Beginners often ask me a question: with so many development boards available on the market, such as 51, STM32, ESP8266/ESP32, Micro:bit, and various Pi, which one should I learn? I heard that Arduino is good; is it useful to learn it? Some old Arduino players are also starting to wonder:It’s already 2020, is it still necessary to play with Arduino?Isn’t ESP8266/ESP32 better?
Indeed, since the birth of the first Arduino around 2004, it has been 16 years by 2020, which is a long time for a hardware platform. One could say that Arduino has entered its middle age. A few years ago, we described Arduino’s dilemma in “Introduction to Arduino 16: Learning Method Suggestions and Arduino’s Future”: under the trend of the Internet of Things, various hardware platforms with networking and intelligent attributes have emerged, while professional vertical fields are increasingly occupied by more powerful and competitively priced professional hardware, leaving Arduino in a predicament with wolves in front and tigers behind. So how much has this situation changed in the past few years? How has the official Arduino responded to its ‘midlife crisis’? And how can we as learners adapt to the trend? Today, I will discuss this with you.External Market ErosionIf we categorize the common platforms on the market, we can find that Arduino primarily targets hobbyists and the education market. In recent years, Arduino’s share in these two markets has been gradually eroded by three platforms. Firstly, in the education market, BBC launched Micro:bit in 2016, which has been heavily promoted and is well-loved in youth programming education. Although small, it integrates many sensors and output components, with a comprehensive programming environment and courses.There are also domestic imitators of the Micro:bit model based on ESP32, such as the Control Board and M5STACK, which have borrowed excellent ideas from Arduino and are carving out their market with more integrated ecological courses. Compared to them, Arduino’s hardware and ecosystem appear very free and decentralized, seeming more “bulk”.
In the DIY hobbyist market, which is essentially Arduino’s base, it is also being ravaged by the ESP series and the Raspberry Pi family. The Raspberry Pi family is relatively clear-cut, mainly focusing on network services and computing, visual processing, and as a single-board computer, it maintains a distinction in performance and price from Arduino. It’s clear that the Raspberry Pi Foundation is also striving to update its offerings, with performance doubling every couple of years at the same price.
In recent years, ESP8266 and ESP32 have become incredibly popular in the open-source community, not only because they come with WiFi (ESP32 supports both WiFi and BLE), but also because they are more powerful. Since programming ESP8266/ESP32 using Arduino IDE became possible, it has been a case of “if others have it, I must have it too”. Devices like Wemos D1 UNO look like you and are cheaper and better than you; isn’t that appealing?
In the professional electronics field, platforms like 51 or STM32 are primarily for electronic engineers. Learning Arduino is more of an enlightening or supplementary experience; ultimately, one still has to return to the fundamentals and learn the necessary C/C++.Struggles Within the OfficialWhile the outside world is tumultuous, how has the official Arduino planned its response over the years? Unfortunately, I haven’t seen any substantial efforts. As referenced in “What? The official Arduino price has increased?”, from 2015 to 2019, the official’s energy was mostly wasted on internal conflicts. After unification in 2019, the official made a series of questionable moves, causing the price of genuine Arduino hardware to rise instead of fall.In terms of hardware, despite the official releasing a few development boards in the IoT and deep learning sectors after UNO, none have been competitive in terms of cost-effectiveness (at least in China).
The only commendable aspect is the software; the official has rewritten the underlying toolchain and launched the Arduino CLI command-line tool, as well as a new IDE tool, Arduino IDE pro, based on the command-line tool. Finally, in developer tools, they have added auto-completion and some debugging features.
Is There Still a Need to Learn Arduino?Despite the concerns surrounding Arduino, it is undeniable that no platform has completely replaced it. This is thanks to its broad user base and openness. As a friend mentioned in the comments, Arduino is more like a framework protocol; new platforms wishing to leverage Arduino’s community and knowledge must provide their interfaces and resources according to Arduino’s rules and interfaces. This mutual reinforcement has brought vitality to Arduino’s ecosystem. This strength is also the reason why Arduino remains popular after 16 years. However, this does not mean that the official Arduino can continue to rely on its past achievements.
As for how we as learners should choose, I believe it varies from person to person. If we plot various mainstream learning platforms on an xy coordinate system, the x-axis represents the performance or intelligence level of the platform, while the y-axis represents the level of language abstraction (assembly or C language is closer to machine-level languages, while Python scripts belong to high-level languages).
We can foresee that platforms will emerge in various positions, and the competition among platforms will become increasingly “crowded,” and platforms will become more “specialized.” For instance, Arduino’s base is still in non-intelligent terminals, such as reading temperature sensors and driving motors, but its language abstraction level is higher than that of the professional 51 or STM32, making it more beginner-friendly.Therefore, if you want to become a professional electronic engineer and work with consumer electronics or terminals, Arduino may be a good choice for entry or rapid prototyping, but eventually, you still need to delve into analog and digital electronics and C/C++.If you are a designer or artist who does not want to deal with programming all day but want to achieve some cool audio-visual effects, then Arduino, ESP8266, or even graphical Micro:bit can be explored.If you are more interested in network data processing, machine vision, embedded AI, etc., then your skill tree should shift right; Arduino may not be your best choice.Of course, if you are skilled, you can choose to have it all.
