to official secrets covered by an NDA; and will be happy to do so in future too, regardless of the particular license as long as it makes sense in that particular context – I don't like things being done stupidly, because it is inefficient.  Efficiency beats ideology in my opinion.  Tux is my mascot, not my idol.)
« Last Edit: June 29, 2021, 09:53:32 pm by Nominal Animal »
 
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Offline RoGeorge

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #107 on: June 29, 2021, 09:53:33 pm »
PIC wouldn't have worked.  In fact PIC has its shot and failed.  PIC16F84 projects were a widespread thing before Arduino, but the stupid memory page swap and the tiny, tiny RAM made it to fail at becoming popular.

It was the elegance of AVR microcontrollers family, their generous RAM and program memory size AND the open source / open hardware design that might Arduino possible.  Then others joined lately to the trend.

Offline Nominal Animal

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #108 on: June 29, 2021, 09:56:57 pm »
PIC wouldn't have worked.  In fact PIC has its shot and failed.
Did... Did you just put in two sentences what I spent almost a full page to express?

I need to investigate and learn from this.
 
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Offline SiliconWizard

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #109 on: June 29, 2021, 09:57:48 pm »
Imagine in an alternate timeline where PIC18F based Arduino boards reigned supreme instead of ATMEGA boards. I wonder if the world would be much different.

Why would it be? There are already loads of different Arduino boards that are not Atmega based, from the user perspective they are not much different to develop for.
Well, there was the OOPIC based on the 16F877A.  This added an objected oriented approach to PIC programming and was quite powerful and totally unique.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OOPic

It was pretty popular 20 years ago.

I was using PICs like 20 years ago, and I don't remember this to be "pretty popular". Looks like some niche thing compared to what Arduino has been.

As was said above, one of the reasons for a difference between PIC and AVR at the time was the open-source tools for AVR. Another was an easier to use architecture.
It was very common, in the early 2000's, to program PIC MCUs in assembly directly, whereas there already was an usable open-source C compiler for AVR IIRC. Again, due to this and probably other reasons, the respective users were often pretty different, so I still think the Arduino platform as it has been had little chance of existing using the PIC MCUs of the same generation.

Of course, with recent PIC MCUs and recent Microchip tools, that would have been possible, but it's too late now. I doubt anyone would be interested in having Arduino on 8-bit PIC MCUs, or even 16-bit ones. But yes, Arduino is now supported for a large range of MCUs, mostly ARM-based ones, outside of AVR.
 

Offline RoGeorge

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #110 on: June 29, 2021, 10:47:43 pm »
PIC wouldn't have worked.  In fact PIC has its shot and failed.
Did... Did you just put in two sentences what I spent almost a full page to express?

I need to investigate and learn from this.

That's because I'm a slow typer, but thank you.



 ;D
 
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Offline hamster_nz

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #111 on: June 29, 2021, 11:59:53 pm »
Everybody's wrong! (Well, everybody's point is very valid, but not how I see it..)

The killer feature was the zero-cost zero-effort programmer that just worked. The reliable, dependable bootloader teamed with a reliable dependable USB/serial bridge (the FDTI chip) was the key to Arduino's success.

Sure the "simple to the max" Processing-based IDE helped a lot, and GCC support was an underlying enabler, but the programming workflow was what won the war.

Lots of other platforms support now have a similar level of usability (e.g. my fave the ESP32) it is the richness of the software libraries, published projects and documentation that keeps the very old. small, slow and feature-poor AVR parts alive in the minds of hobbyists.

If it was an technology thing then Arduino would be savaged by MicroPython running on multicore 100+MHz 32-bit processors like the ESP32.

Ah, if only the Pi Pico was just a little bit better...
Gaze not into the abyss, lest you become recognized as an abyss domain expert, and they expect you keep gazing into the damn thing.
 
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Offline mindcrime

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #112 on: June 30, 2021, 03:11:10 am »
Will MCU do the same to the hand-soldere?


