As someone else said in the previous thread when it was announced: it's about the software first. Qualcomm likely doesn't get this and likely never will
Writing traditional MCU software without an RTOS always sucked for a multitude of reasons. Vendor lockin, expensive specialty compilers, and so on
Arduino showed that it could be done differently with some not too expensive abstractions. Sure it is looked down on by traditional embedded engineers but the productivity gains and accessibility was hard to argue against
ESP didn't (only) grow huge because the hardware was cheap and available. The integration in the Arduino ecosystem was done brilliantly. It truly felt like a natural citizen in between usual Arduino code
What do you mean "vendor lock in"? Developers become accustomed to a particular SDK, and it is hard to move to new silicon because you need to relearn where the peripherals differ. If that's what you mean, I don't consider that lock-in, just inertia, but by your definition the Arduino SDK is "vendor lock in" (for all but the most trivial code it is portable). ESP32 integration with Arduino's ecosystem is severely limited to just a handful of APIs, and you need to use the ESP32 function calls if you want to do anything sophisticated (and idf.py). The Arduino API is too topical. I know from experience. Zephyr blows away Arduino, it has portable stacks, security, update, wifi/ble, etc...
Also, near everyone is offering GCC/LLVM/IAR/ARMCC (except for Synopsys ARC and Renesas RX).
Zephyr is basically "let's have the nice things from Linux on small MCUs" and it sucks. Yes, it is numbers of magnitude better than vendor-specific not-quite-RTOS crap. It blows away Arduino because Arduino is an educational environment just a step above Scratch. Zephyr still sucks. And there is no hope of fixing it because it doesn't suck because the authors did a bad job. They did a fantastic job and it still sucks because the approach fundamentally doesn't work.
Zephyr loves to reuse Linux tooling but it simply doesn't fit. Kconfig silently disabling options because of missing dependencies sucks. No, I'm not using menuconfig, thank you very much, navigating a million of menus is the last thing I need. DTS to C macros abomination sucks. Tons of CMake scripts scattered over every directory suck.
The build in-drivers? What is implemented and tested directly by SoC vendors works, the rest is unusable for anything but example project. Want to use an external SPI flash? Too bad the driver doesn't implement any power management, program it all yourself or accept a constant 12mA draw (fine for many projects, absolutely unacceptable for some). Want to read this I2C sensor once an hour? Too bad, the build-in driver can only poll it constantly in a dedicated thread, just write one yourself. Not like that's a big job, but the build-in driver would be infinitely more useful if it just defined the register map in a header.
And worse yet, Zephyr doesn't do anything to actually solve the silicon lock-in problem, because it's not something that can be solved by new abstractions. Peripheral interconnect, interval timers and basically any peripheral that isn't I2C or UART is simply impossible to abstract over in a useful way. There is no common denominator like there is on desktop.
IMHO, FreeRTOS is a much better system simply because it doesn't tries to be a HAL. It switches between threads and that's it. And HAL for MCUs is simply a pipedream. If you can afford a HAL, go with Linux on a SoC large enough for that.
Zephyr is a baby project. From the embedded devs I know they have only started seriously considering Zephyr in the last 2-3 years for commercial projects.
And you may call it inertia sure, but in the mid 2000's everyone was doing their own hardware abstraction. You had to get books and stuff because documentation sucked. MCU vendors seemingly made a point of making especially stuff like ADCs and timers very hard to abstract away between vendors.
Back then you had a choice of GCC/IAR/KEIL/CCS/Codwarrior and probably more. Each worse and less standards-compliant than the next, except for GCC/avr-gcc as was the key enabler of Arduino
All that text to say: The situation was different, and Arduino showed that there's a wider unmet demand for custom embedded stuff and that people will sacrifice a bit of performance for something that's easy to develop
"People will sacrifice a bit of performance" was also enabled by all the MCU advances.
Those bytes of memory really mattered when 512B was all the RAM you'll ever get. Nowadays, you can buy a RTOS capable 32-bit MCU for $0.20. Why count bytes when you can just... not?
