As if it weren’t confusing enough in the Arduino world these days, now we’re going to have to deal with conflicting version numbers for the IDE. Yup, it’s been forked. Arduino LLC is offering a recently-updated version 1.6.3 at arduino.cc, but Arduino SRL has bumped up the version number to 1.7.0 at arduino.org. The conflict in naming and versioning has not gone unnoticed.
For those of you who’ve been living under a rock lately, the company that developed the Arduino (Arduino LLC) and the company that’s been manufacturing most of the hardware (Smart Projects SRL, now Arduino SRL) have stopped cooperating, filed a bunch of lawsuits, and now maintain separate websites.
According to this article (Google translate here) the versions don’t differ by much, and the 1.7.0 IDE may even be a step backwards versus 1.6.3. It certainly seems to us that the majority of the active developers in the Arduino project have been sticking with [Massimo Banzi] and the Arduino LLC camp. Of course, everything’s open source and there’s nothing stopping Arduino SRL from porting worthwhile IDE changes across to their version of the codebase.
It doesn’t take a clairvoyant to sense that this may be in response to the warning about non-licensed boards that was included in the “official” 1.6.1 release. Nor does it take a psychic to foresee confusing times ahead.
If you’re interested in doing some code-sleuthing, have a look at the two versions and leave a comment below letting us know of any substantive differences you unearth.
Thanks [Kai], and via [Golem.de].
. o O (Forking SRL…)
+1
+1
Someone already posted an issue on github that deals with this. Curious what the response will be.
https://github.com/arduino-org/Arduino/issues/2
Let’s everyone fork it as up the version each time, see how high we can get it lol.
+1
+2
+3
Those idiots are going to sue themselves out of existence as the world watches for a bit and then moves on to the next thing.
Those idiots will sue themselves out of existence yet the cheap boards and peripherals will continue to pour out of china and power simple projects for quite a while as learners learn. While hardly a magic balance point, the combination of low cost, simple (if imperfect) IDE and broad user base brings to mind many devices that still field a fanbase many decades on. If the money and/or enthusiasm is there, development will continue though it might be closer to Adafruit, Seeedstudio or even a Mozilla model.
Yep, pretty much what I said but worded differently.
Certainly the ecosystem created by Arduino will live on, but the idiots at Arduino proper are in the process of cooking their golden goose, so that the lawyers can eat it. Absolute stupidity.
It is time to go teensy!
Teensy’s boot loader is locked up tight! Not good.
Same problem here…
chipKIT with UECIDE?
All this infighting is just disheartening :(
Personally Arduino has always been about the software not the hardware. At least I have never found the hardware to be anything remarkable. It was the ease of use that the Software/bootloader provided that really opened doors for people at least IMHO.
I was sorta hoping beyond hope that since I hadn’t heard much about it in the last week or so that it might be getting better but it just sounds like it is getting that much worse and with no sings of stopping.
Meh. I’m not quite so bothered by it. Although this is rather annoying, I’m not the least bit disheartened by it. I’m just going to stick with Arduino LCC who I define as the REAL Arduino, and those monopolizing sh*ts at arduino SRL can die in a hole.
I’m confident that LLC will come out on top (those licencing fees have got to be pretty damning) and even if they don’t, I’m totally OK with Arduino LLC re-branding themselves. (why not, considering all the branching out with other companies they’ve been up to? They could make like the Pi and call themselves the BLUberry or something…) They do amazing work and I’ll follow them whatever they call it.
It’s not the name that’s important, It’s the mission.
For me it’s all about the hardware. I started using Arduinos when the Chinese started selling compatible hardware at unbeatable prices. And even then I mostly used AVRgcc instead of the Arduino IDE. Especially for USB I use LUFA, because it is much better than anything the Arduino offers.
