ST and TI do the same thing with their boards too and it's not a bad strategy.
I just wanted that someone mentioned these Arduino-likes in the comments. I suspect many of you have come across them though.
But high chance they will look it up on Amazon/Ebay/whatever e-store and buy a clone without knowing.
You ask for an Arduino, and the follow up question is: 'genuine or generic?'.
I don't think the Arduino trademark is that valuable, it's already well underway genericization.
Arduino is open sourced in hard and software which allows this cheap cloning to exist. It also helps a lot with software and docs, which makes it cheaper for them.
Hah! I like to underestimate scope as well, but this is really something else. Definitely a competent engineer could make something like this. But a couple of months maybe. You won't even read the documentation for the chip in a day.
Also a million dev kits is unrealistic for vast majority of companies 5-20k is more the number I hard.
So can the Pi Pico, the Milk-V Duo (one 64 bit Linux core, one 64 bit microcontroller core), and many others.
The Arduino SDK is the simplest to use, sure, but the Pico framework (I don't have experience with the Espressif one) is extremely good, and the Pico's PIO is a godsend. I used it to implement 3 wire SPI (data bidirectional on the same wire) at almost 'real-time', which is to say, at half the speed of the hardware SPI controller (half the speed because the interface clock is put up one cycle and down the next; this also gives enough time for data shuffling).
Why does the Arduino SDK necessitate a huge markup on Arduino boards, when $0 of every computer I buy to run Linux on goes to GCC?
Generics may have the same active ingredient but (vastly) different pharmacokinetics - i.e. different absorption rates/retention in the body. For basic stuff such as painkillers that's one thing, but for more sensitive medication such as insulin, antidepressants or anything related to the cardiovascular system (heart rate, blood pressure and clotting) one has to be very careful when switching between brands.
But you still used the Arduino SDK with the bluepill, so clearly Arduino had a point. Unless you were one of the few masochist who dealt with the STM32 toolchain directly for fun?
The Pi Pico is such a breath of fresh air in that regard. Finally a decent-enough toolchain for a decent-enough performing ARM MCU!
Yep, it's Qualcomm alright.
Exactly. For the people who did not follow a structured educational program on embedded programming, starting with an SMT microcontroller was very hard.
Arduino made this fun and easy with their language & IDE combo. Typing some code and seeing the lights on the board reacting is a hell of a drug.
Once you mastered the IDE, you could either program other microcontrollers in the same IDE, or at some point you hit the limits and started digging into the vendor-specific toolchains.
If I started again today, I would again start with an Arduino.
Arduino really isn't great with naming, a Uno can be an AVR or ARM based board, now either 3V3 or 5V based and also a SBC rather than just a MCU.
Haven't seen any examples of bottom 'high speed' shields yet, though. They said there would be some made available.
The more I look at it, the more it sounds like a platform designed by M&A team
It is kinda disappointing but I can see why Qualcomm wants to use the brand.
More specifically, I can see it trying to compete with things like those funny Chinese boards built around SoCs like SG2000. Those embed a Linux capable core, a small NPU, a camera interface with ISP and video codecs, and a secondary RTOS core for realtime control. Basically built for drones and simple robots. The caveat of those boards being: the documentations sucks, the SDK is wack, you get 3 example scripts and are entirely on your own outside that.
Qualcomm could be trying to branch into drones/robotics/etc with this move.
The concern I have with the $44 Q is it has 2GB of RAM and 16GB eMMC, and a processor that's probably between a Pi 3 and Pi 4 in terms of speed and IO (though 4nm, so probably much more efficient).
For $45 I can buy a Pi 5 with it's own built-in GPIO, PCIe, and a much faster SoC, though it lacks a few niceties like the Q form factor, the more efficient SoC, a realtime microcontroller, and a USB-C port with display out capabilities (I really wish Pi had that...).
But what you think of as an old core design is in fact a mature, well-understood, well-tested, widely-supported, cost-effective core design. It also has some features such as in-order execution which none of the newer chips have. From an engineering perspective, it still can make a lot of sense in the right applications today.
This _is_ possible with Linux, but not at all trivial and likely impossible with general-purpose distros.
Interrupt handling and (on RP2040) dedicated multicore code is also nice.
I assume initramfs-only with special purpose pid0 and only the modules needed statically compiled into the kernel?
What else would it take?
Bootloaders need to initialize most of the devices and load the kernel image. Then they hand the control over to Linux which proceeds to re-init these devices again.
The userspace matters, but on recent computers it doesn't matter that much. You can get to sub-40ms with https://katacontainers.io/ That's a project that uses full VMs to run Docker images boot instead of kernel namespacing.
They're trying to bring Arduino back from the dead.
I think their slides say Debian, but didn't mention what binary blobs one needs to have for enabling various functionality the SoC provides / how much their kernel deviates from mainline kernel ...
Edit: I see you already have a video out about the acquisition that looks a lot like an ad as well...
It seems like Arduino will keep their brand, maintain their existing product lines, and continue building devices using other vendor's chips (besides Qualcomm), etc... but as with all acquisitions—I wonder how long that state of affairs will last.
Alternatives like the Pi RP2040/2350 and Espressif's vast selection of boards can fill the gaps, but Arduino was what got me and many people I know into microcontrollers, so I have a special fondness for them!
[1] https://www.arduino.cc/product-uno-q