Arduino MEGA = Arduino DUE?! By price it seems they are.

Arduino MEGA and Arduino DUE cannot be comparable at all...

However, the price on arduino shop page is the same: 35 Euro.

Can somebody explain this?

The ATmega2560 on the Arduino Mega is a pretty old technology chip, and has a retail price (digikey) of about $12.
The SAM3X8E ARM chip in the Arduino Due is more recent, and despite being much faster and having more memory. retails for about $10.

The rest of the boards are "approximately similar", so why shouldn't they sell for about the same price?

The chip pricing "paradox" is actually pretty common. Newer chips are designed for newer fabs and design rules, and are frequently cheaper to make than old chips. As another example, the ATmega4809 chip used on Arduino Nano Every (48k flash, 6k RAM, multiple UARTs) is currently cheaper than the ATmega8 (8k/1k) chip used on the original Arduinos.

(Of course, it's also possible that both of these boards are headed for obsolescence, and Arduino has priced them to get rid of old stock...)

I wouldn't like to see the Mega phased out. It has become my favourite.

...R

The Due was unavailable for quite a while some years back and there was speculation that it had been retired, but now it's been back in stock steadily for quite some time. It's not the most popular board, but it does diehard fans. I'd be surprised if Arduino willingly retired the Mega, since there isn't anything like an equivalent in the new boards. The closest is the Due, but I'd guess the Due would be retired instead of the Mega if one had to go.

Mega board is still greatly overpriced on arduino shop.

Is there any benefit comparing to $11 Chinese clone? Serial to USB chip is only difference I can see.

There are several benefits to buying the official Mega, but the biggest one IMO is that some of the profit from the official Mega supports the work and services from Arduino that benefit the entire Arduino community. Arduino pays a large team of highly skilled developers to write and support free, open source software, including the Arduino IDE, hardware cores, and libraries. With very few exceptions, the manufacturers of products sold to the Arduino community, who benefit greatly from that software and support, never make even the smallest contribution to these projects. It's very much in all our best interests that the Arduino company does well in business.

pert:
Arduino pays a large team of highly skilled developers to write and support free, open source software, including the Arduino IDE, hardware cores, and libraries. With very few exceptions, the manufacturers of products sold to the Arduino community, who benefit greatly from that software and support, never make even the smallest contribution to these projects. It's

I doubt Arduino pay a dime for a development to anyone out of the company. Decent code from third-party people are probably just donated without any charge, including libs...

I may agree that libs are fine (not looking in the sources, though), but IDE is one of the worst products I have ever seen! It is badly designed, crowded with useless stuff or not very well organized, full of glitches, or serious bugs (as recent auto-deletion of sketch without apparent reason) and with a main excuse that nothing will be reorganizied better since "It will confuse novices!" Who decide what is a benefit or hassle for a total novices?

That is quite sensitive issue, many documentation is already wrote or printed, I'm aware. But anyway, all these make me to write my own IDE from ground few years ago, I have completed it just in few weeks in my own limited spare time after work, all from ground without even looking in the IDE source code I found lost of time anyway. Problems I had with Arduino IDE where gone, all of interest done as it should be and added functionalities I have needed, as to show detail info after compilation regarding used memory, functions size and similar elementary stuff official IDE didn't supported nor still do.

That is why I just testing IDE from time to time and never gave a cent of donation for it. At end, I'm really sorry I must to say, but that is more than obvious for me - any money spent for official IDE development is really burned money!

noob314:
I doubt Arduino pay a dime for a development to anyone out of the company.

That doesn't really make sense. I'm not sure what you mean by "the company". If Arduino is paying someone to do work then by definition that person is either a contractor or an employee.

noob314:
Decent code from third-party people are probably just donated without any charge, including libs...

Of course. That's how open source software works. But from what I've seen over 7 years following and participating in Arduino's open source projects, the paid developers do the vast majority of the work. It's really helpful to have that core of paid developers to run the projects and even manage the volunteer contributions.

noob314:
IDE is one of the worst products I have ever seen! It is badly designed, crowded with useless stuff or not very well organized, full of glitches, or serious bugs

Nobody is forcing you to use it. Better yet, why not submit a pull request to fix the bugs? How much code have you contributed to the IDE?

noob314:
as recent auto-deletion of sketch without apparent reason

Hundreds of thousands of people use the IDE every day. One or two people reported their sketch got deleted. We have no way of knowing whether that was even caused by the IDE.

noob314:
Who decide what is a benefit or hassle for a total novices?

