This is huge news. Glad to see a sleazy offshoot reconciling with the open source community. They originally hijacked the name and tried to strong arm a lot of businesses, which seemed to hurt the arduino community.
Even though it was the biggest and most influential hobbyist electronics environment, there have been other mcu based environments popping up. Some were offshoots, such as TI's Energia, which added some innovative elements like an RTOS. Hopefully, the arduino environment moves forward even faster from now on.
In all fairness both sides seem to have engaged in sleazy behavior throughout the years. To me this whole situation was nothing more than a hizzy fit by Massimo Banzi whose enormous ego won't allow him to see the forest for the trees. Somebody already posted the story of Hernando Barragán so now I'll post some of the strong arm tactics that they (the alleged less sleazy arduino) employ against their partner resellers: http://blog.pimoroni.com/why-we-wont-be-selling-genuino-ardu...
> I'll post some of the strong arm tactics that they (the alleged less sleazy arduino) employ against their partner reseller
When Arduino split Arduino SRL, with the factory in Italy, were the ones with the Arduino trademark in most markets outside the US. Arudino LLC therefor could, presumably, only sell and manufacture device in the US. It seems reasonable that the companies licensed to manufacture Arduino in the US, and can't manufacture anywhere else nor sell to the rest of the world, shouldn't have to compete with Genuinos that are manufactured in China.
In regards to Wiring the project was open source, a master thesis and lives on to this day. It's just that Arduino is more successful.
You can surely doubt the professionalism of many people involved in Arduino, but more than that what happened here is that Arduino forked Wiring and Pimoroni found it cumbersome to sell Arduinos. People always say they want open source or more community driven companies, but when things get complicated not only are people quick to turn on them (which is many times understandable) but they make the situation worse trying to pile on all the things they feel are bad to justify their feelings.
"this whole situation was nothing more than a hizzy fit by Massimo Banzi whose enormous ego won't allow him to see the forest for the trees"
I don't see it that way, especially when you consider how the whole trademark issue went down. And then refusing to pay royalties and strong arming Arduino suppliers. This was not a simple personal disagreement, but overtly hostile and aggressive business moves which hurt the community.
To your point, Hernando Barragán has legitimate grievances, but that was not the main problem that was resolved.
There was originally a company called Smart Projects SRL. They manufacture boards. Arduino LLC was the company originally founded for the Arduino project, and Smart Projects SRL manufactured the actual boards for them, because it's owned by one of the Arduino project founders, Gianluca Martino, and they were all friends. That's the backstory.
But when Arduino LLC tried to register the Arduino trademark, it turned out Gianluca Martino had registered the trademark for his own company two years prior, and not told the others. (Arduino LLC got the trademark in the USA, but were not able to register it anywhere else) This happened in 2008. At the time, they just agreed to stay friends and not make a big deal of it.
Then, last year, Smart Projects SRL made a big deal of it. They renamed their company Arduino SRL, registered arduino.org and cut their ties to Arduino LLC. This was reportedly because LLC wanted to start licensing the name to other manufacturers, but SRL wanted to keep official Arduino manufacturing to themselves. This led to the arduino.cc/arduino.org split.
That's pretty sleazy and anti-open source of them if you ask me.
If I remember correctly, Gianluca Martino's trademark registration actually predated the existence of Arduino LLC, because originally there was no company founded for the Arduino project - it was some kind of joint venture between Gianluca Martino (manufacturing, capital) and Massimo Banzi (board design).
One of the more interesting side-effects of this is that, because the Arduino libraries were written by someone else, no-one involved in the project had any experience of porting them to a completely new architecture. As AVR has gradually become slow, outdated and expensive, this has had the result that unofficial Arduino-compatible boards like Teensy are often better ports than the newer official boards.
For a long while, most people didn't understand the turmoil in the arduino market. The competing arduino.srl tried to fork the ide and even the history of the project.
Oh wow, I didn't know about that merger... that is way bigger news than the squabbling between the Arduino factions. Arduino hardware is pretty much just a breakout board; you can make one on a breadboard. If the bigger merged company decides it doesn't care about the niche maker market, they could kill off the line of DIP chips that IMHO defines what an Arduino board is.
I personally think in this space that they experiencing more competition from boards with the ESP8266. You could use the rpi with the gpio pins but for some projects it doesn't make economically sense.
For 4 euro's and less you can buy a board with the ESP8266 and you can even use the Arduino IDE to program it.
Buy them on Aliexpress and they are even cheaper. You can now buy a ESP-12E for about $1.60 on Aliexpress. That's just the module though. If you want a breakout and a USB port they cost $3-4.
