Why the Arduino Won and Why It's Here To Stay

ptorrone writes "For years, students, journalists, makers and old-school engineers have asked why the Arduino open source microcontroller platform has taken off, with over 100k units 'in the wild' — it's the platform of choice for many. MAKE's new column discusses why the Arduino has become so popular and why it's here to stay. And for anyone wanting to build an 'Arduino killer' (there are many) — MAKE outlines what they'll need to do."

Comments

Great!

[jason18]

It's cheap and affordable, yet it can do so much. The MakeZine section on it is great and has a ton of cool projects. I don't know why people are wondering what's so great about it, because it's really obvious why it is. When it comes down to it, an arduino is a $15 minicomputer.

Re:Great!

[jcoy42]

If it's just cheap and affordable you're looking for, take a look at the MSP430 LaunchPad. Less than $5.

Getting the crystal in is less than fun, but still, that's one cheap board.

The PIC was similar

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a time when it was difficult and expensive to develop embedded applications. Then MicroChip came out with the PIC. The tools were free. There was lots of helpful documentation. You could build a PIC programmer out of junk box parts.

If you were a small developer, you wouldn't bother with a company like Philips (and the others) whose tools were expensive and whose documentation was Byzantine.

Arduino is one step better. It was designed to be used by artists. There are tutorials for everything. It is SO easy to use.

Of course, Arduino isn't a chip, it's a little board. The chip is Atmel's AVR. I don't know what Atmel did to deserve their good luck. I'm guessing that the hard work of the Arduino folks has really increased Atmel's market share.

The lesson here is that it isn't the goodness of the chip. (The early PICs were really unfriendly to C compilers.) You can have the best chip in the world but nobody will use it if they aren't properly supported.

Re:The PIC was similar

[Nethead]

In the mid 80's there was the Intel 8052-BASIC chip. It had a decent integer BASIC with serial interactive I/O and could, with the proper 21(ish) VDC, burn EPROMs. I designed and manufactured a COCOT payphone using it. Quite the fun thing to play with.

Using a Dallas Smartsocket JEDIC socket with a 6564 SRAM chip made a great development environment.

This was back in the mid-80s. This has better speed and Ethernet, but for the decades that have past, not anything astoundingly new.

Re:Agree, mostly.

[RightSaidFred99]

Real reasons to dislike .NET are few and far between, and generally boil down to cases where it's inapplicable to a specific problem domain. "I hate anything M$" is hardly a meaningful or valid reason.

Arduino "Uno"

[trollertron3000]

Arduino is the project, Uno is the board. There's actually a few other boards they've created: http://arduino.cc/en/Main/Hardware

If you like them you may also want to checkout many of the other microcontrollers in a Digikey or Mouser catalog. I collect them myself. Everything from PIC to Atmel-based, to Zigbee. They're all quite fun.

The main advantage of the Arduino is it's open source design. The other controllers are not as customizable _before_ production. With arduino you can add things if you need them on board.

Re:Agree, mostly.

[ivucica]

Do you say the same thing to the people who say "I don't like broccoli"?

I've worked with .Net and Team Foundation and never catched the workflow. I do not claim .Net to be bad, as I have seen too much good engineering done with it, and I have seen quite a few nice tricks in both C# and the framework. I do reserve the right to dislike the general principles behind many pieces of the design and to do so passionately, while respecting the work of good people who designed C# and .Net and who use it. Dislike has very little to do with it coming from Microsoft.

Immaculate Timing

[eric2hill]

I literally just opened the box of my first Arduino board about 15 minutes ago. I installed the IDE, plugged it into my computer, loaded the drivers, and sent a few sample programs to the tiny board with -zero- problems.

With an out-of-the-box experience like that, it's no wonder the darn thing is so popular.

Re:Arduino programming language

[0100010001010011]

LaunchPad does.

I don't see why this hasn't gotten more fanfare or attention.
A full dev kit costs $4.30. Some of the Arduino stuff I've seen starts at $40. You get 2 chips, a USB programmer, dev environment AND.... a real C environment. Not another language.