The people with many years of experience teaching novices. There are other options for advanced users.

noob314:
all these make me to write my own IDE from ground few years ago, I have completed it just in few weeks in my own limited spare time after work, all from ground without even looking in the IDE source code I found lost of time anyway. Problems I had with Arduino IDE where gone, all of interest done as it should be and added functionalities I have needed, as to show detail info after compilation regarding used memory, functions size and similar elementary stuff official IDE didn't supported nor still do.

Where can I download this IDE of yours? I expect it has absolutely no bugs, right?

Of course is had full sense - money stays in the company. What is not clear, you have understood. :slight_smile:
Of course I have submitted several suggestions for the arduino software and the forum - no body cares. Why bother anymore.

Why you think I should dig inside the endless source code to correct any bug? These who make it in the first place have full responsibility.

Why you think I would lost my time with initially badly designed product and correct some minor to serious bugs? It would stay badly designed after that as well.

And what "novice" anyway means? Generally novice in embedded systems? Novice in programming? Novice in hardware? All in one or some? Notice, for instance, that many professional programmers would greatly "suffer" reading some wrote code and watching general on design or trying to write the code is such minimalist IDE, when they already use professional RAD environment earning for life several decades.

Watch this and tell me that implementing that is so hard. These are standard IDE functionality after so many decades of RAD development. I have no idea why any type of novice mentioned here will be confused in order to have such abilities in official IDE, instead to be forced to use other alternatives:

Why would you want to use the arduino eclipse plugin? (by Jan Baeyens)

You talking about people have years of experience teaching novices with the proper teaching license? Or perhaps some CEO(s) think what a 5 year old novice is capable to do with? Or perhaps some student already have experience in programming. Or perhaps some seniors?

Again, there is wide variety of "novices". I personally do think that I'm a noob in electronic and embedded systems even with 10 years of experience in many EE fields as an amateur. Simply, I'm aware I do not have a degree in EE and my knowledge is full of gaps. On the contrary, for any stuff related with computer science which is my primary profession I'm not quite impressed when I see such gaps in any software project.

Long story short, I have made my version of IDE for my personal use several years ago to spare myself such existed flaws in design of Arduino IDE, which obviously is intended for novices in everything and never had intention to publish it.

People who think Arduino boards are overpriced and buggy, and the Arduino IDE is primitive and buggy, are invited to start their own companies, and do better. (Adafruit, Sparkfun, Pimoroni , Seeed, and some others seem to be doing OK, so it is possible. Others have failed relatively spectacularly (Wiring and LeafLabs Maple come to mind.) It's also a lot more work (and more luck) than most people think, and too much of the work is neither hardware nor software creation!)

noob314:
Of course is had full sense - money stays in the company. What is not clear, you have understood. :slight_smile:

No. It doesn't make sense. For example, Arduino contracts me to do some work. I've never met anyone from Arduino in person. I've never visited their offices. I'm just someone who is passionate about the Arduino project and has managed to find a way to find some paid work in this area in addition to the volunteer work I've been doing for the project for years. So when they send me a check and I use that money to pay rent and buy groceries, is that money staying in the company?

noob314:
And what "novice" anyway means? Generally novice in embedded systems? Novice in programming? Novice in hardware? All in one or some?

All of the above. The goal is for someone with no prior experience with hardware or programming to be able to program a microcontroller within minutes of installing the Arduino IDE.

noob314:
that many professional programmers would greatly "suffer" reading some wrote code and watching general on design or trying to write the code is such minimalist IDE, when they already use professional RAD environment earning for life several decades.

The Arduino IDE was not made for them. They are welcome to use a more advanced IDE, CLI, makefiles, or whatever.

noob314:
Watch this and tell me that implementing that is so hard. These are standard IDE functionality after so many decades of RAD development.

The hard part is resisting making the UI unnecessarily complex by adding features that the target user doesn't have any use for. Why would Arduino want to make their IDE a clone of all the other steep learning curve professional IDEs that already exist?

noob314:
Why would you want to use the arduino eclipse plugin? (by Jan Baeyens)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zc2JLbtbI7Q

This shows how you so completely don't understand who the typical Arduino user is. I'm glad the Arduino Eclipse plugin is available as an option, but this is not going to provide a good first experience for a beginner. Sure, the brightest and most persistent will eventually succeed, but what about the other 95%? I guess you don't care about them. After all, microcontrollers should only be for the elite nerds, right? Well, we don't take that attitude. We know that microcontrollers can be made accessible to everyone. This is the reason for the incredible success of the Arduino project.

noob314:
You talking about people have years of experience teaching novices with the proper teaching license? Or perhaps some CEO(s) think what a 5 year old novice is capable to do with? Or perhaps some student already have experience in programming. Or perhaps some seniors?

