| General > General Technical Chat |
| Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby? |
| << < (22/31) > >> |
| Mario87:
--- Quote from: FriedMule on June 19, 2021, 09:27:54 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? :-) --- End quote --- 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). |
| Nominal Animal:
--- Quote from: SiliconWizard on June 29, 2021, 06:37:10 pm ---"Could Arduino have been imagined and designed with 8-bit PIC MCUs to begin with, instead of AVR ones?" --- End quote --- 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.) |
| RoGeorge:
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. |
| Nominal Animal:
--- Quote from: RoGeorge on June 29, 2021, 09:53:33 pm ---PIC wouldn't have worked. In fact PIC has its shot and failed. --- End quote --- 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. |
| SiliconWizard:
--- Quote from: rstofer on June 29, 2021, 07:58:29 pm --- --- Quote from: SiliconWizard on June 29, 2021, 06:37:10 pm --- --- Quote from: james_s on June 29, 2021, 04:59:25 pm --- --- Quote from: Bradlez on June 29, 2021, 01:19:33 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. --- End quote --- 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. --- End quote --- --- End quote --- 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. --- End quote --- 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. |
| Navigation |
| Message Index |
| Next page |
| Previous page |