Sometimes it’s not about the microcontroller part of the project. I use the Arduino as a quick and dirty way to test the “rest” of my circuits. Once I have the hardware interface down and/or the logic figured out I put the proper uC in and save the Arduino for the next job.

I thing its good that hackaday don show just hacks, sometimes non hacked thinks are like a hack :). A hack a day keeps the doctor away.

NOT A HACK!!

I kid.. I kid… great article. This did a great job catching my attention with the “and how we can kill it” part I was like “has HAD lost their mind(s)”? … then I read on… really well written and a great point.

The point of Arduino is to give people who aren’t hackers yet a way to experiment. The Smash Putt installation in Denver this January is a good example of what Arduino can empower:

It’s not that the board or the environment are magic, it’s that they’re good enough to let people get on to the rest of the project.

for an extra dollar (gasp) i can switch out a 555 with an attiny. I bet you make up the dollar difference with the savings of additional components and pcb space required on the 555 circuit. So unless C programming makes you wet yourself the choice seems clear.

The Arduino won only if you ask the outcome to the wrong people.
It is an interesting prototipying platform with some good libraries but sadly a terrible Java based IDE. Newbies and people interested in using it as a tool to develop other stuff will find it interesting but strict microcontroller development is a whole different thing.

I can’t tell you how many crappy boards I built, how many PICs I killed going in and out of zif sockets.

Building your own boards sucks. Having non-portable code sucks. That’s why the Arduino has “won”. They took the two sucky things about building projects away.

@Caleb

Very well written, this has been long time coming.

I think there’s also an important distinction to be made between the hardware Arduino boards and the Arduino library. Everything said here mostly applies to the hardware side IMHO.

I feel the Arduino library is a well written ‘replacment’ for the aging avr-libc. It’s just a software library to enable easier C development on AVR cores. I consider it in the same class as avr-libc. Sure, there’s some slow ‘idiot checks’ in alot of the calls, but they have been improving speed, and there’s nothing stopping the end-user from tweaking the library themsleves (I have).

I’ve bought very few Arduino boards, but I have used the library on many of my projects with my own boards. Sure, I could start codding from scratch, but it just makes dev easier. What’s wrong with that?

I agree with most of your points. I have a handful of arduinos. I come from an electrical engineering background and I don’t like to reinvent the wheel when something off the shelf will do. However, I agree that when I see all of these posts of “finished” projects and they are a breadboard, arduino and a mess of wires I think that is not a finished project, it is a finished prototype or even just a finished concept. With pcb’s so cheap these days with group orders and such, it is a shame to not have a nice polished single board device for a finished project.

Now for simple things or prototyping, the Arduino makes it stupid simple through their (overly) simple IDE and function set. For instance, this past Halloween, I wanted to light up and program a random sequence of LEDs for my pumpkin with only 30 minutes before the kids hit my door. An arduino was perfect for it.

On the “Hater” side, the arduino is a good start but once you want advanced circuit design or optimized programming, then it is time to drop the bunny IDE and simple bootloader and function set for something that doesn’t require numerous cycles to turn on a single output.

Arduino has it’s place and I for one will continue to use it as it is a nice platform for prototyping and for spring boarding into a much larger world of electronics.

Why should we have to “kill” the arduino?

What a silly concept. Look at what good it’s done to encourage new products, hackers, and ideas.

YES IT! There was likely a steady stream of people becoming electronics hackers before the arduino. But AFTER the arduino we got artists, computer guys, high schoolers, and lots of people who’d never written a program before. Much less knew about 555 timers.. Arduino re-invigorated electronics for me and a WHOLE lot of people. You proud “old school” hackers should be thankful there are so many new minds that are being mentored in your art, however cursory that knowledge, is it is there where it wasn’t, and never would have been before.

