"Wiring", which constitutes Arduino's primary API surface, was taken wholesale from Hernando Barragán's 2003 master's thesis project. It was a fork of processing for microcontrollers and was not written by the Arduino team: Massimo Banzi, David Cuartielles, David Mellis, Gianluca Martino, and Tom Igo.
Yeah, the software side is basically only an IDE, a build system and a package manager an another system API (basically an alternative to libc). Which is useful for C++, but far from being non-replaceable.
I recall AVR-GCC not only working just fine in 2005 but being the official method for compiling code for those chips. I used it before Arduino came out to target the same chips.
Arduino was a nice beginner friendly IDE for sure that eliminated the need for make files or reading documentation for GCC, but the existing ecosystem was definitely not closed source.
By the mid 2000s open-source hardware again became a hub of activity due to the emergence of several major open-source hardware projects and companies, such as OpenCores, RepRap (3D printing), Arduino, Adafruit, SparkFun, and Open Source Ecology. In 2007, Perens reactivated the openhardware.org website, but it is currently (February 2025) inactive. [0]
I think they should have worded this better, but what they are known for, more specifically, is pushing open source hardware forward and sticking with it on principle even though it caused many business challenges.
Arduino doesn't directly benefit from pretty much any of legacy unix barf-bag stuff.
It's just a HAL and an IDE, with a truckload of user/third party supplied libraries for various modules, sensors, etc.
Plus, every sizable MCU/dev-board vendor supplies a Arduino HAL implementation (so called Core) for their board/mcu/module (or it's done by enthusiastic community).
> 1989: Tim Berners-Lee invents the World Wide Web
I think ideas etc... existed before that, e. g. DARPA and what Alan Kay said.
Tim mostly pushed forward a simple protocol that worked. Would be interesting to see how much Tim really generated de-novo, but in general I disagree that he "invented" the world wide web as such. That would seem unfair to many other people - just like Alan Kay once said, you see further by standing on the shoulders of giants (translation: you benefitted from earlier inventions and ideas, made by other people).
> Would be interesting to see how much Tim really generated de-novo, but in general I disagree that he "invented" the world wide web as such.
Eh? What do you mean it would be interesting to see? It's well-documented. Not controversial or hidden.
The HTTP protocol yes. But also the browser/editor app, WorldWideWeb, a web server for it, and the URL scheme, are literal Berners-Lee inventions. HTML may be an SGML language but it's his SGML language.
He's not claiming and nobody is claiming he invented hypertext (he would say Ted Nelson and Alan Kay).
He absolutely invented the fundamentals of the end-to-end web technology as we use it. There was no functioning internet open-hypermedia system before 1990. It's just not in question and it's kind of disingenuous to imply he didn't do much.
(Defining down "invent" in this way is also disingenuous to all inventors, who all do their work in the context of prior art)
Complained about and already modified. However, what is "wrong" is that some "person" invented the internet. We live in a time of "followers" and in that paradigm we need some singular person to follow. But it was actually a bunch of original thinkers of whom TBL was one. But it was not a person. I suspect a closer answer is the IETF, but that is also a leaky abstraction.
The point is that if you want to do something, you are probably more likely to do it well with lots of other doers. Not followers.
If you walk into the head office of Qualcomm (in Sorrento Vally, San Diego, CA) and you see the the "Patent Wall" in the entrance covered with almost 1400 patents, it's kind of hard to wonder just how open Arduino will be.
You are right - the whole blog entry has zero names mentioned. An anonymous opinion piece indeed.
Could have almost been written by AI, but the content seemed so angry that I think it must have been a corporate spokesperson who just woke up, read people being concerned and angrily hacked away at the keys at the keyboard.
What I don't get is how what they do is even legally possible, since the libraries have all F/OSS licenses (MIT, LGPL, GPL, APL), and they don't even own the sole copyright to most things.
You'd have to sue them to enforce it. Good luck bringing a case against Qualcomm, perhaps one of the worst companies known for its intellectual property management
Why do I need to sue them, when it's me, who does things I think are granted in their licenses, that they try to forbid? Isn't that the other way around?
“ we have been open-source long before it was fashionable.”
That is a weird, weird claim for a firm that was founded off the back of a project that started in 2005.
It’s, what, over five years after the VA Linux IPO, two years after Microsoft arguably used Caldera as a weapon in a proxy war against IBM, seven years after one of the most famous software products of all time, Netscape Navigator, went open source.
