Doesn’t this only really affect actual Arduino brand products. There’s tons of just-as-good cheap knockoffs available. See Elegoo kits easily found on Amazon for example. The IDE is open source with the AGPL license.

Can’t we just cut Qualcomm out of the supply chain and keep going as normal without too much disruption? Doesn’t even feel like a hard fork is needed. Just don’t buy Qualcomm’s crap.

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F7F7F7 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Sounds great in theory. But this would put a serious dent in the Arduino opensource community and fragment support.

Arduino is the unifying umbrella that keeps everything together. With that gone the platform will surely lose.

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andoando 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Esp32 is just as big if not bigger.

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bityard 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

ESPs are great, but their hobbyist ecosystem ultimately relies on the goodwill of a Chinese company that could just as easily decide they want to go the way of Qualcomm, or worse.

	▲	mort96 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Any company can "go the way of Qualcomm", as you call it. To my knowledge, there's no indication that there's any more danger of them going that way relative to, say, TI or ST? Don't get me wrong, the fall of Arduino is a real loss. Espressif is a company in the business of making money, while Arduino's mission was to build a robust tinkerer ecosystem. Absent an acquisition, it's probably fair to say that Arduino would be less likely than Espressif, ST or TI to do bullshit like this.

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chpatrick 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And a dev board only costs a couple of dollars on AliExpress.

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mort96 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Espressif has a pretty good Arduino compatibility layer for the ESP32 series. So you can follow Arduino tutorials and almost everything will "just work". This what I use for quick and dirty projects.

For more "serious" things, you have the ESP-IDF, which is a pretty good C-style interface to all sorts of hardware features. Less newbie friendly than the Arduino interface, but gives you more control. And it can be used in combination with the Arduino interface.

And then, as the cherry on top, you have their official Rust HAL for the ESP chips, implementing the standard Rust embedded-hal interfaces so it should "just work" with the growing Rust embedded ecosystem.

It's honestly impressive. The only thing that has kept Arduino competitive is their brand, good reputation, and focus on the education and tinkerer space. I frankly don't understand what value Qualcomm sees in Arduino if they're just gonna throw away that reputation and education friendliness.

	▲	MegaDeKay 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		ESP32 is fantastic. I just ordered four more today for various projects. Barely cracked $20 CAD and free shipping from Ali.

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aaronblohowiak 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I wish there was a esp32 board with optically isolated 24v level shifters and screw terminals…

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general1465 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

You can search through AliExpress, but I am afraid that your request is so specific that you will need to design something yourself.

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inamberclad 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Thanks to the open source nature of the Arduino ecosystem, you can make it so!

	▲	aaronblohowiak 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Ars longa, vita brevis

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wmf 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The goal is probably to prevent any knockoffs of the next generation products.

	▲	duskwuff 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Not that anyone's even bothered knocking off their current generation products. The majority of Arduino clones are still using AVR or occasionally SAMD processors - Arduino's newer boards were never really accepted by the community. Some makers have even gone another direction entirely - ESP32-based development boards are popular, and there's a compatibility layer for using the Arduino IDE with those.