I’ve always loved electronics, though even growing up as a dorky kid who’s favorite saturday morning shows were science shows (beakman’s world and bill nye etc), a dorky kid who bought a soldering iron just to desolder old junk and look at the parts, a kid who’s favorite christmas gift was an electronic science kit. I NEVER as a young adult knew that pic microcontrollers were free, or that there was such a thing as a development kit. Instead, like many others, open source computer software filled the tinkering gap, until… Arduino. Did they advertise well? Were they just simple enough? Was it the community they built on their website with free help? Was it the open source and open hardware nature? Probably a little of all of those.
Bottom line, I should have been an electronics hacker in high school. With arduinos around I would have been.
Give thanks that now your hobby industry is a MUCH richer world with bigger and better ideas because of a cheap development kit that did something just right and caught a whole lot of new attention. In the future many of these pesky beginners will probably be as well versed as some of the best hardware hackers you showcase today.

Open the beginner mind to new dev kits and the wider world of micro-controllers? By all means yes.
Kill the arduino? No! Why the hell would anyone want that?

Kill arduinos!! i’ve seen people using arduinos on Final Year projects! on Electrical or computing engineering… WTF?! Hardware in arduino is datasheet hardware.. basic pinouts.. there’s nothing fancy about it.. bootloaders too.. so if you can’t see that arduino is just a board with a ridiculous basic circuit and you’re too lazy to mount it on a breadboard (come on.. takes 10 minutes or less to put those things on a breadboard) go study law, or economics..
people make a lot of noise about it. .arduino this, arduino that.. it’s just a board! want to learn about electronics? pick a book! there’s a lot of great books out there. after that you will know about it and make things much easier.. using that Processing thing they call a Programming Language, you won’t.

I think that a good thing to remember with all the Arduino hating, is that the Arduino platform is like the PageMill or MS FrontPage of the uC world, it makes everyone an EE. Once it comes down to brass tacs, most of the noobs that only develop for the Arduino still wouldn’t be able to develop for a real uC.

Having been “raised” on old fashioned electronics, i.e. before microprocessors and then on the early 4 & 8 bit monsters, I still look to doing things without any kind of processor. Granted it takes a lot of tyme, but I enjoy it. I still don’t make pcb’s either, faster just to do it with wire.

That said, I have been wanted to come into at least this century and start using whatever type of microprocessor I can get my hands on. But after reading all the back and forth on what type to use, which is better, etc., plus my programming is late 80′s, and not having a lot of tyme to learn new programming skills, it gets confusing what to choose from. One of the reasons I read HAD is see what others are using and why. And hopefully I can eventually figure out where to put down my very hard to find $$.

I agree with the basic gist of the article, however you can get more people to learn the basics of electronics, the better.

Even if it means using a sledge hammer to nail a tack on the wall.

Why the arduino won is the entire system.

So instead of having something easy to hook up and program on win/mac/linux, you want people to switch to learning how to do PCBs, soldering fine pitch, getting $250 programming devices, and using captive IDEs that only run under Vista 64. Get real.

I rarely use the Arduino IDE. But it is so much easier to use the bootloader. GCC supports the other Atmel chips like the 2313 which programs on the $49 Dragon and is supported by Avrdude and Avarice in most cases.

I would welcome more and different processors. But when I look, GCC is missing or the forgotten stepchild (isn’t 2.95 sufficient?), I can’t easily breadboard most versions, it requires some strange hardware to program or something else. The OEMs only want to do some minimum and then wonder why.

Even ARM – there are a few things like the chumby hacker board or Beagle board, but why is fedora stuck at 12?

I wish the other microcontroller manufacturers would get a clue. But I can’t use the chip in a complex context if it takes $500 and two weeks just to flash an LED.

i just have the impression that this is a great deal for electronics companies, so once there’s less people dealing with real hardware constraints, there’s less competition for them.. and yet, the people are having the impression that they’re dealing with electronics and stuff, so they’re happy! they keep people busy, while keeping they away from reality and from the market

Why would we like to kill the Arduino? In that case, let’s kill microcontrollers.

We can do the same things with logic, but who would like to do it?

If I had to make a blinking led, I would do it with an Attiny as I know I can change the blinking rate, period, add an external control if the project changes.

Try to be so versatile with a 555

I ALMOST agree with the article. I think that the Arduino is a lot like a pre-built desktop computer in that it can be an end and a means to an end.