Why would it matter if they have a license? If they have experience teaching, that's all that matters. And I've never seen Arduino's CEO to take any part in the decisions of what features to add to the IDE. That's not his job. There are people at Arduino who are specifically assigned to make those decisions and he leaves it to them to do their job.

noob314:
Again, there is wide variety of "novices". I personally do think that I'm a noob in electronic and embedded systems even with 10 years of experience in many EE fields as an amateur. Simply, I'm aware I do not have a degree in EE and my knowledge is full of gaps. On the contrary, for any stuff related with computer science which is my primary profession I'm not quite impressed when I see such gaps in any software project.

Despite what you may consider yourself, you are not the target user of the Arduino IDE. That said, Arduino is not only for beginners. There are really no limitations to what you can do with Arduino. Arduino has been doing a lot of work recently to provide for the advanced users. There is the arduino-cli tool. Although we have provided for people who like using a CLI for year via the Arduino IDE's CLI, arduino-cli provides a more powerful interface without needing to install the entire Arduino IDE. arduino-cli also makes it much easier to add Arduino support to any 3rd party IDE or text editor.

Arduino has also created a new Arduino Pro IDE based on Eclipse Theia/Electron. I will say that the Arduino Pro IDE is still in the alpha development phase. People are welcome to use it, but they should expect to be participating in testing, rather than expecting a bug-free experience.

noob314:
Long story short, I have made my version of IDE for my personal use several years ago to spare myself such existed flaws in design of Arduino IDE, which obviously is intended for novices in everything and never had intention to publish it.

Well good for you, but since you are not kind enough to share it I'll continue to use the best free open source software for beginners to learn to work with microcontrollers: the Arduino IDE!

pert:
Well good for you, but since you are not kind enough to share it I'll continue to use the best free open source software for beginners to learn to work with microcontrollers: the Arduino IDE!

+1

It is so much easier to complain than to contribute.

...R

pert:
Well good for you, but since you are not kind enough to share it I'll continue to use the best free open source software for beginners to learn to work with microcontrollers: the Arduino IDE!

With such "black and white" attitude ("If you are not my friend - you are my enemy!") we will go nowhere. On other side your view is so wide that all shades of gray are considered. And that is the point here.

I have though about publishing it, but not certain about license to use arduino libs etc. And I had no time nor will to legal department of Arduino to ask any explanation or permission, as I'm not a lawyer. Later it was really not important.

You can't simply have one product for all "from 7 to 77", that is not possible. If your target group is so wide, you actually is focused for primary one, in this case let say it is 7 to 18.

You have wrote "All of the above" mentioned target groups, skilled or not, kids or not. On other side you said "Why would it matter if they have a license? If they have experience teaching, that's all that matters. ". Oh, it matters quite a bit. Otherwise we will have one teaching center equally good for all "7 to 77" and teachers versatile and equally focused to teach anyone, learn kids to read and write and as well to discuss about metaphysics. That would be ideal world, is it? :wink: But in reality, that is not possible as simply have no sense. There is no way to put all in one basket and expect that all will be satisfied.

Look for instance at the main menu in IDE: "Examples", "Included Libraries", "Boards" - all overcrowded. Submenus can be multiple screens long! I do not think that is simple for anyone. When Arduno had few boards and few examples, that perhaps was fine, but now keeping all by inertia makes real mess.

Etc., there is many problems here, however "all" (quite questionable who are these people) really so not want to see it and get something about - "we" all love our puppy, even it is now grown up, perhaps bigger than we are. :slight_smile:

Oh and I agree, if your monthly pay check during a year from Arduino allowed you to pay rent and buy groceries, that was definitely worth of your daily effort and time if that was the only job you had at the time and big financial lost for Arduino...

Robin2:
It is so much easier to complain than to contribute.

...R

Certainly, as your sarcastic comments. It is not miracle you have 60K+ posts.

If you all do not want suggestions and constructive critics, just block them all by basic forum rules and stick with you "perfect" judgements and projects. I have noting against, on the contrary.

noob314:
With such "black and white" attitude ("If you are not my friend - you are my enemy!")

I don't think I have that attitude. I certainly don't consider you my enemy. I don't agree with you on everything, but I don't expect to. You are welcome to express your opinions here in a polite manner, and I am welcome to do the same.