Before I clicked I expected a single SoC with a hybrid architecture (powerful cores to run Linux, MCU cores for real time control). This is a board with two physically separate chips. They put an MCU next to the quad-core application chip.
It will be interesting to see how they make this arrangement approachable for Arduino’s audience which generally expects ease of use to be a high priority.
> It will be interesting to see how they make this arrangement approachable for Arduino’s audience which generally expects ease of use to be a high priority.
Would not be surprised to see both approaches to developing only for one of the two systems: programming the MCU and deploying some ready-made stuff to the big Qualcomm chip, like a stacking a shield on top of the Uno only that the shield is software-defined (providing some compute service), and running some ready-made interface abstraction on the MCU, running everything individually programmed on the powerful Linux chip. Likely within some form of JVM or a Python runtime, or node.
I saw this the other day. I’m not sure exactly what the concerns are, nor why Qualcomm deserves any shade. I don’t know much about Qualcomm, but at least on the face of it, they’re keeping Arduino alive and infusing a lot of cash and expanding the platform, and they’re also keeping the board designs fully open source. It seems reasonable (and probably necessary in today’s world) to have terms on the cloud services. Arduino’s website itself was never open source, the chips they’ve always used aren’t open source. And it was Arduino’s decision to sell to Qualcomm, right? Why should the cloud services be open source?
Arduino has four layers, only two were ever truly open:
1 Hardware reference designs (sort of open by intent)
2 Core software (open-source licensing)
3 Services and “happy path” tooling (not open)
4 Brand and governance (never open)
Qualcomm’s move is about owning layer 4 and using it to grow layer 3, while keeping layers 1 and 2 open enough to preserve credibility and community adoption.
That makes sense to me. Adafruit’s complaint relates to layer 3, right? Is Qualcomm changing the openness of layers 1 & 2 in meaningful ways that affect makers & hobbyists? And I guess layer 1 is PCB design, not [MC]PU design, right? Is that what you mean by ‘sort of’?
I expect it to have much less community support, but it ships with better hardware, has more hardware compatibility (with Pi peripherals) - and much better documentation availability, because Texas Instruments actually puts TRMs up online.
I bought one of these to play with when it was announced, but with all the drama I’ve been hesitant to invest any time with it. Anyone make anything interesting?
It's kind of hard to use. I considered putting it to use for a project, but, no official camera sensor boards, not even a Pi camera adapter yet, and the official ISP tuning guides are NDA'd, because, Qualcomm. Would have rolled my own sensor board otherwise.
Very silly. They make a board that screams "for robotics", market it "for AI", and then neglect the cameras.
It would be worthwhile still if this had LTE on board, but it doesn't.
This can be hard to explain to both engineers and laypeople because there's Arduino, then there's Arduino, and then there's Arduino...
For instance, "Arduino" could mean the Arduino branded boards, and the cloud based development stack.
On the other hand, "Arduino" has become almost a generic term for any microcontroller board that happens to support the (open source) Arduino API. As in: "Just throw an Arduino in there."
For instance I've got several ongoing projects using third party boards such as Teensy, where my entire relationship to Arduino is represented by a single line of code:
Writing traditional MCU software without an RTOS always sucked for a multitude of reasons. Vendor lockin, expensive specialty compilers, and so on
Arduino showed that it could be done differently with some not too expensive abstractions. Sure it is looked down on by traditional embedded engineers but the productivity gains and accessibility was hard to argue against
ESP didn't (only) grow huge because the hardware was cheap and available. The integration in the Arduino ecosystem was done brilliantly. It truly felt like a natural citizen in between usual Arduino code
Also, near everyone is offering GCC/LLVM/IAR/ARMCC (except for Synopsys ARC and Renesas RX).
