Do tinkerers still use Arduino? I have a couple of boards here, but since I moved to ESP32, I never used them again. The last usages I gave an Arduino board was for it to serve as a programmer for my ESP2688. And the Arduino IDE has been replaced with PlatformIO in VS Code.

Not sure if this really counts as tinkering, but the other day I needed a custom HID device for my PC. I ordered an Arduino Micro (I think?), one that supports HID out of the box, and with under 300 lines of code my problem was solved.

The Arduino HAL and the overall comfort of the Arduino IDE are genuinely valuable. I didn’t have to learn new flashing tools or a new debugging toolchain just to light a few LEDs, read some buttons, and emulate keypresses on a PC. The learning curve was basically zero.

I’ve worked with embedded systems before, and this level of simplicity is incredibly useful for people who just want to ship simple solutions to simple problems without fighting through vendor-specific, arcane tooling.

I've got some RP2350s since then with Micropython, now those might be even better for getting stuff done (without network or extreme low power needs)

I do. Mostly because I literally have dozens of them lying around ready to be reused for whatever my latest idea is. Admittedly the bulk of those are clones, not "official" Arduino products.

Other reasons I'll reach for an Arduino over alternatives like ESP, RasPi (Linux or 2040/2350) include:

Simplicity. I very much ascribe to KISS. Having WiFi or Linux as part of my hardware _always_ leads me into scope creep. If the idea could be done on an AT328 (or similar), in my head it _needs_ to be.

Robustness. I probably have thrown out dozens of 3.3V microcontrollers/SOCs with dead io pins because I fucked up. An Arduino will often shrug off shorting 12V to an io pin (or even vcc) without blinking. RasPis seem to sometimes get damaged just because you looked sideways at them while thinking about 12V.

Experience. For me, the way I come up with project ideas seems to often be fundamentally linked with "knowing" how I'll do it on an Arduino. I've been using them over 20 years now, practically since they first appeared. And I'd been writing code for ATMega chips since a Burningman project in 1999, struggling with a cross compiling gcc toolchain. Arduino IDE was both instantly familiar, and such a breath of fresh air for me back then. It allowed me to easily experiment, and lowered my barrier of entry to random weekend or evening project ideas.

Separateness from work. I find the low level coding on a bare 8 bit microcontroller to be almost a completely different thing to coding for work. When work is going badly and I'm approaching burnout, any personal time Linux based coding for RasPis pretty much grinds to a halt. I'll find myself reading a book or doomscrolling social media instead of tinkering with that kind of project. The Arduino IDE is different enough to "work tools" that it doesnt get affected quite as

I don't know if I'll use Arduino in a professional project, but the existence of simavr and in-tree QEMU support means I can at least unit-test my code without dedicated test runners hooked up to hardware or licensing for Wokwi.

Indie devs who need testable builds might be a smaller market than tinkerers, but they're there.

It's a pain anticipating money flow into the future in more ways than one.

Same, esp32. Not liking the path that Arduino is on currently.

No we don't.

I have dozens of Arduinos that I will never use.

With a similarly priced (sometimes cheaper) platform like the amazing rp2040 / rp2350 which is roughly 100 times more powerful, I have no idea what the niche is for them any more.

The way they dropped the ball with their IDE is amazing. It still looks and feels like something that was rejected during beta testing in 1993

Arduino is following roughly the same trajectory as BlackBerry, with the current phase being "rapidly fading into obscurity"

I tried to get into it; built some simple LED thingies. Then kind of fatigued.

I semi-attribute this to my lack of willpower but perhaps arduino also isn't as tinker-epic as I thought it may be.

I actually use Teensy. I found that the ESP32 and its whole WiFi stack (?) were slowing the device down. It's not bare-bones enough for many of my projects.

Yup. Esp32 is just better.