Why do Arduino microcontrollers often weaker or cost more than cheaper or similarly priced micro controllers that have better specs and features?

[AndreiArgeanu]

I think it's fair to say that Arduino is the best known maker of micro controllers. But now with competition out there why still get an Arduino when even knockoff's cost more than cheaper alternatives. For example, for the price of a knockoff Arduino Nano you can get a Raspberry Pi Pico, which to me looks to be better in nearly every way, higher clock speeds, twice the cores, more SRAM, more on board flash, more I/O pins and of those I/O pins more of them have features like PWM and other things. So at this point I find it hard to justify getting an Arduino, even the Uno R3 isn't that great compared to the pico, not to even mention the Zero or the Zero W(though they're not micro controllers). Is there something I'm missing, are Arduino's more reliable, are there things outside of specs where the Arduino excels? And it's not only the Pico, there are other micro controllers out there like ESP32 or ESP8266.

[komar]

Same question could have been asked a few years ago about the RPI 3 - why buy that when there were Orange PI, Banana PI and other "knockoffs" which had better specs.

My personal answer is that I prefer the stuff with bigger community support behind them - RPI for Linux and Arduino for micro controller since many stuff have been done, discovered and documented by the people using them.

[mariushm]

Raspberri Pi is heavily subsidized, the microcontrollers are more or less sold at heavy discount.

 

As for Raspberry Pi Pico,.. I suspect they just rebrand some Mediatek or other chinese micro ... they use ARM cores which only cost the manufacturer a one time license (something like $25k per product and then free or something like that) and they use a low nm process (40nm for the rp2040) which allows them to put a lot of chips on a wafer, but there's some downsides to that, like for example no longer being able to power the thing from 5v, less hobbyist friendly as it's more esd sensitive, requires surface mount soldering etc...

 

Arduino is an 8 bit microcontroller and is designed on an older manufacturing process (they're probably made at 90nm or even higher) which often use lower diameter wafers (20cm vs 30cm for example) and while the masks are cheaper and it costs less to produce the wafers, you still may get less chips per wafer, so you can't go below some value for the actual chips.

 

Keep in mind that you're also paying for the packaging, for the software and documentation and all that.

 

The arduino chips (328p whatever) are by no means best price vs performance or whatever ... there's lots of modern chips just as easy to program and work with which are often cheaper and less power hungry... but you often can't beat  copy pasting other projects and editing them for your needs.

[AndreiArgeanu]

20 minutes ago, komar said:

Same question could have been asked a few years ago about the RPI 3 - why buy that when there were Orange PI, Banana PI and other "knockoffs" which had better specs.

My personal answer is that I prefer the stuff with bigger community support behind them - RPI for Linux and Arduino for micro controller since many stuff have been done, discovered and documented by the people using them.

But the raspberry Pi Pico has good documentation and will potentially have larger community support as it can be coded using micro python which is extremely similar to python making it more accessible to hobbyists. No to mention the variations of boards that are already out there based on it, and upcoming ones like the Arduino Nano RP2040 connect.

[komar]

3 minutes ago, AndreiArgeanu said:

But the raspberry Pi Pico has good documentation and will potentially have larger community support as it can be coded using micro python which is extremely similar to python making it more accessible to hobbyists. No to mention the variations of boards that are already out there based on it, and upcoming ones like the Arduino Nano RP2040 connect.

Then buy 1 and lead the way my friend

[H713]

You can buy Nano clones for about $4, and they work just fine. If you're really worried about cost, the schematics are public domain. It's not a particularly hard PCB layout either.

 

IMO, the value of Arduino is in the libraries. They are very extensive, and that often saves time.

[AndreiArgeanu]

9 minutes ago, H713 said:

You can buy Nano clones for about $4, and they work just fine. If you're really worried about cost, the schematics are public domain. It's not a particularly hard PCB layout either.

 

IMO, the value of Arduino is in the libraries. They are very extensive, and that often saves time.

That's just about as much as a pico, for less power and less pins that have less features. It's not only cost it's also features and power, plus it can only be coded in the arduino language based of C which makes it less beginner friendly, whereas with the pico you have both C and python, and all libraries for the arduino are written in C and C++ so I can't imagine why they wouldn't work on a pico with some adjustments

[Alexeygridnev1993]

On 5/9/2021 at 6:34 PM, mariushm said:

Raspberri Pi is heavily subsidized,

Where did you find this information? I didn't manage to find anything online that would suggest that RPi is subsidized.

[mariushm]

4 hours ago, Alexeygridnev1993 said:

Where did you find this information? I didn't manage to find anything online that would suggest that RPi is subsidized.

It's well known.

 

The founder and CEO of RPi was a technical director and ASIC architect at Broadcom.... and that was one of the reasons why they went with Broadcom BCM283x series.  Otherwise, that Soc series is not very open source, not easy to develop on (compared to other chips), and has a lot of stuff that's not accessible by regular developers.

