Posted by MilnerRoute 12/14/2025
If your target audience is school kids, you really can't go past the micro:bit and Makecode[3].
2. https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects/getting-started...
Code is copyright without any licensing. The hardware is not licensed, I don't sign a license or agree to one when buying a car or microwave.
You can find edge cases, but the point is no licensing is actually required.
At the very least, you need some sort of user agreement to specify the things you can do with their content, otherwise you can't really do it because it's their content and you're not allowed to mess with it by default. (Like you said, code is copyrighted by default.) You also need to specify the things that are necessary by law because you are hosting that code and therefore in part responsible for it. You also don't want to make the user sign a new agreement every other week if you add some new feature that they need to agree to use, because the cost of all those legal documents is prohibitive, and it's also very bad UX.
Added to this the fact that lawyers are naturally very conservative as a profession (generally only doing things that have been proven successful, rather than avoiding things that have been proven unsuccessful), and it's easy to see why these sorts of agreements tend to be more expansive than they perhaps need to be, in order to ensure the company is fully protected.
It's also, as I understand it, the reason why law has so much of an emphasis on seemingly magic phrases that you copy and repeat in all sorts of different places. These are phrases that have already been tested and have a meaning that has been made clear in a court of law, so if you need to go to court to defend them, you can pull up the existing case law on the subject and rely on that, rather than having to analyse exactly what the new wording means. Hence why these T&C documents tend to have a lot of fairly standard phrases that don't obviously mean what you expect them to mean.
- Wi-Fi: Esp Risc-V (C3 etc)
- BLE without Wi-Fi (Or ANTD): Nordic. Also a good choice in general for simple devices
- General-purpose, including high-performance, low-power, and high I/O: Stm32
If using rust, probe-rs + cargo is a "just works" CLI workflow to compile, flash, and debug.
However, it was a "standard" boot-loader, had consistent documentation, and a wide community of users. It encouraged people of all skill levels to play with chips, and that was great.
These days a full Linux SoC is often cheaper than most mcu. The age of the Arduino board will just end a little quicker now. Generally, irritating a planet of bored computer engineers does not end well for a business. =3
What's eating Arduino's lunch is the various mcus: risc v, stm32, esp32 etc...
RTLinux or FreeRTOS are guaranteed-latency OS, that can reduce timing jitter.
"Real-time" is another term hijacked by people that think it means the same thing. It was a disservice to students, but thankfully FPGA or Raspberry Pico io DMA with mcu parallelism can teach people to understand clock domain crossing.
Part of the Arduino appeal, was convincing people the mcu and application SoC problem domains were the same. They are not, and never were... Hence the new Arduino board dual chip layout is twice as bad in some ways. Cheers =3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2y8Sx4B2Sk
risc v -- a new hope, but 20 years too late
stm32 -- a solid competitor to Microchip/AVR, but 14 years too late
esp32 -- FreeRTOS with hardware flash paging can pose an issue, but at least it already doesn't need Arduino software lol
Unlike seL4[0], neither OS has a guarantee of worst case latency.
RTLinux cannot realistically have one, as formal verification is not feasible due to its sheer size.
It was odd xenomai was not as common as preemt_rt in projects. =3
But yeah, Arduino is in a weird place right now. I knew people there (kind of lost track), quite liked their IDE and how accessible it made a lot of things, but the recent turn on events is just… weird.
Everything else is top notch open.
Other open firmware: https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware/Open
But for low power sensor stuff the ESP32 is far away from being my favorite anyway. That's almost all-in Nordic for me.
Of course, an ecosystem has grown around that, so you could attach pretty much any popular device (sensor, display, input device,...) to it, and the library was already made for you to simply use it in your project.
But now, years later? There are many such controllers, from esp8266/esp32 to rpi pico, with additional features (wifi included) on better boards (displays, buttons, interfaces,...), for even less money.
Yes, the original arduino was important.. but if it vanishes overnight, very few people would notice.
I kind of drifted off. So curious about what people here think is the best "Arduino when it still was open source" contender. Preferably something Arduino compatible because of the sheer amount of projects already out there.
That said I've heard a fair bit about Adafruit criticism as well, but that's more on the company level and no personal experience there.
(Disclosure: I know the Adafruit founder, but haven't discussed this matter with her.)
Why do you think it isn't?