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| Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby? |
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| RoGeorge:
--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on June 29, 2021, 09:56:57 pm --- --- 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. --- End quote --- That's because I'm a slow typer, but thank you. ;D |
| hamster_nz:
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... |
| mindcrime:
--- Quote from: FriedMule on June 21, 2021, 12:27:10 am ---Will MCU do the same to the hand-soldere? --- End quote --- 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". |
| jklasdf:
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. --- End quote --- |
| westfw:
--- Quote ---Imagine in an alternate timeline where PIC18F based Arduino boards reigned supreme instead of ATMEGA boards. --- End quote --- 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. |
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