+1. I only use “Arduino” because of what Thinkerer said: ” the combination of low cost, simple (if imperfect) IDE and broad user base”. What I do at my Day Job, I can use most any processor. Now I chose something Arduino compatable and put it on a custom PCB with my hardware around it. This is so that I can just write the shell of the code (with hardware drivers) as mostly an example, and let the ‘Scientists’ tweak the code anyway they want…. The fact that they don’t need any special programming hardware and can use a Windows, Apple, or Linux computer for writing software is also a plus.
I guess that reveals their opinion of the community: stupid enough to flock to Arduno SRL over a number change.
I’m waiting for arduino-2015.04 or somethoing even more amazing!
…a giant leap for mankind!
Kindergarten
I can see this whole thing turning into a massive problem that will result in the abandoning of the arduino ecosystem just because of the confusion that will no doubt result.
I think at this point the best bet would be to fork the IDE and bootloader, come up with a new open hardware design that is compatible with the old platform. Remove the Arduino name then rally the community behind it and leave the whinging and infighting behind while both parties sue each other into oblivion.
can we finally fix those headers?
Why when it has been shown the headers they aren’t an insurmountable problem? There is nothing to fix at this stage of the game. Developing, manufacturing a board that can’t make use of existing accessories that are now widely available or owned by Arduino users is bad business.
because it looks like there’s about to be a new beginning and why not fix this little issue along the way. if it’s not insurmountable to fit these weird headers to standard ones then it should also be a non insurmountable problem to fit weird headers onto the standard ones.
I would definitely fix that header.
easy fix. why not fix the header and make a shield that can connect to the current arduino header, so you can continue to use older shields.
Simply make one of the headers a 2-row one. Both old and new shields will fit!
The headers that stop a newb that can’t distinguish a resistor from the microcontroller from plugging the board in the wrong way around and cooking boards?
No, the headers that stop us all from plugging the development board* into a breadboard. Also those headers that require one who is making their own shield to use a custom PCB rather than a super common, dirt-cheap piece of veroboard.
* – That’s what an “Arduino” is, the Atmega chip is the microcontroler
Once I tried to make an adpter to a single shrouted header with Perfboard…
I was swearing the whole day and finaly soldered wires directly to the pads and put the header on the board with superglue… since the board rings in for $5 it was no problem and it even survived about 2 years of frequent using with this patch ^^
We could even get the Chinese sellers involved. Start selling $5 MEGAs with free shipping? Or improve on the design and come up with something better? I get *why* they are infighting, but I still think it’s stupid.
the good news is i dont have to feel bad about using cheap chinese knockoffs.
I never felt bad, $2.57 + free shipping for a Breadboard friendly mini knockoff.That’s only a little more than the chip itself. The only thing original about Arduino’s design was the non standard pin headers. Take those out of the picture and it’s just a dev board based on AVR’s reference design.
I think that’s a little bit of an overreaction IMHO.
While I think this will confuse people to NO end for a while, but beginners will eventually find their footing on one side or the other and everyone else will figure it out. Once things get straightened out, new people will flock to arduino LCC (whatever it’s called).
The only thing could probably get lost here to SRL is the reputation Arduino has, as seen by those unaware of the issue (mostly beginners, bless em’). I’m certain that’ll get rebuilt soon enough under a new name, due to both the huge Arduino community who can find their way to the new name, as well as the products that these guys put out which are amazing for beginners.
screw compatibility.
Fix the header spacing instead!!!!!
That is one of the reasons I have liked the ProMini and Teensy boards. No pin spacing issues, breadboard friendly.
I’m currently in love with the Huzza and Feather Huzza….. The ESP8266 is great
Sounds like a good time for someone else to step in and steal the wind out of both of their sails.
I would love to see Teensy become the new cool kid, yes please?
The Teensy Biggsy
Open Source Teensy QUAD?
i have no idea why anyone would go back to arduino once they’ve tried a teensy. support forums are great, and the libraries are super fun to use. fantastic for when i just want to play around and learn some new stuff.
Many they need something that is open source, or easily supports shields?
Cost.
Simple as that, teensy LC is £10, Arduino nano £2.50 and is often (not always) capable of doing what is needed for small projects.
