Chromebooks and iPads are both completely unsuitable for digital education in my opinion. They can be decent tools for education using digital resources, but that is something different.

To "force" someone to develop on a Chromebook is like giving someone a bicycle to become a race car driver.

That said, I usually flashed my arduinos and used bare metal C. Ironically I think it makes many things easier to learn and understand, provided you have a programming device.

Chrome can read and write to a serial port using the Web Serial API. There is also the WebUSB API, but I haven't tried that. I wonder if that would be enough to flash boards on a locked-down Chromebook?

Arduino was finished the moment it was acquired by Qualcomm.

I recently had a great time developing on ESP-32 directly in VSCode/Cursor and using the Arduino CLI. I believe very similar in concept to Platformio. I've always hated being limited to the Arduino IDE.

> We wouldn't want children to learn coding after all, right?

Why aren't we teaching kids vibe coding? I've been told that is the future after all, and junior devs will never be needed ever again. All they need a webpage interface to an LLM to provide data and customer demographics for AI companies.

+1 for platformio, I recently switched to it and working in VSCode on the code is much more to my liking than the separate Arduino IDE

Technically any recent Chromebook can run Linux in a VM if enabled from settings. Now, I don't know if most schools forbid this, but since it is running in a VM it is safe to use for sure.

Last time I used Arduino was probably the late 2000s, as a kid/teenager,student their prices always felt too high to me, so I moved to "compatibles" or "clones" for a while.

Once ESP8266 and ESP32 came along (with a detour thanks to Raspberry Pi coming along in the 2010s), there was really no need nor desire to use Arduino anymore and like you I forget about them.

Maybe they have a place in education, and maybe in industrial applications, but outside of that, I wouldn't even consider Arduino anymore.

PlatformIO by the way is excellent, and I've used it for all ESP8266/ESP32 development in VSCode for some time now, though increasingly I just use ESPHome, as my desire to program microcontrollers at a low level wanes and my desire to simply achieve the task quickly grows.

Arduino’s sweet spot was always in education and learning.

I think most people should graduate into PlatformIO or vendor tools if they’ve used Arduino to learn basics.

I think it’s great that the Arduino ecosystem became so large and capable, but it had the side effect of leading many beginners into thinking that Arduino was synonymous with microcontroller.

I even took a contract once updating a company’s internal tooling because their first contractor tried to do it all with Arduino. The same scenario happens with Raspberry Pi in the world of Linux embedded systems development.

Are there good ESP32-based starter kits with manual books which a kid can learn from? I was looking for an Arduino-like kit as a Christmas gift, and it seems that Arduino kits are unbeatable. The starter kit is available in 10 languages and comes with a project booklet. All ESP32-based products seem to be better suited for more advanced users and seem to have a steeper learning curve.

I use a combination of Adafruit Ampy to copy files, esptool to reflash, picocom for the REPL, and VSCode. Some of those might be redundant and it did take a bit to figure out the syntax. But once that’s determined it’s cake, and all saved in my CLI history. I just Ctrl+R and bring it back.

What do you think of PlatformIo on these chips compared to the official ESP IDF?

Personally, I am not convinced we should (continue) conflating the IDE with the build+flash tools; the former should be associated with the programming language and developer preferences, and the latter with the MCU being programmed.

I use the command line tool arduino-cli (with plain Makefile) to compile and upload the code (obviously usable in any editor). It has also a --verbose mode to show exactly what is getting executed. But I heard a lot about platformio, so I am wondering what is its benefits (beside the integration in vscode; as an emacs user vscode is not working for me)

I switched to platformio in vscode (and command line) a few months ago after using arduino ide for over a decade.

Can’t recommend it enough. Faster startup. Repeatable builds. The abilty to save your image and then flash on many devices. Build time parameters. Also allows access to some functionality that is not possible using arduino build process due to how arduino compiles and processes sketches.

+1, if only for the documentation. If you haven’t, skim through it: https://pip.raspberrypi.com/documents/RP-008373-DS-2-rp2350-... it’s truly unlike any reference manual I’ve ever read. I will happily pay a few extra cents at modest volumes for a chance to get the detailed technical details and opinions from the design team.