If every computer user had to custom build their PC to be tailored to their own needs, it would never get done. Too many options, too many factors, too much knowledge about what works best with what is required. Being able to go out and buy something pre-built gives me the opportunity to just worry about what I can DO with a computer and not worry so much about what goes into it. Sure, maybe what I got was overkill, but getting online with a quad core is better than not getting on at all. Once I’ve got an idea of what I can DO with a computer are cemented, then I can start exploring how I can do them better and more efficiently.

The Arduino heavily mirrors that. Initially, it’s a black box that “just works”. Play with it. Light some LEDs, drive some motors, sense temperatures, have FUN. The Arduino is a great way to make people passionate about electronics and microcontrollers. People who would otherwise be unable to make the big leap into the beyond. Once the hook is set, reel them in and show them how to build everything themselves.

The flipside of that coin, though, is that for some computer users, “it just works” is as much as they’re interested in. All they want to do is use it, not demystify it and that’s OK too! There’s a lot of cool things one can do with a computer or even a program within the computer without knowing how everything works. I’ve seen some pretty neat things made in Excel for example!

Because you will always have people who want something that “just works” you’ll never kill the Arduino any more than you will kill PC sales at Best Buy. On the other hand, many of those people who started out looking for something that “just works” DO want to learn more and that’s what makes the Arduino OK as both a stepping stone AND an endpoint.

Now the Arduino is looked down upon by a lot of people, however, I actually look up to it. By trade I am a mechanical engineer and electrical circuits that don’t use discrete parts confuse the hell out of me! Just a bare PIC or AVR scares me like nobodies business! The Arduino and all similar products that have a large community really help me along. It seems less intimidating, consider these things training wheels for the micro-controller uninitiated.

Oh weird I’ve been cited as an example of non-hacker. Never thought that would happen.

Anne, I’ve been a hacker since grade school fucking with “Lemonade” and logo on my apple IIe. New Hack City & B00l34n h00LuM5 repruhsent y’all. ahem.

Anyway on topic, since I was dragged into this… I was actually reluctant convert to arduino from the PICs I grew up with. I can honestly say the only reason we use them is that they are the standard with robotics and artists which makes it easy to adapt the generous work of others or collaborate with folks that do similar stuff.

So why is Arduino a standard versus the myriad other programmable project boards? Community… social network connection density… that’s the only reason. Want to unseat Arduino? Well you’re working against basic rich get richer game theory so you better be in for a long slog or come out with some radical meme upsetting marketing and/or technology.

There’s no reason to kill the Arduino. Nor has it “won” anything. It’s a nice platform to test concepts, and the software runs on anything. It’s a decent common ground to transfer ideas to other people in a unified language of hardware and software. People can move on from there. I’m not bothered by non-engineers using it to do stupid things, it’s screamingly funny sometimes, but they can learn as much or as little as they want.

Lets put it this way, those people had a choice: get a book on uC subject and follow its recommendations or get Aduino. They choose to be lazy so let them, we dont need them let church of Arduino swallow all artsy fartsy kind and keep them busy

Caleb, as someone who is entirely self taught in all things electronics and most things computers I appreciate the sentiments of this post. Unfortunately I don’t think the characteristics of the community addressed are likely to change any time soon, and I’ll explain why.

APerson and ftorama both used some interesting analogies so I’ll stick to their examples. The reference to the similarity between Arduinos and PCs also exemplifies the problem many more experienced members of the community feel is compounded by the widespread(some may say excessive) use of Arduinos.

Many people here will remember what the internet was like prior to the late 90s/early 2000s. Yeah the technology sucked, the connections were slow and unreliable, finding the information you were looking for was a pain in the…..hiney, and multimedia was rare at best; but when you finally found the right BBS or IRC channel the community was awesome. Then came AOL and “getting online” became the hip new thing. Next thing you know your favorite forum is full of people who don’t know how to use the search feature, asking the same questions as the guy before, ranting about how nobody helps him when the only response he gets is links to other threads. Your favorite IRC channel fills with a combination of people who’s entire vocabulary is three letters(ASL?), spammers, and bots. All of the positive contributors to the community leave out of frustration and the site/forum/channel eventually dies.

