alt Hacker NewsESP stuff is so damn cheap and capable now I'm not sure what you would use Arduino for these days.
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ESP stuff is very cheap and works well, but the Arduino Uno is a great board/ecosystem for beginners and simple projects. Being 5V is more convenient for a lot of things, and having the pin headers already on the board that you can just start plugging things in with jumper wires is great.
The Arduino IDE is awesome for an extremely quick setup time. You can very easily download libraries and add them to your project, you don't have to create a blank source file, you just have to fill in setup() and loop(). The Arduino IDE makes it very easy to set up a new board and download code to it.
Much of this also applies to the Arduino IDE with and ESP32, but what I really appreciate about the whole Arduino ecosystem is if you want to do something really simple, like say, activate a servo when some sensor reaches a certain value, you literally only have to type 5-6 lines of code. You're not messing around with SDKs and Makefiles and git cloning repositories etc etc etc. You can get kits for $70 that have an Arduino clone, and a bunch of different sensors, servos, steppers, etc. It's absolutely fantastic for teaching basic programming and electronics.
Various ESP dev boards, Arduino, Pi Pico -- any of these are good places to get started from on the road towards doing useful things with microcontrollers, I think.
Arduino is just a familiar name with a long (~20 year!) history. There's a plethora of pre-existing projects that a person with no prior programming or electronics experience can implement easily to get their feet wet.
Some manner of ESP32 (or STM or MSP or RP2...) may be a good choice for a project for someone with some experience, but if you put a reasonably-motivated person in a room with a computer and an Arduino starter kit then they'll successfully be building simple things in no time.
It remains a friendly place to start doing stuff, and that was always the primary intent.
Yeah I'm kind of puzzled by what Qualcomm is getting out of this.
Arduino has so little presence in production devices and is largely an enthusiast and hobbyist product. To be clear, this is good! Having well-supported high-quality enthusiast products is awesome.
But it just doesn't... seem to overlap with the bulk of Qualcomm's business, which is large-scale silicon sales to consumer and industrial clients.
I use it for learning and play with my kids. I load the program on the board then we wire the components together and get all excited about blinking LEDs or a LCD.
The lack of features (notably Wifi on our boards) and somewhat larger size are benefits for us.
The ATMega AVR devices are not cost effective for what they deliver. However, the new ATtiny 0/1/2-series devices are worthwhile for applications the Cortex-M devices aren't a good fit for. The Arduino ecosystem doesn't really acknowledge these parts.
It's not the hardware but the ecosystem, libraries and support which is available. Sure there are alternatives like platformio but when you're learning most of the stuff out there eg youtube use Arduino IDE and libs. And just try and get an LLM to produce code based on Espressif libraries not Arduino lols...
Cheap fun, if you acquired a box of Arduinos from a defunct makerspace or startup in the mid 2010s
this. esp 32 supermini is $3 and has wifi and bluetooth. Arduino stopped being useful many years ago
I run a medialab at an university. ESP32 is great, but there are some downsides that are all not dealbreakers, but can in some cases lead me to recommend a classic Arduino-type device:
1. Lack of 5V tolerant pins. Beginners may or may not be aware of the possibility of destroying the device or the need to level-shift signals.
2. Tooling may not work out of the box. As of today the tooling step boils down to pasting a URL into a field in the preferences, but that is something you need to know. You need to select the right uploading options which are much more complex than with arduino type devices.
3. IMO less clear naming of different dev boards, thus also harder to find docs.
4. Examples may not work out of the box, simple Arduino examples may fail with hard to debug issues (for beginners) where they don't know whether it is a hardware issue, wrong board/uploader setup or a pinout issue (e.g. if the onboard LED pin differs).
These are all examples of issues students had when they used the ESP32 boards without my guidance, so not just my opinion or a theory. And as I said none of these are dealbreakers, but depending on the patience, stress levels, perceived skill etc. of the student this might make me recommend an Arduino over an ESP32.
you are comparing apple to orange, Arduino is not MCU. In fact, the uno r4 has a variant with esp32 module on it.
It's like saying AMD Cpu is so much better, why do you need Linux.
"Arduino" is more a framework than it is a specific piece of hardware. You can run "Arduino" the framework on an ESP32. Not that I would, I don't recommend it as ESP-IDF is way better, but you can run "Arduino" code on an ESP32.
Arduino is an ecosystem of pushing solutions. This is likely what is partially the appeal.
My hope and wish is Arduino sincerely remains accessible as it's always been and not solely drift into B2B or enterprise spaces.
There is a lot of chip building and delivery capacity being aligned this year.
That's probably why these AI-capable Qualcomm boards are being introduced.
Don't look at just the specs. You also need to look at the board design and programming environment. I've used the ESP32 native tools and they are a lot more complex than Arduino. But I'm an embedded firmware developer, so it's kind of what I expect. But I used an Arduino, with 5V tolerant outputs, to light up Halloween costumes for years. I do it in 1 page of code that's I write in their IDE. I don't have to set up an SDK. And the Arudino API hides all the details I don't care about. Especially if I'm really just slinging solder and wiring something up quick.