[jcoffland]

The whole Arduino thing has always baffled me a bit. I've been programming 8-bit AVR chips since 2000. There have always been many different development board options. Even long before Wiring and Arduino. Sure many were more expensive but neither Wiring nor Arduino added much technically to the hardware itself.

The real innovation of Arduino has always been the Wiring programming system. Personally I prefer the low-level interface the AVR chips provide and document very well in their datasheets. I find it frustrating to have another layer, like wiring, between me and the hardware. As an embedded systems programmer my perspective is different.

To me Arduino has always been little more than a really good marketing campaign.

[ssalazar]

Embedded systems engineers are very intentionally not the audience for Arduino. With Arduino you can go from zero EE/FW experience to blinky LEDs in an evening. This is a powerful tool for opening up hardware hacking to young people, artists, designers, and other non-technical professions. Very few of these people are going to read through a datasheet or figure out the difference between DDRB and PORTB.

[eggy]

I agree, but is it then just the open source of it that drove Arduino over say, the Basic Stamp 1 by Parallax? I believe it was very accessible, affordable, and even the smallest Arduinos today are not much smaller albeit with more chips on them. I was using the Parallax Basic Stamp 1 in 1994, 10 years before he even wrote his thesis. It had a BASIC interpreter on ROM, PBasic, 5V regulator, EEPROM, oscillator, and 16 i/o pins (GPIO nowadays). It wasn't called the Stamp for its size for nothing! I was controlling Christmas Window displays - pneumatics solenoids, motors with relays, and lighting and smoke machines. I used relatively-new capacitive switches on the windows facing the street in NYC, that children could touch and make a Xmas Nutcracker bite and raise a bell in his arm for the Saks and Lord & Taylor Christmas windows. This is why I was not pulled into the whole Arduino thing; I essentially already had it without going all techy and banging bits on self-assembled circuit. All I needed were some interface resistors or relays for the high voltage stuff beyond the output pins 150mA limit. The BS1 had a nice text editor, and you could leave the BS1 connected while programming and re-write the program to see the affect immediately. If anything, no genius needed for Arduino; the tech and very exact model, although, commerical was already there, so indeed history is written and some truths lost in time or washed away. He highlights commands he takes credit for terming like 'digitalWrite'. These all had similar counterparts in PBasic back then (you could define ledA PIN 2, then just write HIGH ledA or TOGGLE ledA)that are in my opinion no more difficult. I was on the Processing forums when they first started, ECHO in NYC, at the time. I am grateful for the internet in bringing these to my doorstep, but sometimes hype, or fashion wins over true technical marvels, and we give accolades to imitation or mediocrity. The true geniuses usually don't seek fame, fortune at first, but only thirst to discover. As I get older I smile when somebody thinks they invented something. The knowledge to build a catapult was "re-discovered" at least twice in history due to communications and wars. Nowadays, the internet ensures you should be able to dig up some precursors to your efforts, and not reinvent something that existed only 10 years before your university education.

[ssalazar]

Yeah the OP specifically called out open-ness as being a dealbreaker for the Javelin Stamp. I never used Basic Stamp, but from what I can figure, it didn't have ADCs by default, which is a huge deal. Even now people who are slapping an Arduino on top of Raspberry Pi because its the simplest way to get a few ADCs for sensor input. Cost also seems to have been an issue, and a big RS-232 port probably gave the impression of obsolescence.

Being readily available for Mac doesn't hurt for the design/art crowd either- Wikipedia suggests that Basic Stamp didnt have first-party Mac support? Also looking visually similar to Processing (both the IDE and the code style) eases the switchover for people who are new to coding. Ive heard Arduino described as "Processing for Hardware" which is a bit of a stretch in a technical sense, but perhaps exactly correct in a spiritual sense.

