Arduino has long been fraught with governance and licensing issues, but at its core has been supported first and foremost by a community of keen amateurs and patient professionals teaching in their off time.
This is a reminder - never sell out your baby unless you're willing to see it squeezed for every penny, community be damned.
Looks it's time to move on. New platform and tools will emerge, I'm sure of it. The only way we can fight corpos is not giving them money and not talking about them.
It doesn't look like they've made any drastic changes that would impel anyone to leave Arduino tomorrow, or in the foreseeable future, but if they keep going down this route I imagine the community will move to RPi. They've always been vastly more performant than Arduino and they can run linux, which is somewhat more approachable than the concept of programming a microcontroller and only being able to talk to it over serial.
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.
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
Everyone in my circles has moved to PlatformIO and mostly uses ESP32 boards, but almost exclusively through the Android framework/HAL and its various libraries.
What's the point of paying a hefty sum of money for the right to destroy a product and a team neither or whom are in competition with you? Not the first time I see it happening
From Arduino ecosystem i always have a feeling that they try to do an unnecessary ecosystem lock-in. Most Arduinos are just Atmel AVR MCU with fancy bootloader. You do not need Arduino-this or Arduino-that for programming them, avr-gcc and avr-libc is enough.
> The most dangerous change is Arduino now explicitly states that using their platform grants you no patent licenses whatsoever. You can’t even argue one is implied.
> This means Qualcomm could potentially assert patents against your projects if you built them using Arduino tools, Arduino examples, or Arduino-compatible hardware.
I remember 15 years ago when I was in highschool I really wanted to learn how to program 8 bit microcontrollers without Arduino. And everybody looked at me like I was crazy. There was barely any learning material out there about how to do this.
Now, I imagine the bias pushing everyone to learn on arduino is even more intense? Who out there is programming these chips in pure C using open source compilers and bootloaders?
Edit: Of course there's other platforms like Esp32; teensy; seed. But I've only programmed Esp32s using the arduino dev environment. Are there other good ways of doing it?
Qualcomm wasted no time and tanking this purchase. Not sure how the MBA's thought this would be a good idea to change everything about a project. Wouldn't be surprised to see the prices of the boards go up $200 tomorrow at this rate.
This article is somewhat misleading. The changed ToS only covers Arduino's hosted cloud services, not the IDE or microcontroller library. This is spelled out in black and white in the first paragraph of the ToS:
> 1.1 The Site is part of the platform developed and managed by Arduino, which allows users to take part in the discussions on the Arduino forum, the Arduino blog, the Arduino User Group, the Arduino Discord channel, and the Arduino Project Hub, and to access the Arduino main website, subsites, Arduino Cloud, Arduino Courses, Arduino Certifications, Arduino Docs, the Arduino EDU kit sites to release works within the Contributor License Agreement program, and to further develop the Arduino open source ecosystem (collectively, the “Platform”). The use of the Site, the Platform, and the Services is governed by these Terms including the other documents and policies made available on the Platform by Arduino.Certifications, Arduino Docs, the Arduino EDU kit sites to release works within the Contributor License Agreement program, and to further develop the Arduino open source ecosystem (collectively, the “Platform”). The use of the Site, the Platform, and the Services is governed by these Terms including the other documents and policies made available on the Platform by Arduino.
Is Arduino actually used for anything serious? While I certainly appreciate how their whole ecosystem has made working with microcontrollers more accessible... even the most casual hobbyists I know very quickly move on to something like an ESP32.
Sad, I wrote my first ever programs on Arduino, learned C++ through it, and did my first OSS contribution by creating the Arduino MIDI Library, ~16 years ago.
I wouldn't be where I am if it wasn't for Arduino. Thank you to the OSH community for making these boards open to all back then.
32 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 51.1 ms ] threadThis is a reminder - never sell out your baby unless you're willing to see it squeezed for every penny, community be damned.
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
> This means Qualcomm could potentially assert patents against your projects if you built them using Arduino tools, Arduino examples, or Arduino-compatible hardware.
Yep, the complete opposite of "open".
https://blog.arduino.cc/2025/11/21/the-arduino-terms-of-serv...
Now, I imagine the bias pushing everyone to learn on arduino is even more intense? Who out there is programming these chips in pure C using open source compilers and bootloaders?
Edit: Of course there's other platforms like Esp32; teensy; seed. But I've only programmed Esp32s using the arduino dev environment. Are there other good ways of doing it?
> 1.1 The Site is part of the platform developed and managed by Arduino, which allows users to take part in the discussions on the Arduino forum, the Arduino blog, the Arduino User Group, the Arduino Discord channel, and the Arduino Project Hub, and to access the Arduino main website, subsites, Arduino Cloud, Arduino Courses, Arduino Certifications, Arduino Docs, the Arduino EDU kit sites to release works within the Contributor License Agreement program, and to further develop the Arduino open source ecosystem (collectively, the “Platform”). The use of the Site, the Platform, and the Services is governed by these Terms including the other documents and policies made available on the Platform by Arduino.Certifications, Arduino Docs, the Arduino EDU kit sites to release works within the Contributor License Agreement program, and to further develop the Arduino open source ecosystem (collectively, the “Platform”). The use of the Site, the Platform, and the Services is governed by these Terms including the other documents and policies made available on the Platform by Arduino.
License: GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
Who does the fork? Paging e.g. Adafruit and Sparkfun.
its happy ending for both investor
I wouldn't be where I am if it wasn't for Arduino. Thank you to the OSH community for making these boards open to all back then.