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Arduino SRL Turns Focus To New Connected Boards (hackaday.com)
szczys writes: Arduino has driven a tidal wave of embedded development over the last decade. But last year a rift formed in the shape of two companies — Arduino LLC and Arduino SRL — who are suing each other over trademark. While that is ongoing, each company is trying to outdo the other in terms of new hardware. Arduino SRL is now focusing on producing connected boards and will soon have several new offerings available. The Uno WiFi is a traditional Arduino with an ESP8266 WiFi chip on board. The Tian has a MIPS processor with 2.4 & 5 GHz WiFi making it a Linux single board computer with support for low level pin driving. And the Lei is somewhere in between the other two and only for the Chinese market (it would need FCC certification to be sold in the US). From the user side the trademark dispute looks like a waste of energy, but if it drives the companies to produce more boards and fight for followers on price and quality that may be the silver lining.
This article completely brushes over the Trademark dispute, where if the facts were published it would become clear that ArduinoSRL (formerly Smart Projects) has been attempting to hijack the Arduino brand. ArduinoSRL/Smart Projects produced boards under license from Arduino.cc. In 2008 they sneakily registered the trademark in Italy just before Arduino.cc pursued registering the trademark internationally. Arduino.cc found out and tried to negotiate for the trademark that was rightfully theirs. Subsequently, Smart Projects stopped paying royalties to Arduino.cc, changed their name to ArduinoSRL, and have declared themselves the real Arduino. Funny thing is that the code they distribute to run their hardware is still from Arduino.cc
The esp8266 is already arduino compatible using the board manger in the arduino IDE. https://github.com/esp8266/Ard... Why go through the trouble making a board that has 2 microcontrollers on it when the ESP8266 has wifi, runs at 80 MHz and commonly comes in packages with 1,2 or 4 mb of flash memory for your program. Seems to me to be to little too late. http://www.banggood.com/NodeMc... http://www.banggood.com/ESP826... http://www.banggood.com/3Pcs-E... I feel like there needs to be a whole article on the ESP8266 on here.
Not even close, though it may see reduced application.
Arduino (AVR) can operate at a wide range of voltages and doesn't need terribly close regulation. It can go down to extremely low power if the regulator and power LED is removed (The pro-mini offers a solder link that can be cut to do that easily). It is more robust than the Pi.
Where more computation power is wanted and the above aren't as important, the Pi comes into play.
They both have their place.