[eggy]

I am not one of the electronic elites who dislike Arduinos, and dismisses them as 'just for atrists' who cannot solder. I made a career out of helping artists, other than myself, to bring their visions to reality with non-industrial kit in the 1980s and 1990s. I was just trying to temper the Arduino history presented by the writer by placing it in context of some other less famous, but widely disseminated precursors that brought me into the tech world before Arduino, and that seem deserving of some credit for bridging the techie/art world. This is per my personal experience, and others like me in NY in the 1980s and 1990s. Though not opensource, the Stamps were open in many senses, and comparably priced, if not cheaper than an Arduino today, even if you adjust for inflation from 1996 ($29.99 -> $47.14 2016). The BS-1 was released in 1992, almost 12 years before the OP started writing his thesis in 2003, and in 1992 RS-232 was the future! Neither the BS-1 in 1992, or the BS-2 in 1995 had a clunky rs-232 connector on it. There was a dev board with a breadboarding area, and DB-9 connector if you used it; it was not needed, however, to do in-circuit programming or rapid prototyping. The BS-2 supported I2C and 1-Wire. The BS-2 was a 24 pin DIP chip layout. The cutest piece of kit then on the market, again smaller than most small, or mini Arduinos today, albeit with less chips on board. It was all SMC on the board. You could buy the breadboard with the RS-232 and a power plug jack for convenience, but I basically just used wires to the circuit for my serial programming connection, and programmed it in situ using the circuits 9V supply (battery or AC adapter). Fun story for me with the BS-2: I was in one of the display windows at Saks Fifth Avenue NYC for Xmas 1996, with curtains drawn, while Whoopi Goldberg read the children's book the six or seven windows were themed in outside. I had 3 wires connected to my BS-2 in its circuit running, and hot downloaded the updated code minutes before she gave it over for the curtains to be drawn so the mechanical and pneumatic actuators could do their thing. All from one BS-2 per window. It worked great after a reset, and I stepped out of view seconds before the unveiling [1]. I also used non-industrial chips for an installation in NYC's Central Park Lake by the Bow Bridge (Whitney Biennial 2002 NYC) just after 9/11. Picture me rolling spools of wire by the bridge at dusk out of the back of my pickup truck. The NYPD sort of flipped at this sight, but that's another story! For ADC I would use a single resistor and capacitor (RC), for quick and dirty ADC with some code, or a transistor for better ADC. If all of that was not sufficient I would use an ADC chip. I understand the Macs and Art crowd believe me. I was using PPC Macs, Windows, Minix and NeXT back then (1990s to early 2000s). When I rolled out more than a one-of-a-kind based on the BS-2, I would use the dev board to program quickly and then just pop it in the empty 24 pin DIP socket in my circuit (like a shield ;). ADCs were available on the early PIC chips before 2003 too, and there were some all-in-one plug-n-play boards then too. I don't ascribe Arduino's success to the opensource aspect, as much as the take-off of the internet at the time. To Parallax's credit, they had some of the best documentation, and phone support, but in 1992 to 1997, dial-up and a low online population, did not allow it to take off. In early makers circles, if you could call it that before the term was coined, I relied on online datasheets and burned out chips! And limited online access and materials. I did belong to ECHO, (East Coast Hang Out of NYC - shout out to Stacy Horn and Phiber Optik - hmmm - Mark Abene!), which put me in touch with more diverse techies from all walks of life. I also subscribed to the first Processing bulletin board then, and exchanged coding ideas and asked questions. I made a business from 1997 to 2005 helping artists realize their visions with Stamps, PIC chips, Scenix chips, old printer motors, old PCs, all well before Arduino. I give Parallax a lot of credit for real hobbyist/artist innovations. Look at the multi-core Propeller chip they developed in-house that has been revised of late. This really should have been a blog post, my apologies...

  [1]  http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/nydn-features/autumn-city-merry-menageries-big-stores-put-sugarplums-glass-article-1.746083

  [2]  https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcajvRZA8E0_ckfjqU1irYzOwbsYa2AjC

[huuu]

This is absolutely the power of Arduino. I've got zero knowledge of chips but can buy an Arduino, a CNC shield and some stepper drivers. Press them together and suddenly I got a working CNC machine.

[snom380]

Arduino/Wirings value is in what it _removed_ to give a standardised way of programming the microcontrollers.

So the "little more" part is the difference between some art student being able to create something cool vs. giving up after three days banging his head against a wall. But when you're an expert in a field it's hard to appreciate that.