It has a ton of other add-ons like the EZ430-CHRONOS watch. After growing up watching Who Framed Roger Rabbit, who hasn't wanted to unlock their doors with Shave and a Haircut.

code availability and easy user interface

[smellsofbikes]

Most of my coworkers are old-school embedded programmers. Many of my friends are Arduino-enthusiasts. The Arduino has a vastly easier learning curve: you plug it in, open a window, and hit 'download' and your code is on the machine and running. People who are used to embedded programming are fine with setting up a development environment with libraries, handling source files, telling the IDE what programmer hardware is being used, what target hardware is begin used, what oscillator frequency and which fuses to set, but that's simply overwhelming to someone who just wants to turn relays on and off to power an art project.

And once a lot of people were using it, they all started releasing their code. Sure there are other great code repositories, PIClist, AVRfreaks, but many of the people there are pretty DIY so they'll exchange snippets of code that they build into something finished. Arduino code is often complete: download this program to do this entire process. That mindset has attracted lots of people, who have contributed even more code, so it benefits from a networking effect, so now anyone who is releasing anything for the electronics experimenter market has to provide an Arduino sketch that handles the hardware being offered -- and that drives it even further.

There are cheaper platforms, there are faster ones, there are ones with much better hardware (and some that are all three, the MSP430 being a likely example) but nothing that combines the simplicity and codebase of the Arduino.

Re:Agree, mostly.

[serviscope_minor]

I hate anything M$" is hardly a meaningful or valid reason.

Unless you rephrase it as "I don't want to get locked into Microsoft products again, since I had a bad experience last time.".

Seems meaningful and valid.

Re:Agree, mostly.

[SanityInAnarchy]

Another reason is, "I want to target platforms Microsoft doesn't."

Say what you will about Oracle, but with OpenJDK, I can pretty much do what I want. The closes thing .NET has is Mono, which means you're basically castrating the feature set of .NET, whereas OpenJDK includes almost all of the Sun JDK, and is almost always out-of-the-box compatible.

Or I can write my code in JRuby, which means I run anywhere Java does and anywhere CRuby does, as well as anywhere anyone writes a Ruby interpreter in the future.

Is the hobbyist market _that_ significant?

[petes_PoV]

Arduino is basically a platform for home users. Just like BASIC was in the 80s. That doesn't mean that it's bad, or to dismiss it, just that it needs to be placed in context. While the Arduino family have no doubt sold many, many units what does that actually mean to Atmel? In terms of the MILLIONS of devices they sell every month, the number bought by amateurs is a drop in the pot.

Same goes for Microchip and the PIC family (processors, not development boards). I would expect they are quite happy to cede a few 100k's of chips over the past few years, given that their main business line is everything that has an embedded processor. I doubt they could actually measure the market loss to Arduinos.

Arduino feels like Linux circa 1995

[taweili]

I got into Arduino last year while looking for interesting toys to play with my kid. Even I got a EE as part of my double CS/EE major 15 years ago, I haven't really done any electronic after college. Arduino provides a quick way to get started. Out of box with easy to use IDE, I can make stuffs entertaining my kid and myself in no time.

The experience getting into Arduino reminds me a lot of the beginning days of Linux. There are more mature commercial options out there (e.g. Solaris, IRIX, even HP/UX) and other competing open source like Net/FreeBSD. Even GNU/Hurd was making progress. But one thing Linux got was a friendly community of beginners. Going through the Arduino forum gave me the same feeling of going through Linux forum back in 95: a lot of excitement about this and willingness to help each other and share. That's defintiely one thing other communities lack. One gets "did you real the source?" reply posting anything to a BSD group.

That's almost parallel to where Arduino is today. There are no lack of better or cheaper alternative but most of them are either established embedded communities or serious lack of documentations. Not friendly at all for the beginners. Arduino gives the beginners a friendly place to get started.

And Arduino goes behind just a AVR based board. It's really a ecosystem with standardized IDE and peripherals. Most people's first critics of Arduino, especially those already in the hardware hacking, is the use of AVR and often cite 8bits and the shortage of AVR last years as problem with Arduino. However, I don't really see that as a short coming of Arduino. I just got a Leaflab's Maple which is a ARM based board with Arduino compatible pin layout and IDE. Getting my projects over to Maple from Arduino is smooth. I don't see Maple as a competitor to Arduino but a member of Arduino family.

The article is right on. There will be a lot of competitors now Arduino is on the spotlight but most of them will fail because they don't get the point of Arduino. It's not about raw CPU power or fine point of the system components, it's about community. And ones don't win the hearts of the community by belittle the community's core.