Does Arduino have a future?

liudr:
I'm glad they are now working together. I hope the arduino srl will not use any low-quality regulator that goes into thermal shutdown when 12V is connected for more than a few minutes. Almost ruined a whole project. A dozen devices behaved strangely.

We might as well stop using linear regulator entirely. Switch-mode controllers with built-in switches and synchronous rectifier are fairly cheap now, and can increase both board efficiency and maximum current available at the same time.

I have cooked up a design that is largely identical to Uno but had three changes, one of them being replacing both AMS1117-5.0 and LP2980-3.3 linear regulators with TPS562200. That chip comes in the same SOT-23-5 package as LP2980-3.3, but it can push out 2A maximum, use small magnetics at the size of 5650 or smaller, and have a minimum power efficiency of 75% at zero load. If you are interested I can publish it under 3-clause BSD license. The same power delivery system is also used on my Uno-compatible STM32F103CB/STM32L152CC development board.

On my STM32F103CB board, with the CPU running idle at 72MHz, one power LED and a blinking indicator LED on, and a significant portion of onboard peripherals enabled, the board draws no more than 50mA when powered by only USB. And when powered by +12V barrel jack no component on the board get warm. So if we move the board to switch-mode converters we can cut a big chunk out of the energy consumption, and eliminate warm components almost entirely.