Should we be worried about the "Arduino Revolution"? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Icchan
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: December 07, 2015, 03:23:39 am
content: Hi everyone.It's quite late here so my opening post is somewhat brief, but what do you guys think?http://hackaday.com/2014/12/25/student-trolls-anti-arduino-prof-with-parasite-mcu/I just came across this post on Hackaday. It had a bunch of comments that really made me to think about if people are thinking that they should just replace everything with an MCU instead of learning the concepts by building them up from more discrete circuits?I get it that it's supposed to be a joke, but reading the comments shows that some people really are against using discrete logic if you can do it with an MCU and have hard time coming up with reasons to use discrete logic instead of MCU in some scenarios.I think that understanding the concepts on hardware level is important before you even write single line of code. I've worked with a bunch of people in electronics projects and I've met coders who understand hardware and those who don't. Those who don't, make more simple mistakes and I waste more of my time debugging their code than designing new electronics since they don't have the capability of debugging their code on their own that's running on embedded system. Using a multi meter to debug digital I/O or understanding what's said on the data sheet of an MCU is lost on many.Is this "Arduino Revolution" taking away new student's ability to understand how important basics are? Is the future "just code" and no hardware but one chip?What is the need for understanding logic gates on today's EE-field?I hope we'll hear about this from Dave or perhaps even a topic on The Amp Hour since it's quite interesting to think about in this context

author: DimitriP
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 07, 2015, 03:42:44 am
content: The "maker" movement among other things also moves product.There are tooooooo many posts along the lines "I have an xyz mcy and I want to do abc ....BTW i am a beginner and I know nothing but i read an article that says I can do this with an mcu and help from you guys "I find hackaday a mixed bag of good bad and ugly articles.full discolsure : I'd rather a see a good concept proven on a breadboard or wired ugly style than a half baked "design" on a commercially produced double sided PCb with solder mask .

author: rx8pilot
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 07, 2015, 03:57:38 am
content: I don't think Arduino will dissuade those that are interested in the nuts and bolts of electronics. For those new to the professional field like myself, I had no choice but to learn the fundamentals to design what I needed to design. The MCU all by itself could not solve my problems, it only helped.A colleague of mine set off designing a similar functioning circuit with nothing but discreet parts. He is older than me and substantially more experienced. I had the burden of learning many of the analog fundamentals of the project but I decided to use it as an opportunity to integrate an MCU that covered a lot of territory. It was an inadvertent race of the old and the new way of doing things. It took me two PCB spins to get the analog working, and then set off to code the MCU to get the rest of the functionality. My colleague had a vastly more complex web of analog, but in general got it working in 2 spins. At that point we both realized that the originally stated requirements for the circuit behavior needed to be changed, and changed again. This is where the MCU shined, I could update the software and totally change the behavior without a new PCB. The analog version was a major do-over every time we learned more about the problem we were trying to solve.Analog/discreet is a disappearing art because there are fewer and fewer applications where BJT's, OPAMPS, etc can make a whole solution.An MCU only approach offers very little capability.Those that can develop analog/discreet and MCU/FPGA will be able to accomplish the most.Arduino is a great learning tool. My concern is that I see a lot of chatter about spending a few months fiddling with Arduino and then making a commercial product out of it. I have no insight into what comes of these conversations I see on forums, but I would not want to buy a product that is based on an Arduino and developed by someone that watched a few tutorials to make it happen. Most of the smart folks out there will quickly realize the there is a lot of power in learning the fundamentals or electronics.