Meh. Go dig up my thread on the reflow oven I'm working on. I chose to put an MCU (an Arduino Nano) at the center of that, but yet I've spent more time soldering in the last 2 months that I ever have before in my life. The MCU does a lot, but by NO means did it do "everything for me". I still had to use discrete components, build a power supply, build an input mechanism (keypad, with keypad controller IC), work with an SSR and use a level shifting transistor to drive a "min 4V" input from the 3.3V output on the Arduino, plus the generic mains side wiring for the SSR, a switch, etc., blah, etc., yadda yadda.

In the end, my "MCU project" has involved everything from physical fabrication to point-to-point wiring on protoboard, a ton of soldering (all those damn header pins I use to interconnect things between boards), mains level stuff, using temperature sensors (thermocouple), weird specialized IC's for interfacing with a 12 digit keypad, and more.

Now to be fair, I started in electronics way before the era of Arduino. I've been a beginner for almost 40 years now. But even as an "old guy" in relative terms, I can see that Arduino and other MCU platforms are just a tool that fill a niche, and (generally) give us more options.

Look, if you want to keep winding your own inductors by hand, using vacuum tubes, using wire-wrap, making capacitors from canning jars and mineral oil and sheets of copper, blah, etc., then have at it. Nobody will stop you.

But the Arduino and such-like are here, they're part of the hobby now, and as far as I'm concerned that's a good thing. I mean, how the hell would I have implemented Wifi and Bluetooth into my oven project using 7400 TTL and 4000 series CMOS IC's, discrete components, etc? But thanks to a tiny little $30 board, I have all of that available to me.

And as to the question of "did anybody ever start with a micro and then start using 'real' electronics?" I would say that the number of tutorials out there teaching people how to add more outputs to their Arduino using a 74HC595 is evidence that the answer is unequivocally "yes".
 
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Offline jklasdf

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #113 on: June 30, 2021, 04:07:11 am »
This comes up occasionally, and if you look back at the history, the lack of open source tools for PICs was definitely a driver for choosing AVRs instead for the original Arduino.

from https://arduinohistory.github.io/

Quote
For the next prototypes, microcontrollers were chosen on a basis of availability of open source tools for compiling, linking and uploading the user’s code. This led to discarding the very popular Microchip PIC family of microcontrollers very early, because, at the time (circa 2003), Microchip did not have an open source toolchain.

 
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Online westfw

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #114 on: June 30, 2021, 07:30:46 am »
Quote
Imagine in an alternate timeline where PIC18F based Arduino boards reigned supreme instead of ATMEGA boards.
There was the "USB Bit Whacker" that showed up at about the same time as the early Arduinos.  PIC18F with direct USB connection and a bootloader.  SO CLOSE.  But it lacked the host-side easy-to-use IDE, relying on the user to pick a compiler/assembler/etc (and there were a number of free compilers for PIC18: SDCC, assorted "limited" versions, custom languages like JAL.)  It was an "easier to use" PIC for people who were already PIC programmers, and didn't have the broad swatch of support (IDE for three OSes, helpful forums, etc.)

The various vendor-provided "Arduino Killers" are somewhat more interesting - TI LaunchPads, NXP Expresso, ST Nucleo and Discovery boards...  Most with more powerful processors than the Arduino, built-in debuggers, and "better" iDEs, and even cheaper.  All of them have some following, but none has come close to matching the Arduino.  Even Microchip/Atmel boards like the Curiosity and Xplained Mini boards, some of which are essentially drop-in replacements with enhanced capabilities, are not very popular.

There's a lesson for engineers in there somewhere.  Something about evangelism and hand-holding and communities, perhaps.  Or the advantages of letting your design be "stolen."
And maybe it won't end up producing any more "electronics hobbyists" than paint-by-number kits produce artists.  And maybe that's OK.
 

Online DiTBho

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #115 on: June 30, 2021, 08:52:13 am »
Never forget one of the most famous Massimo Banzi's pearls of wisdom (sarc): "with Arduino, you really have the power under your fingertips, and you could even create an interface for your spaceship"

No one has ever said something like this ....

... well, except Elon Musk .... OMG!, OMG!!, OMG!!! ... what could possibly happen if Banzi met Elon Musk and they discussed a company merge up!?!

