17 Apr
2012
17 Apr
'12
8 a.m.
On Apr 17, 2012, at 5:41 AM, Joachim Thiemann wrote:
I find the dislike of the Arduino by some people in
this forum a bit
silly, yet funny in a history-repeating way. The Arduino, in my
opinion, occupies roughly the same space that the Vic-20 (or ZX-81)
did back in its day. It's a great intro to the field.
To be clear, I don't dislike the Arduino, not at all. It's great at
what it does, just like a PET. I just don't like when people get the
idea to shoehorn it into something it's totally inappropriate for,
which is something I *do* see a lot (much like Mouse's example where
a simple 555 circuit would have made much more sense).
I was just as mad when management at one of our clients forced us to
use Linux on a little embedded board where the microcontroller was
only going to be used for housekeeping; with a tiny little event loop
for an OS, we could have done the job with a 50 MHz ARM, but instead
we ended up with an 800 MHz PowerPC which caused us no end of trouble
(not least because it was a buggy chip, which is maybe a separate
issue). I like Linux, and I like PowerPCs, but they didn't belong
there.
More importantly, the Arduino disrupted the
microcontroller dev board
market in such a way that to get any mindshare these days you need to
have a sub-$100 board to get hobbyists interested, AND have a
(reasonable, and open or at least free) click-and-compile IDE with it.
Yes, that's what's great about it. And when you're inducting newbies
into anything, you're bound to get some questionable attempts like
what I described; that's just called "learning". :-) I guess my
irritation comes when people do something like that when they should
damn well know better, which does occasionally happen ("Hey, I need
some blinking LEDs; maybe we could use an Arduino!").
- Dave