Posted by MilnerRoute 2 days ago
There are also 10c RISCV cores available that people are starting to use
I don't think it "saves" it particularly though
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
Maybe it should all have been free software all the time.
We need an arduino fork.
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.