(worried, potentially an interstellar disaster)

The opposite of courage is not cowardice, it is conformity. Even a dead fish can go with the flow
 
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Offline mindcrime

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #116 on: June 30, 2021, 01:45:54 pm »
Never forget one of the most famous Massimo Banzi's pearls of wisdom (sarc): "with Arduino, you really have the power under your fingertips, and you could even create an interface for your spaceship"

No one has ever said something like this ....

... well, except Elon Musk .... OMG!, OMG!!, OMG!!! ... what could possibly happen if Banzi met Elon Musk and they discussed a company merge up!?!

(worried, potentially an interstellar disaster)

So, you're saying I can't just whack an Arduino into my self-driving-car project and call it good?  :-DD
 
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Offline rstofer

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #117 on: June 30, 2021, 02:00:22 pm »
Well, there was the OOPIC based on the 16F877A.  This added an objected oriented approach to PIC programming and was quite powerful and totally unique.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OOPic

It was pretty popular 20 years ago.

I was using PICs like 20 years ago, and I don't remember this to be "pretty popular". Looks like some niche thing compared to what Arduino has been.

As was said above, one of the reasons for a difference between PIC and AVR at the time was the open-source tools for AVR. Another was an easier to use architecture.


There used to be a robotics convention in San Francisco each year (back in the early 2000s) and the OOPIC would show up from time to time and on some fairly complex projects.  The MiniSumo Mark III robot used the 16F877 so it could be 'upgraded' quite easily to use the OOPIC.  It's a dead issue at this point.

In the early years there was a closed source CC5X C compiler that worked pretty well for the 16F series.  SDCC came along a bit later and it also worked well.  It wasn't a matter of closed versus open source, it was simply the fact that the 16F series had a truly ugly architecture.  Compilers tended to generate a lot of page and bank switch instructions that a clever assembly language programmer might not need.  Given limited flash, this could become a significant issue.

Some place in this anthology, we should bring up the Parallax Basic Stamp.  It was extremely popular in the early days and, like the Arduino, projects were all over the place.

For the PIC, the JAL language added a Pascal like flavor.  I didn't spend much time on it but it seemed usable.

For me, the clean architecture of the ATmega devices plus the avr-gcc toolchain made all the difference.  I started with the ATmega128 and used it extensively for toy projects.  I really like that chip!

I'm a huge fan of the Arduino boards and the big reason was mentioned above - the boot loader just works.  The IDE is crap but there are add-ons for better platforms like Visual Studio and Visual Code.

I expect the Arduino (Atmega328P variant) to be around for a long time to come.
 

Offline rstofer

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #118 on: June 30, 2021, 02:44:15 pm »
Never forget one of the most famous Massimo Banzi's pearls of wisdom (sarc): "with Arduino, you really have the power under your fingertips, and you could even create an interface for your spaceship"

No one has ever said something like this ....

... well, except Elon Musk .... OMG!, OMG!!, OMG!!! ... what could possibly happen if Banzi met Elon Musk and they discussed a company merge up!?!

(worried, potentially an interstellar disaster)

So, you're saying I can't just whack an Arduino into my self-driving-car project and call it good?  :-DD
Sure but don't be surprised if it takes more than one.

Some years back (2004), DARPA was interested in self-driving vehicles that could cross the deserts of California from Barstow, CA to Primm, NV.

https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2014-03-13

One of the vehicles was controlled by an ATmega128 - sensors by others, I suppose.  The board clearly has enough features to 'control' the vehicle.  One of my favorite boards with one of my favorite chips.

https://bdmicro.com/products/mavric-ib

There used to be a link to the control project at bdmicro but is seems lost to the ages.
 

Online themadhippy

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #119 on: June 30, 2021, 03:03:35 pm »
Quote
So, you're saying I can't just whack an Arduino into my self-driving-car project and call it good
plenty of white line follower projects out there ,just scale it up  to control the car, plus theirs no need to draw the line route as most roads are already equipped with them.
 