I like “Arduino” because I prefer to buy the raw chips rather than a whole module and I use through-hole components.
O.K…. could you summarize what the difference between a ‘teensy’ and Arduino is? I always assumed that a ‘Teensy’ was just an Arduino shrunken down…
Teensy uses a different processor architecture but remains fairly compatible
While I love the Teensy, it’s not open source. I think that if we do have an alternative, it should be open source.
Maybe if Teensy was opensource, argh.
This isn’t the fork we care about (could be? probably not)
I think a more in sync group or person needs to fork the software into something more modern. Arduino has lacked innovation since their original release and doesn’t really respond to community feedback.
The IDE needs to be more modern. As an IDE it is horrible! Any programmer that tries to use the Arduino IDE can immediately start listing all the problems with usability. Usually Arduino claims certain features are left out to make it appleal to the non-programmer. This is BS. library repos, code completion, auto indentation/completion, etc, should be there. They tend to blame this on the IDE they fork from, but it’s time to move on.
The hardware is just lacking. Not to mention Arduino Zero was (still is?) vaporware for over a year. Look at all the 3rd party Arduino renditions and you will see what Arduino missed. These 3rd party boards are designed and ready for distribution within days, not years. They work better (assuming they don’t use cheap parts) and have more functionality. Anyone can design one that is better than the original Arduino. Which emphasizes the fact that software is the more important and harder part.
Arduino is great because it made a community, however they are shit because they stopped caring about the the software, hardware and original intentions. It seems like at least some of them got greedy and are just in it for the money. What those greedy ones don’t realize is that no one cares about them. The community will take it over, move on and make it better. There should have been a lot more advancements by now, but Arduino kept people in the dark and screwed themselves over.
Arduino may have kicked off the IOT or new embedded micro rush (Parallax could have done it, but they were ahead of themselves) however Arduino has stopped innovating, the brand is dead. The community is still there and they will continue to innovate, change and move forward.
mbed is the better approach. Many people/companies have come before and after mbed with the same concept. One of them will become supreme, replace Arduino and last longer before they are replaced by a better approach. At the same time, hardware [DEV BOARDS] will become more and more available through the actual OEMs of the processors. Libraries will continue to converge while independent companies will release more specific dev boards. No reason for anyone to buy a dev board, GPS shield, 9-Axis shield, batter shield, etc; when there is a common need for those combos and they can cost the same as a single dev board.
Sounds like a good description of Arduino SRL :D
While I agree that the Arduino IDE is a bit too limited for advanced programming, it does load almost instantly on even a 10 year old PC. Contrast that to MPLAB X that takes over 10 seconds on a high end PC. Guess which would be easier to run on a tablet…
@Mike I’d guess Neither? because the interface in both are not tablet friendly.
Writting code is not tablet friendly, so no IDE can be.
For things like this I like “tablet” software that does not necessarily have a tablet friendly interface. I don’t care how great a touch interface you make… it will suck to do development via touch. Half your screen taken up by the keyboard.. swipe gestures… No Thanks!
But.. I have no problem using a bluetooth keyboard/mouse on my tablet. It means I don’t have to buy and maintain a laptop. Is that exra stuff to carry? Sure but only when I am going somewhere I want to do development. Otherwise I can leave the keyboard/mouse at home. If for some reason I find myself developing when I didn’t expect it.. that’s ok. That is the exception to the rule. I will muddle through with the unfriendly touch interface. It’s better than nothing!
Of course.. iOS users are SOL since Apple removed the mouse support when converting OSX into iOS. But that’s what you get for buying Apple products. Suckers!!
You can get keyboards for tablets nowadays.
I suspect that’s the point that many ‘advanced’ users forget. The Arduino project was about getting newcomers on the microcontroller leaning curve as fast and as easy as possible. You don’t have the problem of configuring fuses, getting the clock multiplier right, struggling to configure the a USB stack so that you can send debug information out to a terminal. You don’t even have to worry to much about the C/C++ language nuances or whether your computer had the right OS to run it on. All of which is additional baggage that you used to have to drag up a difficult learning curve. Even offset headers meant that you can’t plug a shield in the wrong way round (lucky mistake?).