I have tried several of the most popular alternatives to the Arduino IDE. I saw that they had advantages, but were much less beginner-friendly. Since my main focus is to help beginners to learn how to use microcontrollers, the Arduino IDE is my preference. For all I know, your IDE is superior, but I won't assume that until I have tried it.

noob314:
On other side your view is so wide that all shades of gray are considered. And that is the point here.

I don't understand what you mean by this.

noob314:
I have though about publishing it, but not certain about license to use arduino libs etc. And I had no time nor will to legal department of Arduino to ask any explanation or permission, as I'm not a lawyer. Later it was really not important.

I do understand that figuring out how to license your code and comply with the licenses of any other people's code you might have used is confusing and not fun for most of us. Fortunately, some people knowledgeable about these things have published information online that makes it pretty clear even to us non-lawyers. As far as licensing your own code, it's as easy as just grabbing a standard license and pasting it into your project. When it comes to using other people's code, the most simple approach is to just use the same license as they did. The tricky thing is if you want to use a different license. Then you have to determine compatibility.

Anyway, I hope you might consider making your code open source, but it's your decision of course.

noob314:
You can't simply have one product for all "from 7 to 77", that is not possible. If your target group is so wide, you actually is focused for primary one, in this case let say it is 7 to 18.

Well, 7 is maybe a little on the young side, but above a certain age (maybe 12?), I don't think age is really relevant. What matters is experience. Arduino is targeted to people with no prior experience, but also intended to be powerful enough that you can continue with Arduino as far as you want to go and make very advanced projects. So as far as an age range goes (over a reasonable age), it certainly is possible. As far as a range of experience, when we're talking about the Arduino IDE in specific, it's true that we can't make everyone happy (and I've never claimed otherwise). That's why we have decided to focus on the beginners, and leave the very advanced users to try the other alternatives if they like.

noob314:
"Why would it matter if they have a license? If they have experience teaching, that's all that matters. ". Oh, it matters quite a bit.

We'll have to agree to disagree about that. I understand why licensing is needed, but someone with experience teaching and no license may very well still have very valid insight. This is much more so in this case where we are talking about designing the UI of a piece of software. How is a teaching license even relevant in that case?

noob314:
Look for instance at the main menu in IDE: "Examples", "Included Libraries", "Boards" - all overcrowded. Submenus can be multiple screens long! I do not think that is simple for anyone. When Arduno had few boards and few examples, that perhaps fine, but now keeping all by inertia makes real mess.

I don't think it's so much of a problem, but maybe there is room for improvement. How did you solve that problem in your IDE?

noob314:
Etc., there is many problems here, however "all" (quite questionable who are these people) really so not want to see it and get something about - "we" all love our puppy, even it is not grown up, perhaps bigger than we are. :slight_smile:

I don't understand what you mean by this.

noob314:
Oh and I agree, if your monthly pay check during a year from Arduino allowed you to pay rent and buy groceries, that was definitely worth of your daily effort and time if that was the only job you had at the time and big lost for Arduino...

I think you misunderstood my point. I was trying to explain why your statement "money stays in the company" doesn't make sense.

Of course it was worth my daily effort and time. In fact, I think it's worth my daily effort and time to do the work even as a volunteer, because I believe in the mission of the Arduino project. Paying people to do work is good too though, because it allows them to spend more of their time doing that work. I know that some amazing open source projects have been accomplished with only volunteer labor, but it's hard for me to believe that the Arduino project would be able to progress as quickly without the team of developers that Arduino is able to pay with their profits from selling boards.

noob314:
Certainly, as your sarcastic comments. It is not miracle you have 60K+ posts.

I am very comfortable with the amount of contribution I have made to the Arduino community, by posting a number of tutorials that have been well received and by helping individuals with their problems.

On the specific issue of the IDE, I don't use it. I use the Geany editor. And I have written a simple Python program to compile and upload Arduino code using the command-line IDE. As you can see I have made my Python code available for anyone who wishes to use it.

....R

so, while we are on the subject of the IDE: is there a place where a guy can make a suggestion, or request? A pulpit where you can state your piece?

@Geek Emeritus there is a forum board for that "Suggestions for the Arduino Project - What do you think should be improved, features for the hard/software, bugs you found"
https://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?board=21.0
That's a good place to get feedback from the community about your suggestion, which you can perhaps use to refine it.

You can also submit bug reports and feature requests to the issue tracker on GitHub:

This is the place where the Arduino developers will see your suggestions.