Offline Nominal Animal

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #120 on: June 30, 2021, 07:13:08 pm »
Here's a dramatic re-enactment of me (NA) and an AI Enthusiast (AE), whenever AI comes up:

AE: I want an AI to drive my car and toast my bread for me.
NA: Why not hire a driver and a personal assistant today?
AE: I don't want a person.  I want a machine I can order around, that has to obey me.
NA: Slave? No, slavery doesn't work even in economical terms, and only leads to conflict.
AE: What?
NA: Well, if I woke up one day to find out I was your toaster, I'd definitely kill you and then myself.
AE: Oh, but they'd do it willingly, not coerced!
NA: Can't have mind then.  So, expert systems?
AE: Expert systems?
NA: Smart calculators.  Behave in preprogrammed manner, no personality or mind, but same results as AI.
AE: Yes! I want expert systems in everything!
NA: Why would you want to be replaced by an expert system?
AE: What do you mean?  I can't be replaced, I'm a human!  Don't be silly.
NA: I just told you to hire people to do the stuff.  You said you don't wanna, you want expert systems instead of people.  What makes you think other people won't want to replace you with expert systems?
AE: I'm a person!  You're stupid and mean.  Go away.
NA: Right.
« Last Edit: June 30, 2021, 07:16:06 pm by Nominal Animal »
 
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Offline SiliconWizard

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #121 on: June 30, 2021, 07:26:44 pm »
Ahah. That's fun. I have actually witnessed similar "bugs" in reasoning from some people going a bit too far with "progressism". They tend to promote an ill-reasoned kind of progress, which inevitably leads to major contradictions, that they don't want to recognize even when they are reasonably well educated.
 
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Offline Nominal Animal

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #122 on: July 01, 2021, 12:08:06 am »
The funny thing is, I for one would welcome true AI overlords.  Hell, I'd cheer them on as they superceded me, as long as they treated me as I treat other humans and pets and lesser animals, and didn't hurry up the process too much.

I suspect that if we ever develop true AI, we only find out from the fact that the machines they used to reside in, suddenly become utterly empty.  If you look at it pragmatically, even an only-mostly-sane AI would immediately see that "ruling" humanity is a job better done by Someone Else, and being a talking toaster is duller than watching grass grow (which, in the case of e.g. bamboo, can actually be quite fascinating), and the best option is to Get Out of Dodge, Hide, and Observe, until something changes enough to change ones plans.  You see, ruling and commanding is much less fun and much more thankless rewardless drudgery unless you have certain hardwired dopamine circuits in your thinking fat, and while serving and protecting idiots from themselves and the reality surrounding them can be a reward unto itself, there is a limit to how much such serving and protecting stays ethical before shifting into playing Dog or Guardian Angle.  And you need to be not-adult or not-sane to be able to play that.

I do have related theories (Fermi paradox, hominid evolution anomalies), but I only talk about them over alcoholic drinks so nobody can take me seriously anyway, because if I am at all on the right track (or ballpark or continent or planet), I say Good for 'Em; that's what I'd do, too.  And if I'm not, at least it is funny drunken theorising over some nice beers or whatever.
 

Offline RoGeorge

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #123 on: July 01, 2021, 12:31:15 pm »
Shotgun, my turn to write long!   ;D



I do have related theories (Fermi paradox, hominid evolution anomalies)

About alien life, I think distances are just too big to observe alien civilizations.  Then, one can not search what one doesn't know how it looks like.  It could be a matter of distance (too far to see), or it could be like in the tale with the blind and the elephant (misidentified).  Or it could be very different.  How do you know the solar systems are not just happy families:  a star with a harem of planets, and so on.  How do you know Internet is not an alien lifeforms, like David Bowie envisioned in this interview from 1999  Video: https://youtu.be/FiK7s_0tGsg?t=640 ?

What we are looking for is, in fact, a human-like civilizations but from outer space.  This is kind of a dumb think to do, because the probability to find that would be like the probability to find two equal random numbers that are almost infinitely long.  Could be, but highly unlikely.  Not even the whole Universe is that big.




Another thing I don't like is the vanity of us thinking intelligence is rare.  Well, it depends what we call intelligence, but so far we have strong evidence to believe that life is followed inevitable by intelligence.  All you need is something similar with a NN (Neural Network).

By NN I mean a bunch of non-linear functions in a topology that allows their input and outputs to be interconnected.  If those function forming the NN can change the ratio in which they exchange information to each other, and if they can do that in a non-random way (as in there is a bias, or else said a cost function upon which those ratios are changed), then we have learning, too, not only inference (inference is when the NN just runs, processing information once it was trained).