Just a strange, facially implausible bit of appeal to tradition.
The license change isn't a dealbreaker, but Qualcomm still consists of 900000 insectoid lawyers pretending to be humans, and their hivemind thinks "open source" is some kind of disease.
The "best case scenario" was that Arduino would get Qualcomm as a whole to be more open to small devs. The "worst case scenario" was that Qualcomm would get Arduino to be as bad as Qualcomm, and you'd have to "talk to sales" to get an SDK for your development board.
So far, we're not getting the "best case scenario". So keep the pitchforks at hand.
It may be over already. I mean, the pitchforks will change what exactly? Looks like qualcom pwns I mean owns the arduino ecosystem now. Just like a killed-by-Google meme, qualcom may soon start its own killed-by-qualcom trend.
"we collect data for your privacy" they have no idea what words or actions mean anymore.
There is no such thing as being purchased by a large company while retaining anything non-evil. If anything this is the remaining employees who were lied to their face about remaining whatever they were
Anyone have any advice for Arduino replacement? I recently (unknowingly) bought a R4 for some LED projects but knowing now the background, I'm wondering if there's any other alternative for hobby (noob level) micro controller project
I've played with a lot of boards, including Teensy, Seeed XIAO family, some boards from Adafruit and SparkFun, and one Chinese copy of a Chinese ESP32 board.
For my work projects, I use Teensy because it's the screaming-est processor, and I use its computing power. The cost isn't exorbitant since it's typically re-usable unless you want to turn something into a permanent installation.
I suggest play with what you've got until you get sick of it, or run into a hardware need that would be better served by another processor or board. Or choose a new board when your R4 goes into something that you want to keep.
I've tried to maintain a "platform agnostic" approach, where I stick with the general Arduino API and processor-independent libraries as much as possible, and only drop down into the vendor-specific libraries when there's a real performance reason. This makes it easier to switch boards if needed -- a lifesaver during the chip shortage, and possibly important under present day supply chain uncertainty.
Doing it this way will give you the benefits of drawing from a broader range of tutorials and docs, while also providing a gentler learning curve on working with the low level chip-specific stuff.
Any ESP32, RP2040 or RP2350 board. The last two use external QSPI flash, so hobby projects only. There are no fuses to set to read protect the firmware.
Still can be reflashed if you have access to the right pins, but I believe there are more security features built into the later generations of these chips (plus some security fixed from the original 2350 design).
Just to be clear, some micros (STM32s come to mind) have what they call "on the fly decryption" for external flash. Basically, if the micros wanted to, they would. I think ESP32s are also using qspi flashes but they're integrated in package? Maybe that's changed but that's how I vaguely remember it
I use a RP2040 in a commercial product, but it's for a niche portion of a niche industry and it's not intended to ever communicate with another device. Disabling USB mass storage and not adding a bootloader button is good enough for me.
Depending upon your project, perhaps the new MakerPort might be a good fit? https://makerport.fun
The basic kit comes with a built-in speaker, a bunch of LEDs, a servo, an LED matrix, and other goodies. The default firmware works with Scratch, Snap, and MicroBlocks, but I believe you can also use your own custom firmware.
Pine64 has products that are far more open than Raspberry Pi products, and still have good community support. They also have several RISC V products, which are quickly overtaking AVR, PIC, and ARM Cortex M0 microcontrollers.
Readit News
An abridged timeline:
1960s to 1980s: hobbyist and academic/research computing create thriving public domain software ecosystems (literally the birth of FOSS)
1983: The GNU Project begins
1989: The World Wide Web is created
1991: Linus Torvalds posts the first Linux kernel to USENET
1992: 386BSD is released; Slackware is created
1993: NetBSD is forked; Debian is created
1994: FreeBSD 2 is released
1995: Red Hat is created
[a decade of FOSS and the internet changing computing and research forever]
2005: A collection of low-cost microcontroller education tools, benefiting from half a century of FOSS, is formalized into something called "Arduino"
Processing was/is graphics-centered, so that's where Arduino's term "sketch" come from, if you ever wondered.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Processing_screen_shot.pn...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Arduino_IDE_-_Blink.png
Deleted Comment
And some industry players still are. Looking at you, Broadcom and Qualcomm.
Arduino was a nice beginner friendly IDE for sure that eliminated the need for make files or reading documentation for GCC, but the existing ecosystem was definitely not closed source.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_hardware
Deleted Comment
It's just a HAL and an IDE, with a truckload of user/third party supplied libraries for various modules, sensors, etc.