You have to look at it in the same context as Processing you’re not going to write then next mobile phone OS with it, it was never intended to do so. Just as the Arduino was never meant to host multiply development boards.
The Arduino Zero seems to be available:
http://physicalcomputing.at/Arduino-Zero-Pro
But I think it is from Arduino-SRL
The thing which put me off Arduino was the IDE. I’d been spoilt by long term use of Visual Studio, love Microsoft of not I have to admit the IDE is a good product. I started using Visual Micro with Visual Studio Community Edition to program the Teensy and I’ve not looked back.
As for startup times, it does not really bother me too much. I start the IDE once or twice a day and leave it running so it does not matter too much if it takes 2 seconds or 2 minutes to start, it can happen whilst I’m making a coffee.
You can develop for arduino in VS.
I agree, it’s a peerless IDE.
The IDE issue are easily solved with http://eclipse.baeyens.it/ I think everyone shall give it shot.
The issue with the IDE is easy, just use http://eclipse.baeyens.it/
Will give that a try, thanks!
Why Arduino jumped into the 3D printer business so late in the game I’ll never know…
LLC ..Limited Liability Company from what i have recently learned is legalized robbery of a name with no responsibilty of the original name holder actions. i would suggest avoiding the LLC company altogether
That isn’t what a LLC is. I would suggest you avoid offering advice on a topic you are unfamiliar with.
I f I were a cynic, I might guess the poster of the original comment is a shill for the SRL…. Oh, wait,I am a cynic…
if it walks like a goose, and honks like a goose…
You got this backwards. Arduino LLC, at http://www.arduino.cc, is the real Arduino. Smart Projects is the manufacturer that’s physically made the boards. They’re the ones who recently renamed themselves and launched a brand new http://www.arduino.org website.
By looking at the commit logs on the respective github repositories, you can easily see who’s really developing Arduino and who’s copying the other. About a week after Arduino LLC released version 1.6.1, Smart Projects copied it to their github repository. They still have a branch named “ide-org-1.6.1.x”. If you look at the public history, you can clearly see Smart Projects (aka dot org) spent several days importing the Zero code (which they also copied from a private beta of Arduino LLC) and making only superficial changes. Meanwhile, Arduino LLC released a major new features and merged pull requests from the community, including some I submitted. The released version 1.6.2 and days later 1.6.3. In response, Smart Projects simply renamed 1.6.1.1 to 1.7.0, without anything new. All of this is publicly viewable github commit history on their respective repositories.
I have a new plot twist Smart Projects srl (now Arduino srl) doesn’actually build the poard. As far I know prepared the PCB layers and designed the hardware and was founded in 2004 to design and market the arduino boards.
The actual maker is mainly http://www.systemelettronica.it/ for the etching, soldering and QA checking of the board.
I think that the situation is really messy and i fear that the collateral damages of this situation will be the workers of the actual PCB factory. If everybody swiches to the chinese copies or Arduino LLC decised to make the PCB elsewhere, they will lose the work.
The same could be said for workers at any company. If the business loses a major customer or client and fails to make for the loss with other sales, the total amount of workforce needed will decline. Workers will get laid off. This is hardly a situation unique to manufacturing of Arduino boards!
If anything, this is all the more reason why decision makers should strive to build solid business relationships based on delivering real value. Ethical, value-based business leads to stable long-term jobs for workers. Greedy, unethical executives playing high-risk games that ultimately result in workers losing their jobs is also a situation hardly unique to the production line workers who’ve previously built the official Arduino boards. It sucks for the workers, but no company can justify cheating others can escape consequences only because their workforce would be reduced if they couldn’t continue doing so.
SRL is a type of llc. If you mean the llc stole the name, you have not followed the story that closely.. It appears 1 partner of 5 has stolen the name, and with foresight that seems to imply serious malice.
