alt Hacker NewsI'm a long time user of the Arduino IDE for third party boards such as the Teensy. Recently I've switched to Platformio for coding. So I should be satisfied with never needing Arduino's cloud service.
But Adafruit points out a problem, which is that the cloud service is the only available option for students using school-issued Chromebooks. I can confirm that a school-issued Chromebook is likely to be set up to lock out access to any programming tools. We wouldn't want children to learn coding after all, right?
I think relying on a corporation to preserve our freedom to code is a bit too optimistic.
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Arduino was finished the moment it was acquired by Qualcomm.
I recently had a great time developing on ESP-32 directly in VSCode/Cursor and using the Arduino CLI. I believe very similar in concept to Platformio. I've always hated being limited to the Arduino IDE.
> We wouldn't want children to learn coding after all, right?
Why aren't we teaching kids vibe coding? I've been told that is the future after all, and junior devs will never be needed ever again. All they need a webpage interface to an LLM to provide data and customer demographics for AI companies.
Technically any recent Chromebook can run Linux in a VM if enabled from settings. Now, I don't know if most schools forbid this, but since it is running in a VM it is safe to use for sure.
Chromebooks and iPads are both completely unsuitable for digital education in my opinion. They can be decent tools for education using digital resources, but that is something different.
To "force" someone to develop on a Chromebook is like giving someone a bicycle to become a race car driver.
That said, I usually flashed my arduinos and used bare metal C. Ironically I think it makes many things easier to learn and understand, provided you have a programming device.