The flipside of this is that the RP2xxx has rather poor hard IP, and the PIO is not quite powerful enough to make up for it.

They are great for basic hobbyist projects, but they just can't compare to something like an STM32 for more complicated applications.

They are a pleasure to work with and I think that they are great MCUs, but every time I try to use them for nontrivial applications I end up being disappointed.

Flashing can be easy, sure. Compiling that binary, including library management, is not, unless you’re using something like micropython. CMake is not hobbyist/student-friendly as an introductory system. (Arduino isn’t either, but platformio with Arduino framework IS! RPi refuses to support platformio sadly)

Arduino took over for 3 reasons: a thoughtful and relatively low cost (at the time) development board that included easy one-click flashing, a dead-simple cross-platform packaging of the avr-gcc toolchain, and a simple HAL that enabled libraries to flourish.

Only the first item, and a bit of the second), is really outdated at this point (with clones and ESP32 taking over the predominant hardware) but the framework is still extremely prominent and active even if many don’t realize it. ESPHome for example still will generally use the Arduino HAL/Framework enabling a wide library ecosystem, even though it’s using platformio under the hood for the toolchain.

Even folks who “don’t use Arduino any more” and use platformio instead are often still leveraging the HAL for library support, myself included. Advanced users might be using raw esp-idf but the esp-idf HAL has had a number of breaking API changes over the years that make library support more annoying unless you truly need advanced features or more performance.

To "yes, and..." you, the whole RP2040 microcontroller line is great and I would encourage folks to support the smaller maker/OSHW companies on Tindie[1] who use it.

[1] https://www.tindie.com/search/?q=rp2040

How long does raspberry pico run on CR2032?

I'm asking because used Arduino ide to program STM32L011 and it would run for months or even years.

“ 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”

Even easier if you setup debugging using another pico, debug probe or even a Pi (not sure if this works on the 5)

>It has dual core if you need it, and the fun little IO coprocessors

I think you're missing the point of what made arduino so popular. It's not the HW itself, it's that you can plug in whatever display, sensor or motor driver out there, and there's ready made templates in the IDE that gets you running immediately, without you having to know anything about how the HW or SW works under the hood.

The lack of dual cores or "fun IO coprocessor" whatever fun is in that context, was never an issue for the arduino.

There's a virtually unlimited number microcontrollers and boards out there for tinkering or production, that are more powerful and have more features, but they all have a higher technical barrier to entry than the standard Arduino out of the box.

I don't wanna have to read datasheets and erratas just to learn how to use a second core, deal with shared memory between cores, or how to configure the GPIO of the "fun IO coprocessor" just to get a LED blinking to work. That's not what fun is to a lot of people. Fun is getting the motor spinning until my coffee finishes brewing and that's where the Arduino ecosystem USP was versus other more powerful platforms.

> Adafruit is trying to drum up some marketing content

This was evident to me when their original post "yada yada yada'd" over the details to make things in the agreement sound sinister.

Agree completely and I was writing arduino libraries almost 20 years ago

More importantly, do they still allow local development or you're now depending on the "cloud" ?

> People also do not like the arduino ide because the days of easy setup and run are gone and a real way of debug is needed in most projects.

A surprising amount of embedded SoCs target the Arduino IDE either as the main IDE, or one of the main ones. And for those the setup is still pretty easy for non technical users - "Download IDE, paste this into the boardmanager, compile the sketch, upload". That's the main reason I'm still using the Arduino IDE for stuff I publish and expect less technical people to use.

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.

And of course the editor is horrible - but thanks to file watching and automatic reloads that isn't much of an issue nowadasy.

Arduino is a tiny market, and Qcom has left bigger things to die on the vine previously. They dont need Arduino to succeed in any way.

Your English is perfectly understandable :)

Adafruit makes a ton Arduino libraries, and sells boards and starter kits. They also make their own stuff, and sell things from their other "competitors." I got my first arduino from them over 19 years ago.

Their real competitor is sparkfun, but I never heard them say anything to put them down.