I think the big complication is that no-one has stolen the name. They were both acquired legitimately, but then the two organizations have grown apart.
It’d be much easier to fight if the name was actually acquired in bad faith.
It’s all a plot by TI to drive everyone to using Energia ;-)
What would really be funny (and good for all) would be if someone generalized Energia to provide an Arduino style interface for multiple vendor boards. I’m not enamored of the interface myself, but I can see why it’s popular.
But if nothing else, the Arduino earned a significant place in history by starting the dev board wars. That’s pretty important.
Matters little when everyone using a shield or a breakout from Sparkfun or Adafruit is advised to use 1.0.6 in all sample code, tutorials, etc. The Arduino community was already horrible at version control before this happened.
It was never envisaged to go beyond the original board.
The original concept was that you cut your teeth with an Arduino, then take the next step and choose a chip and toolchain that suited your project while continuing to learn about microcontroller programming.
As with the Raspberry Pi, it’s an educational tool that is used by developers, makers and hackers.
Regarding this notion:
*”Of course, everything’s open source and there’s nothing stopping Arduino SRL from porting worthwhile IDE changes across to their version of the codebase.”*
Yes, in theory this is true. But in practice, things aren’t so simple, relative to the finite and relatively appetite Smart Projects has so far shown for software development (essentially only copying from Arduino and renaming things).
Let me illustrate with a special example, pull request #2850, which I contributed a days ago and was merged and became part of Arduino 1.6.3. This new feature tries to help users with an all-too-common problem, where they installed a library into their sketchbook’s libraries folder, usually a long time ago. Then something changes in other code, making it incompatible. Usually a compatible copy of the library exists elsewhere, but Arduino allows the sketchbook libraries folder controlled by the user to override all other locations, which makes it easy for user to customize libraries. But when a long-working library later breaks, the result is incomprehensible error messages about code deep within the libraries.
My contribution last week detects when 2 libraries use the same name and could have been included into the build process due to the same #include line. It simple prints a message. You can see details and screenshots here:
https://github.com/arduino/Arduino/pull/2850
In theory, Smart Projects could just import this code. But in practice, doing so would be rather complex, unless they also choose to import the rest of 1.6.2. Obviously Smart Projects will NOT wish to import the new dynamic library and board manager code, which gets its stuff from servers controlled by Arduino LLC. While all the client side code is open source, they haven’t released the server side code which manages the authoritative lists of boards and libraries.
Arduino 1.6.2 added quite a lot of new code to manage libraries. Much of it is similar to older code, but more than just “refactored”. For example, the complete list of all libraries is now in a new Java class called LibrariesIndex. My duplicate library detection adds a patch to the LibrariesIndex class, to keep a second list that doesn’t have certain types of conflicts automatically removed. Smart Projects would have to bring in portions of the new library manager to get the LibrariesIndex class, or they’d have to reimplement my changes back into the old code that scanned library directories.
My contribution also changes the populateImportToLibraryTable() function in BaseNoGui. Before 1.6.3, it build a table using a Java HashMap object, mapping header file names to the libraries they are supposed to include. The header file is a Java String object. But what it maps to changed. Prior to Arduino 1.6.2, and in Smart Project’s 1.7.0, the Map object target was a “Library” class. Arduino 1.6.3 changed this class to “UserLibrary”, which is a base class. They built more features on top, using object inheritance. So in 1.6.2, the Map is to a UserLibrary object, which is a Java class not present in 1.6.1 (and Smart Projects 1.7.0).
To give Arduino the ability to report duplicates, I changed the Map target from UserLibrary to LibraryList, which is yet another new Java class which isn’t present in the older code bases. But the Arduino devs clearly meant for this new class to do this sort of thing, so I made good use of it, rather than building my own class or use of Java ArrayList or normal arrays. Of course, my code uses those new classes and the Java features they inherit. Likewise, in Compiler.java, I used those again, to keep a record of which duplicates (if any) were referenced while build the include paths for the compiler, so I can later report it after an error (where the user might actually see the message).
