Adafruit: Arduino’s Rules Are ‘Incompatible With Open Source’

> young coders are asked to assist these characters achieving simple goals by coding simple instructions. As challenges become more difficult, more complex algorithms are required to solve them and new concepts are introduced.

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

Having spent several years teaching kids to code everything from games to lightbulbs on Chromebooks, I can confirm that there are certainly difficulties - but they're tradeoffs. I could spend my time coming up with a way to work through the platform restrictions, or I could spend my time maintaining a motley crew of devices and configurations. Having done it both ways, they both have different pain points.

We in the industry might see AI progressing to where cube vibe coding is just as real as using spreadsheets rather than paper ledger books, but it is years out, and teaching kids on v0.1 tools would just be frustrating for teachers while likely teaching kids all the wrong things.

I also think they have some testing features built in, though i never delved too deep.

> nontrivial applications

Out of curiosity, where do you find that you’re hitting the limits of what it can handle?

There are similar chips at a quarter of the price.

Obviously for hobbyist stuff, $1 doesn't really matter.

I recently started programming Arduino for profit and you need to do exactly that, because the libraries range from somewhat buggy to completely broken. They so often just write into random other registers and if it works it is only do to the chip already working without any configuration and the library not breaking things too badly.

I have a old Arduino UNO R3, would be a really disappointing if I could no longer play around with it by just downloading the IDE and connecting the cables.

It doesn't need to do anything with "the cloud".

> The problem with the IDE is that it doesn't offer a gradual path to more advanced usage. You're pretty much stuck with a single file main project. You can split off functionality into libraries, but the way library resolving works is way worse compared to "proper" build systems. There are projects to provide makefiles for Arduino projects, but it's a bit of a pain to set up - I use that for CI on some of my stuff, but it clearly is on the other end of difficulty scale.

It actually isn't all that hard. I recently did exactly that and it took like a week, most of which was spent on understanding what the Arduino IDE does with strace. Initially I assumed the Arduino IDE does way more stuff then it actually does. The makefile projects are too complicated, because they try to abstract over the installation and project. Instead I used Autotools which is way easier and simpler. It also breaks less, because these makefile projects tend to hardcode paths.

To save others the work: All you need to do is populate CPPFLAGS, CFLAGS, LDFLAGS, ... with the information from platform.txt and boards.txt . Then tell your build system to use the cross-compiler toolchain from your OS. Take care to only use the exact uploader program version that the Arduino IDE also uses, I have been burned by using the latest version, which bricked my board (i.e. you can't upload anything to fix it and need to use a second board to reflash the bootloader). This information is in the package_index.json file. Granted this is annoying to work with using fulltext search, you would have a much saner experience actually using the JSON format, but it still works and I am lazy.

> You're pretty much stuck with a single file main project.

You can have multiple files just fine, this is actually the reason why the Arduino IDE defaults to having this project directory. The Arduino IDE just assumes all files below that are things to compile. You need to remember to not name the other files with *.ino, but *.cpp, *.c and *.h, otherwise you end up with multiple main functions. An *.ino file is just a *.cpp file that gets preprocessed with a main function template.

> And of course the editor is horrible

You can tell the Arduino IDE to use another editor, which is what I did when I used it.

This seems like an ideal component for the OSS community to handle and rally around. Then anyone can use the IDE of their choice, the compile-flash manager handles the rest.

Prototyping platforms have tiny markets, but lead to downstream sales. Many a company were brought down by more developer-friendly platforms ignoring the "tiny" userbase of people who want to do unconventional things.

Most IC vendors provide free samples and support because of this. That's a market size of close to zero -- electronic engineers -- but leads to a market size of "massive." I can get an application engineer to visit my office for free to help me develop if I want.

Arguably, iPhone and Android won by supporting the tiny market of developers, who went on to build an ecosystem of applications, some long-tail, and some unexpected successes.

And arguably, x86 won for the same reason.

Atmel had shipped 500 million AVR flash microcontrollers, due in large part to the ecosystem created by Arduino.

Balmer said "Developers! developers! developers!" Visual Studio was not a major revenue driver for Microsoft; what was developed in it was.

> Chief microcontroller rival Adafruit

Implying that Adafruit makes their own competing microcontrollers, which sure would have been news to me.

Edit: sees sibling posted at the same time. Well that would explain it.

If your target audience is school kids, you really can't go past the micro:bit and Makecode[3].

1. https://thonny.org

2. https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects/getting-started...

3. https://makecode.microbit.org

At the very least, you need some sort of user agreement to specify the things you can do with their content, otherwise you can't really do it because it's their content and you're not allowed to mess with it by default. (Like you said, code is copyrighted by default.) You also need to specify the things that are necessary by law because you are hosting that code and therefore in part responsible for it. You also don't want to make the user sign a new agreement every other week if you add some new feature that they need to agree to use, because the cost of all those legal documents is prohibitive, and it's also very bad UX.

Added to this the fact that lawyers are naturally very conservative as a profession (generally only doing things that have been proven successful, rather than avoiding things that have been proven unsuccessful), and it's easy to see why these sorts of agreements tend to be more expansive than they perhaps need to be, in order to ensure the company is fully protected.

They released their first closed source "pro" boards in 2021

https://blog.adafruit.com/2023/07/12/when-open-becomes-opaqu...

Unfortunately, it’s not isolated.

https://chaos.social/@North/115605819126197877

Conform conform conform.