Products that started life with arduino prototypes

I'm an Arduino fan, and I've been discussing Arduino as something to encourage as a hardware development kit. The problem I have is when they make the comment "but arduino's just for small/amateur/prototype projects, not for real products", I'm not sure quite how to answer it apart from "the point is to prototype, and then slim down the PCB and components before mass manufacturing", but they don't seem to like it.

What I'm wondering is, are there are 'testimonials', case-studies, articles describing real on-the-shelf products that started life as arduino-based prototypes? Of course the bigger/more successful the product, the better it would be for my argument.

The best I've been able to find so far are BakerTweet and OpenEnergyMonitor, but neither are really production-quality/mainstream enough to be good arguments.

I dont have a product, but whenever someone gets a shot of my AVR board, which has 14 pin 8 pin and 28 pin sockets I usually hear at least once "see he knows what he is doing, none of that arduino crap"

and 95% of the time whatever mcu I am using is running a sketch ... :roll_eyes:

http://www.cameraaxe.com

Pretty impressive photos, btw.

Most of those negative comments are made out of gross arrogance or gross ignorance.

All microcontroller products started life on some type of development board. Whether that board is Arduino or ATmel is of little significance. Arduino is a development board with low overhead, and ready access to most of the functions. And it provides a way to develop code and then move it to other devices. I have developed a small piece of code on the Arduino and then moved it to a ATtiny2313, I also used the Arduino as the ISP for the 2313.

Those that look down their nose at the Arduino are either spending way to much money for some "professional" system (they think it can only be good it it cost a ton of money) or they aren't doing anything, and doing everything they can to keep others from doing anything.

If the Arduino will do the job, then use it. If you can get by with a 328 with bootloader then go for it.

kf2qd:
Most of those negative comments are made out of gross arrogance or gross ignorance.

All microcontroller products started life on some type of development board. Whether that board is Arduino or ATmel is of little significance.

I totally agree, I don't see why an expensive development kit would be any more or less capable unless it's spec'd differently for the needs (which can't be simply decided upon just because you want to offer a hardware development kit). The problem is the perception, whether right or wrong, with the team I've spoken to is that Arduino is an 'amateur' platform for 'small prototype projects', whereas a more 'enterprise' development kit would somehow get them to market quicker with higher quality product.

I can somehow understand their argument, but only if the architecture of the final product is required to be significantly different than an arduino-based prototype, but since AT chips are presumably used in all manor of embedded devices, who's to know if for instance an energy meter is based on AT or Intel as long as the thing does it's job.

kf2qd:
Arduino is a development board with low overhead

Precisely why I'd love them to offer it as an option for developers... I'd love to see the 'entry fee' for the development platform get lower and see how much more innovation is done with it.

Arduino is a development board with low overhead

True that. I just started playing Arduino (and electronics in general) about a month and a half ago. I think in total I've spent maybe $90 on projects so far. (got my nifty thermistor datalogging rig, most of that cost was the 8gb Micro SD card. Got me a shift register thing that produces random light shows on my wall.) Heck for most of my resistors and other components I recycle them out of an old "tee hee, coilgun" project I had where I went to wallgreens and asked them if they had any disposable cameras and they gave me like 70 of them for free. So pretty low overhead is a bit of an understatement.