Admitted, this little contribution is only about 120 lines. But it makes good use of powerful new Java classes added by 1.6.2, for managing libraries, which are already being used quite pervasively already in many places.
Soon, I’m going to revisit library dependency detection pull request #2792 https://github.com/arduino/Arduino/pull/2792
I wrote this a few weeks ago, before many of these new classes became part of the public code. I’m also going to adapt it to analyzing the sketch, as you can see discussed on the lengthy conversation on that pull request. This is a pretty substantial change, so it might be a few versions until it becomes part of Arduino. There’s also some other work using different tools, so it’ll take a while to work out which way will eventually become Arduino’s official code. But I’m confident everyone will agree the “gcc -M” approach is superior.
Of course, I’m going to build on top of all the new, improved infrastructure 1.6.2 added. Merging this back into the old 1.6.1 code (or Smart Project 1.7.0) would require quite a lot of work, because it has all the old data structures and lacks these new, more powerful classes for managing libraries, which are tightly integrated with the new dynamic install features that Smart Projects can’t easily copy without the missing server-side components.
Eventually, once Arduino finally has really good automatic library dependency detection, which is truly aware of conditional compilation, I expect some of the more sophisticated libraries will make very good use of it. I know this will come about, because I’ve already exchanged several messages with authors of some of those libraries, who really want sketch preprocessing and library dependency analysis to work with conditional compilation. When they start to make good use of those features, their libraries will require the newer versions.
This is just one tiny feature. An incredible amount of progress is going to be coming to the Arduino software over the next year. I’m doing more than I have before, and I believe we’re going to see the pace accelerate both within Arduino and from external contributors like me.
In theory, it’s all open source. In theory, Smart Projects could just port all this code, separating and/or recreating the library management classes without Arduino LLC’s dynamic update system. But in practice, that will require quite a lot of work, from a group that so far has show no ability to do much more than simply copy code and make superficial changes.
I do like the idea of detecting multiple libraries and giving better error messages — my usual solution has been to just install to a new directory and reimport all the libraries I needed. It would also make changing platforms much easier — for now, I have different directories for different hardware.
How will the dynamic library and board management code work when there is not a connection to the server-side scripting? Is there a reasonable failure mode that still works?
You ask some good questions, and cover things I think we all wonder about.
And I ‘m (also) not too enthusiastic about an online callback thing to handle the discussed issues. The dependency on a connection and the handing off of control basically seems a bit counterproductive.
Should I make a demo server for that then? :-P
So they have 2 choices, they either rename each IDE to separate them, or the whole arduino thing will die a slow death.
(Patiently waiting for someone to buy the domain ‘arduino.wtf’ and post a de-forked, best-of version.)
Didn’t arduino.org “fork” a while back? After all, the big difference was that they had the “Zero Pro”, and their initial tree was numbered “1.5.8.2” or something. Now we just have leapfrogging version numbers, or something…
Windows jump from 8 to 10 comes to mind.
[yawn] Any news on Radio Shack lately? so I can read bench racing a or board lawyering on that for a change of pace. ;)
Incoherent. -1.
Did someone say Arduino IDE for ESP8266?
Does it support the Adafruit CC3000 WiFi Shield? ;-)
Already exists, as of a week ago — http://hackaday.com/2015/03/28/arduino-ide-support-for-the-esp8266/ :)
Massimo Banzi (arduino.cc) has done lots for the open hardware movement. He has built the community around the Arduino and spread the ideas. Many people have joined this community and helped others for free. They have replied to questions in the forums and built an invaluable educational resource. Massimo is committed to this community.
Gianluca Martino (the new arduino srl) wants to cash in onto this community which he has not built and to which he has so far not shown any commitment to.
For reference the Google hits of today:
Massimo Banzi Arduino – 1.190.000 results
Gianluca Martino Arduino – 49.900 results
Thus Gianluca has not 5% of the Google hits that Massimo has and that is quite telling.