Pre-built PCs and internet access that “just works” allow people who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to to get online. It’s true that out of those thus enabled a few continue to learn and even become positive contributors to the communities they join, but it could be argued they would have done so regardless.

Another potential issue could be outlined following the analogy of Excel. Excel is a very useful program with incredible capabilities. The problem with that is that people will use it for things that it was not intended to do. I have seen people trying(and to a certain extent succeeding) to build relational databases using spreadsheets because that’s what they understand. The same could be said of most programs in the MS Office suite(s). I’ve seen large scale CMS, POS, and inventory control systems implemented in Access because the author didn’t want to learn how to do it on a SQL server.

That’s all fine and dandy until it stops working or begins having problems. when that happens somebody else usually gets called in to fix the problem because the original “architect” has moved on or is incapable of resolving the issues. Then somebody who does know what they’re doing is tasked with fixing what is very often an unweildy system/program/other-type-of-solution. If that person wants to reimplement from scratch or otherwise invest the (usually)considerable resources to do the job correctly they’re berated or ridiculed for not being able to “just fix it”.

The same example can be made of many C# “developers”(bear in mind it is a foregone acknowledgement that the following is not always the case). “C# developers don’t care how things work in background, they want a working program in 5 minutes” is exactly the problem. They bang out a program with little thought for performance, scalability, portability, maintainability, security, or any of the other things that a more capable programmer might. Perhaps it’s never a problem, but if it is, it’s the more experienced programmer who has to fix it(or at least deal with it in some forum).

I would’ve loved to have had some form of a mentor to teach me things like pointers, how to enumerate the column names in a table, how to read a data sheet, the difference between PNP and NPN, how to recognize a GLC, how to deal with the HV produced by a collapsing magnetic field, and a million other things. By the same token I would mentor somebody who wanted to learn those things if I thought they were worth the effort. The thing is that by the time some random stranger on the internet has proven that they’re worth the effort, they already know much of what I could teach them. In proving they are worth the effort they showed that they already know how to find the answers they don’t have, they learned how to search the forums, they read TFM. They also learned intollerance toward those who didn’t. In short, they became one of the “jerks”.

All that being said there are those for whom the Arduino is a first step, but I believe that for many more the Arduino is the ultimate destination.

Being an avr dev for thbe last 5 year, I remember strutting around the dept because I got printf to work with the stkt500. I remember spending weeks in datasheets setting up spi. When winavr came out people oohed and awed over a free compiler. I thought I was brilliant when I mounted an ftdi chip and flashed a bootloader.

Then arduino was born and am glad the world has seen the light.

I remember chastising people using a 100 minidragon for a weather sensor and scoffing. I think a 30 arduino is excellent. What I would love to see would be a kit that would allow you to build an arduino on a breadboard. I know how because of my long painful history. I’ve shown a few people and watched the aha.

Let’s be the aha!

Great article making very valid points.

I have an arduino I bought for prototyping but it’s the IDE that I hate. Having learnt everything I have so far (and by no means am I saying that’s a lot, for example I struggle massively with analogue electronics) from PICs when I first programmed my Mega I couldn’t believe how slow it was to program the board! That’s just one of many things that bug me about the IDE but if it is getting more people learning the basics, piqueing their interest then great! It should be welcomed, encouraged and nurtured by sites such as this. I admit I cringe when I see a final project with and arduino a rats nest of wires etc but if that is good enough for the job why make it more complicated than needed?

I remember the two things from my childhood that led me to electronics and hacking were tearing apart an old laptop my Dad had bought from work when they replaced them when it died and a Lego mindstorms kit that one of my friends had and we were able to make things work and program them like ‘real robots’ as it seemed to us. If the Arduino platform does this for kids, students or just people who are curious about hardware then how can we complain? And I’m sure, bar a small number of us, we have all posted things on forums that have replied to us in a very condescending manner when we are stuck with something new, even with a data sheet or api references etc things aren’t always crystal clear and not everyone thinks in the same way so what appears obvious to you may not be to them without a little help.