 

They got huge volume pricing from Broadcom (and while they won't admit it, they most likely got BETTER than huge volume pricing)

As a non-profit organization they also got funding from the UK government and they also basically got nearly free distribution through Farnell instead of paying 10-20% to Amazon or other places.

 

See Economics of the $35 / $25 Raspberry Pi - Raspberry Pi Forums

Quote

Although this thread is locked, I will make a couple of points that have been missed by some of the other posters. Note, I am a Broadcom employee and a Foundation volunteer (but not a founder member or anything like that).

The current board was designed by a Foundation member, NOT Broadcom. So the design is permanently available to the Foundation.

The Foundation DO pay for the SoC - but they do get a good price (one normally reserved for large purchasers, although in fact current sales levels are so high that price is looking more and more sensible) .

The chip was chosen because 1) It's the right price and perfrormance 2) We have good support from Broadcom 3) Eben knows a lot about it.

Yes, some Broadcom engineers (me included) have put time in for free. But mostly not Broadcom's time - their own time. Broadcom have supplied some time, but that time is worth something because its has fixed issues seen elsewhere as well.

 

 

[Alexeygridnev1993]

3 hours ago, mariushm said:

It's well known.

An opinion of one guy on the RPi forum =/= "well-known".

 

OK, his idea is that Broadcom gives away millions of chips to RPi foundation as it is a more cost-effective way to advertize their other chips than to start an ad campaing. Doesn't that sound a bit ridiculous? Broadcom have been on the market basically forever, and I highly doubt they actually need any advertising at this point. Plus, it's been going on for 10 years, a bit long for a marketing campaign.

[mariushm]

1 hour ago, Alexeygridnev1993 said:

An opinion of one guy on the RPi forum =/= "well-known".

 

OK, his idea is that Broadcom gives away millions of chips to RPi foundation as it is a more cost-effective way to advertize their other chips than to start an ad campaing. Doesn't that sound a bit ridiculous? Broadcom have been on the market basically forever, and I highly doubt they actually need any advertising at this point. Plus, it's been going on for 10 years, a bit long for a marketing campaign.

No, it's not about giving away... let's say the chip in single piece quantity is 10$, and it's 8$ if you buy 1000 and 6$ if they order 10,000 chips.  If Broadcom gave them them the chips for 3-4$ a piece as a discount / huge volume deal, basically that's a huge advantage. That 2-3$ is the ddr3 chip, the hdmi connector, audio connectors, can be a huge benefit.

 

We're also talking about maybe preferential payment agreements, like "only pay us for the chips once you sell 1000 pcs or 5000 pcs of raspberri pi"  which means maybe they had more funds to purchase the other components, packaging, everything else.

 

Also keep in mind that all the work on raspberri pi to support the BCM8235 chip in linux and in general benefited Broadcom, it's reflected in the next chips Broadcom made, BCM8236 and BCM8237 ... which otherwise may not have existed. As is, they got into TVs and other things. Developers found hardware bugs, and they corrected them in next chips.

 

 

 

[Alexeygridnev1993]

On 7/11/2021 at 12:33 PM, mariushm said:

No, it's not about giving away... let's say the chip in single piece quantity is 10$, and it's 8$ if you buy 1000 and 6$ if they order 10,000 chips.  If Broadcom gave them them the chips for 3-4$ a piece as a discount / huge volume deal, basically that's a huge advantage. That 2-3$ is the ddr3 chip, the hdmi connector, audio connectors, can be a huge benefit.

 

We're also talking about maybe preferential payment agreements, like "only pay us for the chips once you sell 1000 pcs or 5000 pcs of raspberri pi"  which means maybe they had more funds to purchase the other components, packaging, everything else.

 

Also keep in mind that all the work on raspberri pi to support the BCM8235 chip in linux and in general benefited Broadcom, it's reflected in the next chips Broadcom made, BCM8236 and BCM8237 ... which otherwise may not have existed. As is, they got into TVs and other things. Developers found hardware bugs, and they corrected them in next chips.

 

 

 

That definitely sounds more reasonable, selling your chips for cheap to sell higher volume and to get free drivers and bug fixes in return. Still, I would not call it "subsidised", as that would imply that Broadcom is selling every chip at a loss, which is not likely to be the case. You cannot really sell millions of chips at a loss, even if you're losing just a dollar on every chip.

[artuc]

Part of it is convenience, there is easy to follow instructions and projects, they are easy to program, bootloader etc.

 

A long time ago at school we did PICs with assembly, needed to go through datasheets looking at registers and flags, manipulating binary strings...    urgh.

 

Those without a bootloader may need a programming or devkit board to flash your code, the official ones can be expensive.

 

There are micros that can do what an Arduino does for much cheaper but typically their ecosystem is just harder to get into for a casual hobbyist.