Without reverse engineering, there is no security. No way to find new bugs and vulnerabilities or confirm it's backdoor free. Just blind trust only.

Reverse engineering prohibitions are the dumbest things.

Let's say I do this. Arduino sues me. Okay. Now what? What money are they going to take?

Hell, this would be a perfect time for everyone to form an LLC and purchase Arduinos as the LLC and then release your research under your corporate name as CC0. If your LLC has no revenue, you as an individual are legally protected.

Arduino can try to put the genie back in the bottle but good luck.

Better companies than Arduino have tried to prevent hardware reverse engineering and have failed. Apple being the biggest company I can think of that have tried to sue people for releasing schematics of their motherboards.

It's still legal in Australia, at least, we never got the anti-circumvention rule the US media companies got into the US trade agreements

Or rather we did, but they have exceptions that cover just about every otherwise legal use case. I can legally decrypt media to play on my Linux machine, for example. I think the only thing we can't legally do is circumvent controls to do copyright violation

Same with raspberrypi really.
companies just can't seem to know how to grow without line go up mentality.

Also rp2040 devices.

I'm getting into meshtastic and learned how those esp32 devices are everywhere! They seem pretty neat

There are clones now more open than arduino that we can buy. In addition esp32 and other small boards are awesome.

I mean, it's either that or a vendor-independent ecosystem. And this rarely gets fostered by vendors.

I love the ESP32, was onboard with the ESP-8266 (might have the numbers wrong, it was the predecessor), but I thought the real difference between the ESP-32 and the Rpi was that the Rpi has an OS with a possible desktop even (and all that Libux has to offer basically), as the ESP is more of a uProcessor you program in C/C++?

Edit: Plesse disregard, I mixed up the posts and posted one levet too high too...

But how many of those esp32s are programmed using the Arduino IDE and Arduino libraries?

Arduino has its place for self-taught hobbyists. For a lot of projects, a simple code is more than enough, so there is no point of going into the more advanced mcu like esp32 or stm32.

You are not wrong. Took a trip down that path for a friend, helping him create some items, which was frustratingly limited.

It is, however, super easy if you don't want/need much.

I hate to see options disappear, even if we have other reasonable options available.

I was always surprised why the TI line of MSP430s didn't take better. Guess their marketing was bullshit 🤷.

All the open hardware and software and ecosystem was pretty cool. It was cool you could just buy hats, or whatever they're called, to add functionality, rather than designing a custom PCB and spending hundreds of dollars to get a few boards made and populated. I'm not a fan of their software stack or their choice of uC's, but they did make it easy to just kind of plug stuff together in hardware and software.

Up next: Raspberry foundation enshitification.

I stay away from all the micro tech drama and I feel like two years ago, that community was bitching that raspberry pi sold out and everyone should switch to arduino.

I don't have a side. I just pick whatever is easiest to make a emulation station.

You can also use the Arduino hardware without their IDE or libraries. You just need avr-gcc, avr-libc and a makefile. The AVR microcontrollers are very easy to program. The Arduino libraries really just get in the way once you need to do anything with timers.

True, but you can't just port arduino code to python or whatever language the raspberry picos compile from. An arduino project would have to be completely rewritten, as far as I'm aware.

You can get an arduino clone for a lot cheaper than you can get an rpi clone.

Sometimes, you just need something very simple and a cheap arduino is the right choice.

Arduino is also a lot more user friendly for newcomers.

It's a shame that Qualcomm will be the end of it.

I hope that you get over it soon. Coughing is the worst. I'd rather have hallucination levels of fever than have a bad cough.