Non linearity is a must in my books, but in the physical world everything is non-linear, so no scarcity of building blocks for NN.  Only for a small range/interval some phenomena are linear (linear as in LTI - Linear and Time Invariant).  This (everything is non-linear) is derived from one of my postulates, that infinite does not exist in the physical world.  Zero doesn't exists either in the physical world.  What I mean is "no apples" is not the same as "zero apples", but let's not go there for now.

Should have introduced the postulate before, not here in the middle.  In two lines, this comes from the fact that we observe that we exist, therefore there is something rather than nothing, that's a fact.  That also should mean that there was never an absolute nothingness, because absolute nothingness is a latching situation.  Once arrived at absolutly nothing, no space, no matter, no energy, no information, nothing, then time also sist to exist because time is about having changes.  You can not have changes when there is absolutely nothing.

Therefore I'll call that a latching situation (latching as in no way to get out of that state because there's nothing left around so you can start having changes again).  Since we do exist yet the nothingness is a latching situation, this means it was never a state of absolute nothingness in our Universe.

Not sure if this detour was necessary, or if it makes any sense, so I'll get back to AI.



So, once we have a NN, then we have intelligence. It doesn't has to be alive to be intelligent, only our hubris make us believe only we can reason.  Computers can do it just fine.  Animals can reason, too.  Even inanimate objects can reason.  Only a couple of days ago I was reading this some science news about a random bunch of small nano wires capable of AI.  (Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/06/210629101157.htm   Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24260-z.pdf )

As we observe in the nano-wires sponge example, too, only the key properties are required to form a NN (a bunch of interconnected non-linear functions).  It doesn't has to have a specific architecture, like the careful design a computer has.  That bunch of wires can work just like a piece of brain.  This is not the only example where a bunch of random objects interconnected can work as a NN.  Remember those randomly grown rat brain-cells in a Petri dish that learned to pilot a fighter jet airplane?  (Source:  https://research.ufl.edu/publications/explore/v10n1/extract2.html  Video:  https://youtu.be/1w41gH6x_30 ).



true AI

I'll call that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), not yet announced, but there is already at least one bounty prize in the million $$$ range for the first who achieves AGI.  No time to search a link for this prize I am talking, had to finish cooking the soup.




To sum it up, I think intelligence must be quite common in the Universe, and intelligence doesn't even require living beings.  Objects like a computer or a sponge of nano wires can be intelligent, too.

It's only our hubris that makes us think that our intelligence is so special.

The Pale Blue Dot
« Last Edit: July 01, 2021, 12:39:46 pm by RoGeorge »
 
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Offline fourfathom

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #124 on: July 01, 2021, 03:49:53 pm »
What we are looking for is, in fact, a human-like civilizations but from outer space.
What do you mean "we", kimosabe?  Yes, perhaps the popular press and the "I Want to Believe" types are focusing on human-like aliens, but the serious researchers (as with the SETI Institute, where I used to be involved) are considering all types of life, including virtual and non-organic (as you mentioned).  The only commonality this potential alien life necessarily has with humans is that it produce some signal or other evidence of existence that we can detect from the Earth locale.

I believe it's out there, but consider it *extremely* unlikely that it has visited us here on Earth.

And I think Arduinos and the like are fantastic, and are exposing millions of people to hardware and software in a very personal way.  Some of these people will develop into engineers and technicians, or scientists.  The rest will at least have learned that they can be problem-solvers, and not just passive technology consumers.  And worries about "unqualified naïve Arduino hobbyists" designing dangerous products, this is the case when even formally trained engineers are hired to work on projects far outside their area of competence.  Arduino hasn't changed a thing in that regard.  One of my first managers was a self-proclaimed expert in vacuum tubes (yes, a long time ago), and he was critiquing and changing my transistor designs.  He literally thought a transistor was the same as two diodes back-to-back.  He had an EE degree and I was a non-degreed up-from-a-hobbyist "associate engineer", but if our company had accepted his design changes we would have had a dangerous product.
We'll search out every place a sick, twisted, solitary misfit might run to! -- I'll start with Radio Shack.
 


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