[serviceberry]

I used to say things like that, but come on: Arduino is targeted at hobbyists. More specifically, it's targeted at hobbyists who don't want to spend too much time learning hardware. If they did, they would be using a "bare" microcontroller better suited for their needs and costing one tenth the price. But they're not interested in microcontroller programming, they just want to get their art project done.

It's the same thing that happened with computers. Billions of people use them, but most just want to access Facebook or use MS Word, not learn OS internals. It's a different world from where we used to be 30-40 years ago, and that's fine. We design simpler, more intuitive products for them.

If a product meant for that group can't be used effectively by the target audience, I think the fault is with the designer, not with the user.

[toast0]

> If they did, they would be using a "bare" microcontroller better suited for their needs and costing one tenth the price.

Where do you get something like an ESP that's one tenth the price? ESPs are cheap and you can run Arduino, ESP-IDF directly, or fringe environments (I had some ESP8266 running NodeMCU because Lua made more sense to me than Arduino).

[serviceberry]

You can run Arduino code on anything, since it's mostly just a bit of syntactic sugar around C. But I'm sure you know what I mean.

My point is that people who are attracted to Arduino are, by and large, not the kind of people who want to geek out about the inner workings of the MCU, and there's nothing wrong with that.

[Vurdentium]

The problem isn't with the artist doing a one-off project involving a microcontroller. It's the Arduino "experts" who write blogs, create videos, and dominate forums with their accumulated nonsense. They posit themselves as authorities in the space, newbies adopt and echo whatever rubbish they make up, and the cycle continues. They get very defensive if you try to correct them, even linking directly to documentation supporting it.

If you're going to write a blog about how the ESP32 doesn't connect to the strongest AP so you need to pin it to a specific BSSID in your router settings... Maybe you shouldn't be writing that blog. If you haven't taken at least a moment to check documentation and see that the behaviour you want is already an option that can be selected by changing literally one line in your ESP32's WiFi config. Instead this pseudoscience proliferates.

[vachina]

I know what you mean haha.

Instead of spending x2 the initial effort to fix the root cause, you spend x1 the initial effort to implement jank and then spend x10 the effort down the line maintaining the jank.

[RockRobotRock]

Who wants to deal with writing that logic for a hobby project? That doesn't sound fun at all.

Sounds like a "good enough" shitty solution to me, which is kind of the whole point of DIY.