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itopaloglu83last Tuesday at 1:59 PM3 repliesview on HN

What do you think about the Arduino professional line? They have industrial PLC equipments and other high end boards etc.


Replies

dfexlast Tuesday at 3:06 PM

Not the OP, but have had some experience with the Arduino Opta around this time twelve months ago (Oct 24) through a professional development course I took at my local university on industrial control systems programming.

While it's nice to have exposure to PLC programming at an Arduino price point, the IDE, and PLC firmware was VERY rough around the edges. It took lots of resets and fiddling to even get the units connected over their USB serial, and you'd come back the next day and you'd have to repeat the process. Lots of "hold your tongue the right way while pressing this button". The IDE was also very buggy (though it may have improved in the last 12 months), but once you got things going, it did the job.

crotelast Tuesday at 3:13 PM

Doesn't look bad, but the Arduino name is a serious drawback. It's a brand focusing on DIY tinkering, how are you going to sell that to your boss who only finds a bunch of shady hobbyist stuff when he Googles it?

Besides, what's the market? The non-pro hardware is fine for prototypes, but you don't want a bowl of spaghetti in production, so porting it to the pro is pointless. If you want a generic compute board, why not a Raspberry Pi? If you want a PLC, why not go for a proper PLC?

There's perhaps a market for the shadow IT equivalent of electronics projects where an Arduino sketch is suddenly a load-bearing part of the company, but that's about it.

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duskwufflast Tuesday at 4:05 PM

Deeply unserious. Arduino put little real thought into what features industrial users would actually find useful. I suspect the main market for their "professional" boards is hobbyists with money to burn.