But Adafruit points out a problem, which is that the cloud service is the only available option for students using school-issued Chromebooks. I can confirm that a school-issued Chromebook is likely to be set up to lock out access to any programming tools. We wouldn't want children to learn coding after all, right?

I think relying on a corporation to preserve our freedom to code is a bit too optimistic.

I do keep meaning to try this though - https://platformio.org/

The process of getting a binary onto the board is just dragging a file, and on linux at least you can script it with picotool

I did a bit of searching and found some sketchy documentation that just leaves me with more questions. It sounds like Arduino’s new web editor programs boards wirelessly somehow? Does it assume the board has WiFi? What is this new, networked system? What Internet protocols does it use? How do you pair it with the web editor?

It sounds like Adafruit are just trying to sow some outrage here.

Now contemplate open Android and Google Play Services.

They are PCB brands. The microcontrollers are made by the usual manufacturers like ST, Renesas, Infineon...

  - Wi-Fi: Esp Risc-V (C3 etc)
  - BLE without Wi-Fi (Or ANTD): Nordic. Also a good choice in general for simple devices
  - General-purpose, including high-performance, low-power, and high I/O: Stm32

If using rust, probe-rs + cargo is a "just works" CLI workflow to compile, flash, and debug.

However, it was a "standard" boot-loader, had consistent documentation, and a wide community of users. It encouraged people of all skill levels to play with chips, and that was great.

These days a full Linux SoC is often cheaper than most mcu. The age of the Arduino board will just end a little quicker now. Generally, irritating a planet of bored computer engineers does not end well for a business. =3

But yeah, Arduino is in a weird place right now. I knew people there (kind of lost track), quite liked their IDE and how accessible it made a lot of things, but the recent turn on events is just… weird.

Of course, an ecosystem has grown around that, so you could attach pretty much any popular device (sensor, display, input device,...) to it, and the library was already made for you to simply use it in your project.

But now, years later? There are many such controllers, from esp8266/esp32 to rpi pico, with additional features (wifi included) on better boards (displays, buttons, interfaces,...), for even less money.

Yes, the original arduino was important.. but if it vanishes overnight, very few people would notice.

I kind of drifted off. So curious about what people here think is the best "Arduino when it still was open source" contender. Preferably something Arduino compatible because of the sheer amount of projects already out there.

That said I've heard a fair bit about Adafruit criticism as well, but that's more on the company level and no personal experience there.

(Disclosure: I know the Adafruit founder, but haven't discussed this matter with her.)

Maybe it should all have been free software all the time.

T&C's preventing reverse engineering of an online platform seems to have no real business value. Serious hackers will ignore the T&C's, whilst serious competitors will not need to do any reverse engineering to build an online compiler.

Yea that's gonna be a hard pass for me. Thank goodness for the Pi Pico which means I'll never have to use Arduino ever again. On a side note, the new Arduino IDE based on Monaco looked nice but made development so painful I just stopped. I had to keep disconnecting and reconnecting devices all the time to upload sketches when before with the old IDE that was never an issue. Everything Arduino feels like a regression.

We need an arduino fork.

It is disappointing because it distracts from the discussion around Open Source and Arduino as a long term educational tool. Regardless if that shade is in good faith or not, it distracts from the conversation we should be having.

And I think these people are right, but that is not necessary a bad thing.

There is just about no reason a giant like Qualcomm would take over something like Arduino for any other purpose but to acquire resources (talent, customers, community, processes, documentation, ...) they can use to teach themselves how to become more open, to what degree they even want to and to have a trusted platform they can take their initial steps in and will get feedback from.

And the reality is, that someone with little experience will screw up badly, several times. I mean, look at the current state of the major silicon IP holders, the only reason they dont ship brain-chips with their NDAs that explode the moment you mention the wrong part number infornt of a competitor is because the NDAs for the documentation on how to install the brain-chips would get them stuck in recursion hell.

And just as little experience Qualcomm has at making open source a successful business strategy, Arduino has just as little experience at being a corporate Godzilla trying to carefully pet the egg they just adopted. And let's be real: Open source projects OWE it to their community to be financially successful, because it's that financial success that guarantees that the project CAN STAY open and wont force its core maintainers into choosing between their commitment to their community and a fulfilling lifestyle, although for someone like Qualcomm this success can probably be something else but financial in nature (acquiring talent, their products becoming a preferred choice, schools teaching students using Qualcomm products, whatever).

Both Arduino and Qualcomm will end up outside of their domain and it'd be surprising if this would not result in major mistakes being made.

.

Qualcomm has to evaluate whether their new talent at Arduino is doing a good job and are suddenly looking at a giant dumpster fire, wondering what could have possibly caused this since their lawyers aren't even half-done sticking on the "by Qualcomm" labels yet.

Right now, instead of trying to pressure Qualcomm into making commitments they do not understand, the community should try to adopt the role of a stakeholder, who prioritizes a long and healthy relationship with a currently struggling contractor over getting the desired product at a reasonable timeline.

The community needs to make a cold day in hell happen, calm down, get together and formalize what they think they liked about Arduino up until now, the fundamental requirements that need to be retained or even developed and what would be nice to have.

Running a proprietary SaaS doesn't really show commitment to open source.