Posted by Chris Anderson on December 30, 2009 at 12:00am
A fun analysis by Sparkfun on the world domination of Arduino over the past couple years. More people are searching for it than even the once-dominant Microchip (maker of the PIC chips). No wonder that Sparkfun reports that: "Microchip wanted to meet with us because they were interested in creating an 'Arduino' like board using a PIC processor. Microchip finally began to understand what it means to get people early, and using their hardware, and Microchip was sensing (rightfully) that they were losing market share to this thing called Arduino. "
This is because noone wants to buy demo and eval boards for development (Microchip produces dozens of these). The wiring of a demo board cannot be changed- I won't buy another board for about 100 USD if I have an MCU stamp which has only the "vegetative" parts (crystal, power management, prog. interface) and it's no big deal connecting extra stuff to it on a breadboard.
I think that the real success of the Arduino is because it relies on excellent, free and open source tools like the gcc compiler for the AVR family. You can find hundreds of free schemes on the web based on PIC micros with, or even more capabilities than Arduino, but if you haven't a free tool from you can program it easily... people don't want to waste time learning assembly languaje for their homebrew projects. Even if you can get free PICs from Microchip!
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