Plus, every sizable MCU/dev-board vendor supplies a Arduino HAL implementation (so called Core) for their board/mcu/module (or it's done by enthusiastic community).
The point of the GP was to refute the claim that they were started “before open source was cool”.
I think ideas etc... existed before that, e. g. DARPA and what Alan Kay said.
Tim mostly pushed forward a simple protocol that worked. Would be interesting to see how much Tim really generated de-novo, but in general I disagree that he "invented" the world wide web as such. That would seem unfair to many other people - just like Alan Kay once said, you see further by standing on the shoulders of giants (translation: you benefitted from earlier inventions and ideas, made by other people).
It's an abridged timeline. Brevity because the point is the date, not the fine detail.
But since I don't care to argue on the internet... edited.
Eh? What do you mean it would be interesting to see? It's well-documented. Not controversial or hidden.
The HTTP protocol yes. But also the browser/editor app, WorldWideWeb, a web server for it, and the URL scheme, are literal Berners-Lee inventions. HTML may be an SGML language but it's his SGML language.
He's not claiming and nobody is claiming he invented hypertext (he would say Ted Nelson and Alan Kay).
He absolutely invented the fundamentals of the end-to-end web technology as we use it. There was no functioning internet open-hypermedia system before 1990. It's just not in question and it's kind of disingenuous to imply he didn't do much.
(Defining down "invent" in this way is also disingenuous to all inventors, who all do their work in the context of prior art)
The point is that if you want to do something, you are probably more likely to do it well with lots of other doers. Not followers.
-- statement from Qualcomm without a single human being's name on it
Could have almost been written by AI, but the content seemed so angry that I think it must have been a corporate spokesperson who just woke up, read people being concerned and angrily hacked away at the keys at the keyboard.
Except that half their boards and the entire cloud platform aren't open source at all.
E. g. qualcom stepwise swallowing the infrastructure and pulling the chair under the hobbyists community.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45978802
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45985663
That is a weird, weird claim for a firm that was founded off the back of a project that started in 2005.
It’s, what, over five years after the VA Linux IPO, two years after Microsoft arguably used Caldera as a weapon in a proxy war against IBM, seven years after one of the most famous software products of all time, Netscape Navigator, went open source.
Just a strange, facially implausible bit of appeal to tradition.
The license change isn't a dealbreaker, but Qualcomm still consists of 900000 insectoid lawyers pretending to be humans, and their hivemind thinks "open source" is some kind of disease.
The "best case scenario" was that Arduino would get Qualcomm as a whole to be more open to small devs. The "worst case scenario" was that Qualcomm would get Arduino to be as bad as Qualcomm, and you'd have to "talk to sales" to get an SDK for your development board.
So far, we're not getting the "best case scenario". So keep the pitchforks at hand.
Of course, if you weren't already making that assumption when Qualcomm bought them, I don't know what to tell you ...
There is no such thing as being purchased by a large company while retaining anything non-evil. If anything this is the remaining employees who were lied to their face about remaining whatever they were
Deleted Comment
Show me a time anyone has ever remained themselves after being purchased by Qualcomm.
It’s over for Arduino.
For my work projects, I use Teensy because it's the screaming-est processor, and I use its computing power. The cost isn't exorbitant since it's typically re-usable unless you want to turn something into a permanent installation.
I suggest play with what you've got until you get sick of it, or run into a hardware need that would be better served by another processor or board. Or choose a new board when your R4 goes into something that you want to keep.
I've tried to maintain a "platform agnostic" approach, where I stick with the general Arduino API and processor-independent libraries as much as possible, and only drop down into the vendor-specific libraries when there's a real performance reason. This makes it easier to switch boards if needed -- a lifesaver during the chip shortage, and possibly important under present day supply chain uncertainty.
Doing it this way will give you the benefits of drawing from a broader range of tutorials and docs, while also providing a gentler learning curve on working with the low level chip-specific stuff.
Still can be reflashed if you have access to the right pins, but I believe there are more security features built into the later generations of these chips (plus some security fixed from the original 2350 design).
> We’ve heard some questions and concerns following our recent Terms of Service and Privacy Policy updates.
Translation: Y’all are angry about us changing what we stood for.
> We are thankful our community cares enough to engage with us and we believe transparency and open dialogue are foundational to Arduino.
Translation: You fuckers are loud and this is blowing up in our faces, so we need to do damage control fast or the acquisition will be worthless.