Zephyr is basically "let's have the nice things from Linux on small MCUs" and it sucks. Yes, it is numbers of magnitude better than vendor-specific not-quite-RTOS crap. It blows away Arduino because Arduino is an educational environment just a step above Scratch. Zephyr still sucks. And there is no hope of fixing it because it doesn't suck because the authors did a bad job. They did a fantastic job and it still sucks because the approach fundamentally doesn't work.
Zephyr loves to reuse Linux tooling but it simply doesn't fit. Kconfig silently disabling options because of missing dependencies sucks. No, I'm not using menuconfig, thank you very much, navigating a million of menus is the last thing I need. DTS to C macros abomination sucks. Tons of CMake scripts scattered over every directory suck.
The build in-drivers? What is implemented and tested directly by SoC vendors works, the rest is unusable for anything but example project. Want to use an external SPI flash? Too bad the driver doesn't implement any power management, program it all yourself or accept a constant 12mA draw (fine for many projects, absolutely unacceptable for some). Want to read this I2C sensor once an hour? Too bad, the build-in driver can only poll it constantly in a dedicated thread, just write one yourself. Not like that's a big job, but the build-in driver would be infinitely more useful if it just defined the register map in a header.
And worse yet, Zephyr doesn't do anything to actually solve the silicon lock-in problem, because it's not something that can be solved by new abstractions. Peripheral interconnect, interval timers and basically any peripheral that isn't I2C or UART is simply impossible to abstract over in a useful way. There is no common denominator like there is on desktop.
IMHO, FreeRTOS is a much better system simply because it doesn't tries to be a HAL. It switches between threads and that's it. And HAL for MCUs is simply a pipedream. If you can afford a HAL, go with Linux on a SoC large enough for that.
And you may call it inertia sure, but in the mid 2000's everyone was doing their own hardware abstraction. You had to get books and stuff because documentation sucked. MCU vendors seemingly made a point of making especially stuff like ADCs and timers very hard to abstract away between vendors.
Back then you had a choice of GCC/IAR/KEIL/CCS/Codwarrior and probably more. Each worse and less standards-compliant than the next, except for GCC/avr-gcc as was the key enabler of Arduino
All that text to say: The situation was different, and Arduino showed that there's a wider unmet demand for custom embedded stuff and that people will sacrifice a bit of performance for something that's easy to develop
Those bytes of memory really mattered when 512B was all the RAM you'll ever get. Nowadays, you can buy a RTOS capable 32-bit MCU for $0.20. Why count bytes when you can just... not?
It will be interesting to see how they make this arrangement approachable for Arduino’s audience which generally expects ease of use to be a high priority.
Would not be surprised to see both approaches to developing only for one of the two systems: programming the MCU and deploying some ready-made stuff to the big Qualcomm chip, like a stacking a shield on top of the Uno only that the shield is software-defined (providing some compute service), and running some ready-made interface abstraction on the MCU, running everything individually programmed on the powerful Linux chip. Likely within some form of JVM or a Python runtime, or node.
1 Hardware reference designs (sort of open by intent)
2 Core software (open-source licensing)
3 Services and “happy path” tooling (not open)
4 Brand and governance (never open)
Qualcomm’s move is about owning layer 4 and using it to grow layer 3, while keeping layers 1 and 2 open enough to preserve credibility and community adoption.
I expect it to have much less community support, but it ships with better hardware, has more hardware compatibility (with Pi peripherals) - and much better documentation availability, because Texas Instruments actually puts TRMs up online.
Very silly. They make a board that screams "for robotics", market it "for AI", and then neglect the cameras.
It would be worthwhile still if this had LTE on board, but it doesn't.
Oof.
Am asking because an OSS project asked me the same thing when I mentioned possibly using an Arduino platform for something related to their project.
For instance, "Arduino" could mean the Arduino branded boards, and the cloud based development stack.
On the other hand, "Arduino" has become almost a generic term for any microcontroller board that happens to support the (open source) Arduino API. As in: "Just throw an Arduino in there."
For instance I've got several ongoing projects using third party boards such as Teensy, where my entire relationship to Arduino is represented by a single line of code: