Whats with the anti-arduino sentiment?

Inprogress:
I think the resentment is somewhat the same as what I have when I look at my salary (when I still worked as one) being an Industrial Engineering Technician who spent a ton of money learning a ton of stuff, only to see the just out of school girl work as a PA at a higher salary. Same kind of resentment which is based on nothing more than being angry at the situation as it was when you went through it. Now anyone can basically learn anything either free or very very cheaply and make a good living out of it without the need of a big university piece of paper.

I think you hit the nail on the head but you really need to expound on it.

It really depends on the motivation of the person with the anti-arduino sentiment because some of them have interests in other microcontroller companies and Arduino is sucking the business from them. A retired professional in the industry recommended the Arduino to me because it is one of the easiest to learn because it comes with a bootloader and bootloaders make things easy because it does things for you.

One of the pros is that it works with the C language. C is the language of engineers for now.
Another pro is that it comes on its own little development board and there are daughterboards (called shields) that work with it.

The criticism is that the Arduino was invented for art students and that you aren't really interested in learning microcontrollers. The truth is that microcontrollers can be hard to learn and that there is a learning curve. In a truth, people are jealous because they spend a lot of time learning and you can go on the web, buy a daughterboard and cut and paste some code and you are on equal part with someone who is learned...Well, almost. The truth is that you have to start somewhere and this is as good a place as any.

I think we're all hitting relevant aspects of the issue here. One of the things I really like about Arduino is that you seldom feel like you're 'hitting the metal'. The Arduino language feels like a real programming language, while the others I've looked at (MSP430 and PICAXE) are more like strings of configuration parameters, hiding the logic of the program.

I'd far prefer to be able to understand programming logic concepts than remember specifics of particular processors. For more than half my life, I've been uselessly carrying around the ability to disassemble Z80 opcodes in my head, even though the need for me to do so evaporated more than 20 years ago.

I program Arduino for fun. My day job is engineering, so I leave the detail stuff in the office. I'm glad other people enjoy squeezing the last clock cycle out of their processors. But there is, as the old Perl mantra goes, more than one way to do it.

This is the example in another forum. I'm probably breaking a rule somewhere.

http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?129428-MAKE-you-lost-me...

The problem is just want to get started. I get interrupted a lot at home so I figured that I could get started with Arduino because the tutorials are shorter and the manuals on the other projects are written for people without children. The problem is they are still writing manuals for people who aren't like the rest of us. I spent two years over there and haven't gotten started and everyone refuses to say what needs to be said.

try talking to a professional photographer who earns (earned) a living from stock photography some time.

That would be me :0

Actually I don't give a toss because I don't need to earn money from photography any more, and what I do earn comes from photographing things I like not things the agency has on it's wish list because they will be more likely to sell.


Rob

Just imagine the DIY electronics technology of near future. The customer draws some scheme from functional blocks, on-line in the browser, then click 'Buy' and after near half a day one get ready board in a box, after day or several - ready to use device in the stylish case. It's like to send document to the printer.

Vanyamba:
Just imagine the DIY electronics technology of near future. The customer draws some scheme from functional blocks, on-line in the browser, then click 'Buy' and after near half a day one get ready board in a box, after day or several - ready to use device in the stylish case. It's like to send document to the printer.

Just to follow your lead, in some foreseeable future, everyone will have a rep-rap on their desktop to print out 3-D objects and possibly circuits on flexible substrates and wear them to work. I guess the rep-rap project must have upset some mechanical engineers, who think only they have been given the power to create 3-D objects with their knowledge of CNC and professional 3-D prototype machines. Way back, maybe the CNCs had upset many old-fashion machinists, who would depend on their hands to make parts from mills and lathes. And even way back, when machines replaced hand tools, ...

I can see why EE people may dislike arduinos, as to all the learning that an arduinoist didn't do. But time you spent=stuff you learned. I've spent my time with arduino but I never learned the basic principals of I2C bus. My RTC and EEPROM still work just fine. I think with arduino, I can opt to not spend time to learn things that are only relevant to electrical engineers. They're good at what they do, knowing all the details of specific stuff that all ICs depend on, so the rest of us can enjoy their fruits without having to bare their burden to plant, grow, and harvest.

This goes to physicists as well. They work out all the basic principles so everyone else can use their applications. Have you heard any physicist ranting about being under appreciated on any website lately? Well, they should. ]:slight_smile: All of YOU, wasting the best computer ever grown on this planet with the easy stuff in college, being couch potatoes every night, leaving us to attack the most difficult problems, and without enough funding or appreciation. =(

liudr:
I can see why EE people may dislike arduinos...

Where did you see an EE people? Was it a EE man or a EE woman?

Vanyamba:
The customer draws some scheme from functional blocks, on-line in the browser, then click 'Buy' and after near half a day one get ready board in a box, after day or several - ready to use device in the stylish case.

The software side is already starting to get there. For example, Sprog! and Scratch, while mainly aimed at teaching programming, are a great proof of concept, along with more advanced-user-friendly tools like Yahoo! Pipes. Even Google got in on the action with App Inventor for building Android applications. With all of these, there's very little traditional programming; instead, they're visually modelling the logic involved: drag, drop, done.

We're a little behind on the hardware side, but all the underlying pieces are already there: low-cost 3D printing, low-cost CNC, low-cost board fab, and this idea of stackable/reusable hardware. The next 10-20 years are going to be pretty cool. :slight_smile:

The next 10-20 years are going to be pretty cool.

No cooler then the last 60+ years have been for some of us. We watched men landing on the moon live. :smiley:

retrolefty:
We watched men landing on the moon live. :smiley:

We also watched "2001" turn from "prophecy" into "wishful thinking" =(

If the cockroaches ever get around to writing a history of the humans, they'll probably decide that "The Turning Point" was when we decided we'd rather watch Star Trek on TV than make it happen.

[cynical rant]

I remember watching the moon landing, then a few years later 2001 Space Odessy (remember that space station) and thinking that when I was older a holiday in space and even on the moon would be the norm.

And what have we got, a few tin cans super-glued together with some resident scientists and a defunct space shuttle program.

Oh well, maybe in a few generations.

If the money had been spent on something useful, say reducing poverty or increasing the number of hospital beds I'd say fair enough, that's a good swap. But somehow I doubt that's the case.

[/cynical rant]


Rob

I think the space accomplishments have contiuned to be pretty impressive, at least to me anyway. The Hubble telescope, all the robot missions to all the planets, lots of knowleged gained, great pictures. Sending people into space is still too expensive, there waits a new energy breakthrough if common people are going to have low cost access. It will happen, it has too, life will not survive on earth when the sun goes boom. We need to be somewhere else when that happens. :smiley:

Lefty

Graynomad:
If the money had been spent on something useful, say reducing poverty or increasing the number of hospital beds I'd say fair enough, that's a good swap. But somehow I doubt that's the case.

[/cynical rant]

We did get this Internet thing. I hear it's pretty handy.

DCContrarian:

Graynomad:
If the money had been spent on something useful, say reducing poverty or increasing the number of hospital beds I'd say fair enough, that's a good swap. But somehow I doubt that's the case.

[/cynical rant]

We did get this Internet thing. I hear it's pretty handy.

And Tang, and PCs, and Steve Jobs. The spinoffs just boggle ones mind, little ones like mine anyway. :smiley:

I think the space accomplishments have contiuned to be pretty impressive,

True, I guess they don't quite grab the imagination like a person walking on another planet.

when the sun goes boom. We need to be somewhere else when that happens.

She'll be right, I've got some SPF50+ lotion and anyway there's a 50/50 chance it will happen at night :slight_smile:


Rob

True, I guess they don't quite grab the imagination like a person walking on another planet.

Yes, walking on Mars would be a great accomplishment, but mostly for pride and ego. So much more information and data can be obtained by the robots, compared to short visits by us meat bags returning with a few rocks.

Lefty

If the money had been spent on something useful, say reducing poverty or increasing the number of hospital beds

Not to turn the thread into political rants, but the NASA budget peaked at about 4.5% of the total US budget (in '65. More recently it's less than 1%), compared to (recently) about 20% each for Medicare/etc (hospital beds, etc) and Social security (helps prevent old folks from being poor) and 14% "safety net" programs (reducing poverty.)

I won't claim that any of that money is spent particularly efficiently, but quadrupling the space budget by reducing social programs, or reducing the space program to zero and putting all the money in social programs, would be unlikely to make a noticeable difference.

How about boost both space program and social welfare with reducing guns and troops. It's unlikely the 3rd world war will start within a few decades. Oil running out may spark conflicts but with more money on renewable energy, we can prevent that. If each country doesn't have to watch their own backs so much, they can spend time and money on something more meaningful.

Anyways, if we make it to Mars, it's like the good old American dream come true. Martians welcoming us with gold and endless resources. Everyone sends postcards with photos of stockpiles of energon cubes and gold bars. :grin:

reducing guns and troops.

Sounds good to me. Unless you count "troops" as another method of helping the poor.

Unfortunately, reducing the "Defense" budget is unlikely to end up putting money into other science/tech areas. Those social programs are like a black hole for money, inefficiently spending everything thrown their way in bureaucratic rat holes that don't solve the original problems, and don't even end up creating any neat toys.