If Gianluca wants to cash in on a community then he has to get his butt up and work to create it in the first place. The fact that people have bought the totally overpriced boards from his factory has made him blind for the community.
I have stopped recommending buying Arduino boards and instead I recommend now to get cheap boards from China. And for sure in the future I wont touch anything from Gianluca’s Arduino SRL. IMHO he is shooting himself in his foot: people bought his $30 Arduino instead of the $3 China board in order to support the cause of open hardware.
All people I spoke to who are involved in various open source / open hardware projects are siding with Massimo. Give it two years and Gianluca will have lost all his business.
If you want to see Massimo, here is his TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/massimo_banzi_how_arduino_is_open_sourcing_imagination
Unfortunately Martino’s group control the distribution of “arduino” boards. Adafruit, Mouser, Digikey, RS, all the distributors are selling arduino.org boards, none of them seem to care about the dispute. All the profits go to Arduino.org. 99% of users won’t even know there is a dispute.
Using the Arduino IDE to fight arduino.org is just going to screw things up further, IME it already has. I now can’t use the latest IDE at work with Arduino Due :( Open source IDE with closed server is NOT Open source.
The blame for the problem lies squarely with Musto and Martino, but sorry, M. Banzi and co are really not handling it well.
Those Arduino SRL blokes are willing to kill whole Arduino community just for their profit. I will make sure I never buy one of their boards again. I’m even willing to donate few bucks to Arduino LLC for every chinese board I buy, just to support those guys who made the whole Arduino story possible.
I don’t know, some might say that the incredibly slow development of the IDE is also a way to kill the community. Not to mention that the IDE is pretty bad. There are editors that could’ve been used as a base for the IDE or the IDE could’ve been a plugin to some editor instead of just being a sub par notepad with programming command.
SRL are being pretty a-holish though. They really need to rename the fork to clearly show that it is not the original IDE and the version should start from 1.0, or if they actually add something significant, from 2.0 but the current BS sucks.
Totally agreed!
i know that a lot of people stick up for the Arduino IDE saying that it is as it is because it’s simple and it’s simple for beginners. I get that idea but I don’t think keeping it simple really describes the Arduino IDE’s suckage.
First.. how about long-standing bugs? I’ve been getting this bug where the first time I click on a menu it doesn’t display right. Half the entries are trying to occupy the same space. I would assume this is something unique to my setup but I have seen it happen on several computers with multiple versions of both Windows and Linux and different java environments.
Why no keyboard shortcuts? Yah, I know that full keyboard control like Emacs would be outside the scope of a beginner environment. There are certain keys that one should expect to work in ANY program though. How about Alt-F to get to the file menu? Ctrl-S to save? Ctrl-F or F3 to search? I can’t even count the times I have ended up
Woops, hit it too soon.
I can’t even count the times I have ended up writing an F and/or an S into random positions in code because of muscle memory and trying to save my work.
LOL, that one gets me every time. And seriously, how can someone go to all the trouble of writing a serial monitor and not even add a simple, basic check for when the thing’s been disconnected to prevent a java exception dumping the stack to the main editor output window? I’ve known 1st-semester comp-sci students with more attention to detail.
I used to feel that buying “real” arduino branded boards supported the arduino.cc website and those who support that infrastructure. Now that is no longer the case, Why would I buy an *arduino” branded board when countless other options exist and I’m not supporting the “team” by doing so? With other options available, as always… The solution is clear. We can support with our wallets. (A new “donate” option exists.) Support those worthy of being “supported”, let those who are unworthy lose support and die.
I used to feel a little bad about not buying “real” Arduino boards and supporting the project. But… when I can get an Atmega chip for less than a dollar and the board costs how much? It never made any sense.
Who took down http://arduino.cc/ ? It gives 504 response
They’re up now from here.
Steel cage death match. 2 man enter. One man leave.
They’re just a bunch of spoiled children, aren’t they?
With every passing day there’s another nail in the coffin of Arduino and another reason to never use them again.
They’re just a bunch of idiotic spoiled brats!