Adafruit is not an arduino competitor. They sell arduinos

I understand adafruit's take at it. But I guess they are simply plain wrong when saying 'incompatible', at least from a pure license perspective for the HW/firmware.

As other pointed out, companies like Google demonstrate, how open source can be used in a rather aggressive commercial strategy. However, I think the good news is that that the open hardware stuff is not rocket science and maintenance hell at this point (without the new Qualcomm bits). I guess it is now for others to step up and make the ecosystem resilient. That is IMHO the power of open source in case it works.

Was going to quote this exact line. Yes, what was open stays open, but unmaintained, then development/updates/patches are moved to the close(r) alternative until the hassle of running the open old one isn't worth the effort anymore and the need of updated/debugged libraries or board definitions forces the users to migrate. I wonder how doable would be a fork of the whole shebang with the online downloadable content hosted somewhere.

They did a great job. We must recognise experts in this matter. They had help of other companies and hardware producers of course, but still...

Or even that they forbid to use different clients for YouTube

Adafruit actually focus on CircuitPython which is a fork of Micro Python but takes some of the complexity of Micro Python away. I don't personally like coding in C++ as I started my career with Perl then PHP and Javascript. Writing Python in my own choice of text editor instead of the Arduino IDE is much more my style.

Using python makes sense though - it widens the user base. Not everyone is a C++ guru.

I agree the writing is imprecise.

But of course Arduino historically also didn't make the Atmel or Pico chips, so I can sort of see what they were going for.

Setting up the toolchain that's not Arduino IDE is a prohibitively high bar for a school child that wants to blink leds.

Yeah their IDE is basically unusable.

That's not needed though. No licensing is required.

Code is copyright without any licensing. The hardware is not licensed, I don't sign a license or agree to one when buying a car or microwave.

You can find edge cases, but the point is no licensing is actually required.

What do you feel is a good approach to licensing user generated content?

For Espressif it's only their radio blob. And and community is on a good way for a open source replacement for this.

Everything else is top notch open.

It is entirely opensource and hacking-friendly.

Why do you think it isn't?

Don't the latter require separate board support in the Arduino IDE? That was at least the case in the past

esp32 with 'free' (built-in) wifi/bluetooth is just so much easier to work with. That was my experience a few years back.

The latest esp32 chips are RISCV meaning you're not paying a licence for the old ESP CPU (which comes from elsewhere).

There are also 10c RISCV cores available that people are starting to use

I don't think it "saves" it particularly though

The problem space a full Linux SoC solves is very different from the problem an MCU solves. (Imagine a lot of real time io, interacting with a lot of peripherals etc....)

What's eating Arduino's lunch is the various mcus: risc v, stm32, esp32 etc...

Proxmox is awesome, just do it. Ask for forgiveness not permission.

I did some evaluating on this option and there's definitely complexity to bear in mind: Proxmox has worse support for my storage and backup solutions, and if the MSP you are working with has a ton of experience on Hyper-V migrations and limited Proxmox experience, the support you get will lack.

I will say I'd eventually love to have my day job environment on Proxmox but it isn't quite ready to be there today. No shade to anyone who is able to be there by any means, but I think it's fair to say hypervisors aren't something you want to choose on vibes alone.

Yeah, let's not forget that Arduino was built on a history of being kinda sheisty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduino#History

And Adafruit has been a stalwart of open hardware advocacy. If it were anyone else, I might entertain the idea that they're "just trying to drum up some marketing." But we're talking about Limor "LadyAda" Fried here. She's good people and always has been. Her opinion should count for a lot.

I agree, but that is nothing new. The original SaaS was already proprietary.

And btw, the "reverse engineering" close was already here too. You can check the archive.org of Jan 2025, months before the Qualcomm acquisition.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250120145427/https://www.ardui...

So this citation, is basically fake news and FUD. The *now* part is false and this hide the fact that the "platform" is only the SaaS.

> Phillip Torrone had warned [...] Arduino’s users were now “explicitly forbidden from reverse engineering or even attempting to understand how the platform works unless Arduino gives permission.”