And yes, I think the squabble left people a bit unsure about Arduino and then they discovered that there's ... the confusing mess that is mBed :-)
It's not that he ESP8266 is fully a replacement and there are still lots of situations where you would lean towards the Atmel chips in the Arduino or others like PIC and STM. E.g. the ESP8266 is pretty limited on IO, not as tolerant of higher voltages, more heat/power, worse for sensitive real-time applications, inferior low-power performance and so on.
But for a lot uses they are a better fit. The ESP8266 is a right time and right place kind of thing - it has enough IO and wifi to be really useful for the hobby explosion of IoT stuff.
It's a 30 second read; you should just click on the link.
If you really are that lazy; arduino.cc and arduino.org settled their dispute and have setup a holding company to organize device sales using he Arduino brand. In a addition, a not-for-profit company is being setup to run the educational part of the organization.
I'm assuming this fixes all the B.S. that was the "Genuino" fiasco. Good riddance but the brand has been severely damaged by their scorched earth tactics with devices like the Raspberry Pi gaining amazing traction. It will be interesting to see if it can recover.
> It will be interesting to see if it can recover.
Ardiunos were fantastic in their time, but the industry has moved on.
Why work on an 8-bit MCU where you [mostly] have to bit bang IO when you can buy something like an STM32 which has hardware acceleration (DMA) for IO, and on higher models even adds things like an RTC?
Arduino has a great community, but there are far better choices available now, which are even Arduino compatible (e.g. Teensy) for the same price, but that use an ARM core instead of AVR.
Arduino now is a dead end. ARM ate the world, and it's now the better choice for new projects. Unless there's a need to support legacy designs implemented with Arduino, I see no compelling reason for people to continue to use them.
There is something to be said for having the underlying hardware be relatively simple. Someone who started with Arduino could reasonable be expected to grow, study the data sheets, and progress on to AVR C. Moving from the Arduino API to any of the other things supported by ARM is quite a jump to make in a single leap, without some sort of intermediate learning step.
Exactly. I would add that the same is true of the hardware. You can easily pop the DIP chip out of a classic arduino and build your own circuit around it on a breadboard. Making your own surface mount board is a much bigger leap.
A lot of more recent Arduinos use more sophisticated cores than the AVR. There are several models that use ARM cores, there are a few that use x86 variants, etc. One of the advantages I can see with the Arduino infrastructure is that the libraries are fairly reasonably cross-platform, so you can use them on multiple projects which use different micros without having to rewrite a bunch of code.
Arduino has made a huge impact on the "maker" community. It has enabled lots of non-electrical engineers to produce hardware that was previous not possible or easy for non-programmers. Most of the time, 8 bit micros are sufficient for the types of projects involved. Even embedded engineers use them when convenient.
And the ecosystem of Arduino "shields" has become so popular that lots of people and companies make shields. Even the newer environments such as ARM's mBed will accept arduino shields due to their availability.
Exactly. You can get a board that accepts Arduino shields and lets you program with the Arduino environment, but also natively supports high-speed buses like PCIe, USB, SATA, and Ethernet, and provides a more direct programming environment based on Linux or a smaller embedded OS.
I'm curious, what board in the Arduino form factor are you talking about that can do PCIe and SATA? Those require fairly sophisticated processors AFAIK (read: expensive).
Also, for many uses programming in Linux is the exact opposite of direct when comparing to banging out some bare metal C or C++ on a dinky 8-bit micro. Maybe using a RasPi to blink LED or read a temperature sensor is more accessible to some people and that's a good thing, but it's like killing ants with a tactical nuke.
On the other hand, the genuine arduinos with morr modern cores seem to be very expensive. The arduino used to be fantastic a number of years ago but they move a long way down the value chain in recent years. I have boxes of all the original ones but have not used them in years.
I liked and used the Arduino Due, which is a low-end 32-bit ARM CPU on an Arduino form factor board. It's supported by the Arduino toolchain, but you get more memory and a more powerful CPU. The Due, though, has been discontinued. For some reason, Due boards cost more than a Raspberry Pi.
I am baffled by the suggestion that a Raspberry Pi could ever be considered a competitor to an Arduino. It's akin to saying a Doctor could equally use a scalpel or a kitchen knife for surgery. It is possible, but there are different knives for different jobs for good reasons.
Collecting sensor data? Arduino is a lot leaner and to the point. Performing computations on sensor data? Might be better to use a Pi.
Even though it was the biggest and most influential hobbyist electronics environment, there have been other mcu based environments popping up. Some were offshoots, such as TI's Energia, which added some innovative elements like an RTOS. Hopefully, the arduino environment moves forward even faster from now on.