With every passing day there’s another nail in the coffin of Arduino, and another reason to never use them ever again.
With so many alternatives now, why would you bother?
If this is such an issue why doesn’t LLC change the code license of any future versions to prevent SRL from using it?
People have criticized me for getting cheap chinese clones rather than ‘real’ arduino’s that would support the developer. My ‘defence’ was always: ‘it is open hardware, this is what the developers intended’. Now I can add: ‘You are not supporting development, you are paying for the lawyers’
As a software engineer I am really thankful for what Arduino has done to bring hardware programming to the masses.
As an entrepreneur, this a fantastic case study: Concentrate on the user above all else.
Here are the top 5 mistakes that were made:
1) Arduino IDE: Yes as everyone mentioned this was one of the worst IDE’s to ever exist. They could have iterated on this and fixed a lot of problems. Instead the team focused their technology resources on bringing the DUE, with it’s completely different architecture to the IDE and ended up forking the IDE for two years.
2) The DUE was hugely expensive ~$65? Yes it was blazing fast and had a fast processor, but does the average learner needs 50+ pins? No. You would think that the Arduino team would try and figure out how to bring a low cost alternative to market.
3) The team kept on flirting with intel and bolting on a linux distro ontop of the Arduino. Again, this raises costs and introduces complexity, which is at against the thesis of what made the system so popular to begin with – an affordable platform that any can program.
4) Not being able to read the trends of the times. Adafruit just walked in and created their own platforms – for $6. Adafruit got it right, people want the cheaper, less feature rich board. Teensy did the same thing with their own arm platform and hacked IDE – their platform is the best if you want to drive thousands of WS2812 LED’s. Also, Seeeduino and a handful of chinese competitors. I’ve created my own clone. It’s easy and everything is available. Arduino could have done the same thing with the Atmel tiny85 (which Adafruit used) but they didn’t. They sat around and watch the customer leave and whined about it rather than make necessary changes to prevent the outflux.
5) A now the reason for the split – the Gianluca was paying a royalty for each Arduino and not seeing the platform evolve. No meaningful hardware evolution for the majority of the users, no meaningful software evolution. Everyone else is taking the money by creating clones. Meaningful innovation is happening external to Arduino. Yeah, the jungle sucks but it is what it is. If you don’t adapt then you get buried after enough time. I don’t know what happened behind closed doors, but I’m sure Gianluca tried to reduce the royalty payment to stay alive and the founder team wouldn’t budge because of stubbornness and a refusal to see the reality of what was happening.
Here’s how the Arduino could have been a real dominate force:
1) After the Leonardo, the team should have seen that wearable computing was on the horizon – and made at least one Attiny85 variant
2) Concentrated on improving the ide experience. There were so many bugs in this IDE. For example, if a library file include didn’t exist in the right place – no error message just “symbol not found” either in the compiler or linker. Figuring out what this actually meant required expert level c++ toolchain experience to determine what was going wrong in a reasonable. A beginner is likely to give up and do something else. This was an easy to fix bug which required a compiler flag to be set. But it wasn’t – for two years.
3) Lower the price over time. The arduino platform runs on commodity parts. There are 20+ tutorial showing how to make your own clone.
Hopefully the founders can resolve their differences and new leadership can steer the company in the right direction.
Hi friends,
i am sam from delhi I bought this thing from Robomart. Before I bought this unit, I had never used an independent micro-controller. In robotics there is a lot of application of microcontroller. I needed a self contained unit for a project and found a lot of recommendations for the Arduino. I’m glad I chose it. Despite my lack of experience with micro-controllers, setup and initial configuration were easy. The web site contains a lot of information and tutorials and made it easy to learn to use the tool to run servos and get input from a variety of sensors. Today I have made different robots based on Aurdino all gave me better performance. So my recommendation is to buy Aurdino from Robomart. I have searched in various sites to purchased it
Thank you,
i want know if your controlelr can support SK6812 MINI 3535 LED
http://www.szledcolor.com/download/SK6812%203535%20MINI.pdf