Arduino is great for beginners and I wouldn’t dream of actually taking it off the face of the planet. So many of their users, who are obviously more talented than the average person, build more complicated projects. It hurts to see that instead of actively seeking the right solutions, they’d rather find hacks to mold Arduino some questionable solution.

I want these people to break out of their Arduino habit. Plus, there’s so many Arduino products flooding the market, and not a lot of people bother with designing more advanced stuff for more advanced hobbyists within the same price range.

And I think Arduino has basically monopolized (obvious wrong choice of words) the beginner’s microcontroller market. It makes it for any other different platform to compete, which limits options for non-beginners, which is annoying.

Look at the Teensy, which is an excellent step up from the Arduino, but it still prefers to promote the use of Arduino code, as opposed to encouraging people to try using LUFA or Atmel’s USB stack. This is obviously because nobody would buy the thing if it looked too hard to use.

Netduino has nothing to do with Arduino… It looks like an Arduino but that is it. It goes to show you how much influence that Arduino has, and because of it, Netduino thought it was a good idea to make its shape and pinout the same as an Arduino, which means not all of the pins are available on the AT91SAM7 chip it has. And Netduino isn’t the only one guilty of this. Fez Domino and Maple Cortex boards also use the Arduino form factor, which turns me off them. I’m looking for a cheap ARM solution, and because of Arduino’s influence, it’s very hard.

I just got a FPGA board called the Papilio One. And the getting started guide is about how to use Arduino IDE with it to turn it into an Arduino… NothiI This is a FPGA, yet to a noob, still only as useful as an Arduino… Good thing I had plans for it before hand.

It’s like getting a PC port of a console game. My point is, I think Arduino has dumbed down the market for everybody else, which is annoying.

If you are going to suggest to me some other ARM solution, I’m already looking forward to getting a LPCExpresso, and a mbed, but I question the DRM on both…

Good article, though I like to think of it as “How the arduino won and how we can use that”. Myself being an old-old-school hacka the arduino was my intro to microprocessors. I know Ohms law, transistors, sines and cosines but still struggling a bit to understand this strange concept of telling a curcuit what to do (v;>*

@hekilledmywire
You are thinking of fprintf, but thanks for demonstrating what this article is all about.

Dont “real” programmers use itoa? JK I did cause Image Craft prntf took up half my chips memory.

The level of reading comprehension fail I’m seeing in some of the comments here is stunning.

Simply put, the message behind this post has little to do with Arduinos at all, it can be summarised as ‘don’t laugh at noobs, help them’.

If you can’t understand why then you’re not much of a hacker, hacking is very much linked to education.

Hi, my name is Andrew, and I’m a bad hacker.

By bad, I mean awful, not that other connotation. I had a phone conversation with somebody over how the motor tutorial works for my Arduino. It took the two of us an hour of poking, prodding, and asking the wiser Google to find answers to our question (specifically, the diode in parallel with the motor, and its purpose). But, we found it.

After I worked through the tutorials, I put the kit away and let it sit for months. Even though it was put away, it was not forgotten. I won’t say that my first foray into microcontrollers started a torrent of ideas. But, one or two thoughts bumped into other thoughts. How does the wall collapse? One stone at a time, for a time.

I don’t yet have a deluge of creative ideas. But, I read an article on hackaday every day or two that catches my interest, and I file the relevant parts away. I frequently see an Arduino used in the projects that interest me. I also frequently wonder why I would use my $40 dollar, pre-assembled Arduino in a long standing project to do something that seems relatively simple. I don’t know the limits of the hardware, but I think that an autonomous drone would be more intensive of a project than LED moodlighting (which I like. It was that first project I read about on an Arduino).

My biggest goal in using my Arduino at this point is to understand *WHY* the controller selection. And, more importantly, *HOW* do I make changes. My project right now is controlling a Roomba via the ROI. It only uses serial communication. I’m only using about 20% of the memory capacity of the Arduino. Even after I write all the functions I can dream into a library, I doubt I will have 50% of the capacity used. I want to know how I can swap out my solderless breadboard and prepackaged Arduino for a smaller, more appropriate solution.

But, that will take time. It will take research. Google will undoubtedly be involved. I may even post a question or two on a forum when I get absolutely stumped.

This is a lot of verbage for my main comment. Therefore, my Too-long-didn’t-read is this:

This article says exactly what I’ve been trying to find online. Help me, and help other new-blood hackers to understand why the Arduino isn’t the end-all solution to simple hacking. And once I know *WHY*, show me *HOW*.

You know what the arduino allowed me to realize? That an iPhone is nothing but a handful of sensors, a couple of i/o components, packaging. Externally it has a way of creating software and putting it on there.

You know what the arduino allowed me to realize? That *I* can create a remote sensor network to monitor a community center that I am responsible for.

You know what the arduino allowed me to realize? That if I need to install 10 sensors in the center, that is expensive if I use the arduino. And I asked how the eff is it that I can buy something that contains all of that functionality that I want so cheaply.

You know what I came to realize? That there is this community that understands how to create all of this cheaper and smaller then I can with an arduino.

Had I not found the arduino, I wouldn’t know the possibilities.

Don’t scare me, and those like me, away…. Encourage us and nuture us.

@Pippofranco

Arduino a business???

It looks like you don’t know Arduino nor business. It is open source, open hardware and you’re free to build one from scratch and download the bootloader for creating your own Arduino

If it’s business, Arduino creators are really bad businessmen lol

What! No mention of the MSP430?. A Launchpad is under $5 and it’s easy to use Spy-bi-wire for in system programming. We teach a course, and on day 1, folks are breadboarding their own ISP-able circuits. It only takes the Mcu, a cap and a resistor.

The smaller MCUs are $0.35 in large quantities.

Whare the Arduino shines is in the simplicity that the Wiring language brings. In fact, we have created a Wiring header that lets the MSP impersonate the syntax of many of the most used Wiring intrinsic functions. Using that library, we were able to port several Arduino libraries, such as the MAX7221 lib, the LiquidCrystal lib etc.

Where the Arduino fails miserably is in debugging, and that makes itvery moluch “not for me”, except for quick prototypes ..

I’d just like to add my 2 cents here: people dislike the Arduino out of principle. It is over-priced and over-powered for most projects. It laughs in the face of efficiency to use a big ass board to power a few LED’s or produce one PWM. Beginners should look at something like PICAXE, Pic’s loaded with a bootstrap that allows programming with just a cable (no programmer), programmed in basic, require no external oscillator, has tons of features, and cost only a few dollars.
Thats why people hate that ridiculous POS arduino. It’s like choosing a bicycle with training wheels that costs more than a motorcycle… just because it is more user-friendly.

@rob

if you want that, check out http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/usnoobie-kit-p-708.html?cPath=104_128

O ‘ell, the DIY/hardware hacker community would enter a P’n contest over would brand of an adjustable wrench is the proper tool for the job. Good luck with agreeing as to the way to teaching basic electronics, and/or skills of any sort.

I’m a high school student, and I’ve been using the Lego NXT and Vex robotics systems for years. The problem is, I’ve grown tired of being tied down to their products. Now, I could use 555′s and other components, but my skill with circuitry ends at linking an LED. I also could get a bare micro processor, but I don’t really have that many programing skills. In comes the Arduino. I quite like the instructions and user database, and using these I can build up my programing skills in order to write other languages.

wow – that’s a lot of comments.

I’m a graduate of an EE Tech program at a major university. I’ve been limited in my job opportunities to do embedded work, so I end up doing much of that for my hobbies.

The arduino is useful and is an ideal choice in some projects. I sometimes weigh the pro’s and cons of using one instead of the attiny24, which is a favorite of mine. One thing I like about the arduino is that there’s a lot less register programming which usually leads to quite a bit of extra debugging time and then there’s the fact that getting the project off the ground is much faster.

I don’t think you can ‘kill it off’. I do think there’s a lot of platform innovation going on as a result of arduino. We now have maple, the msp430, at90usb, propeller, pic, and many more other development platforms than we’ve ever had in the past. Too many to mention and cover adequately if you ask me.