 Let's do some Python on hardware. Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum. OK. This week is going to be a little differently, Ada. Why? Well, there is an intersection of open source hardware, open source hardware news, Python on hardware, all the stuff we're doing. And speaking of nostalgia, because we had folks who saw us 10 years ago doing Show and Tell, I've been covering open source hardware beat for a long time. And there's new and interesting. It covers you at some point. It is. You're trapped in here with me. So in our newsletter, we were walking around, and Lady8 is like, hey, did you see the newsletter? I'm like, yeah, I started looking at it. And one link that was in there that Ann put in there that was really neat. So besides MicroPython version 1.2.2 out, do check that out. Infrared's a sponsor, both financially and with our code of MicroPython. We're very proud of that. Go to GitHub, and you can sponsor them if you want. We do a yearly donation to keep MicroPython going. It's what we base CircuitPython off of. But the article was on TechCrunch, which is a little weird. TechCrunch used to cover hardware a little bit more. And this was a surprise for me to see it. I don't know anyone at TechCrunch anymore. They more spoke at Crunchfair. I don't know. What was the name of that? What was the name of Tech? What was the TechCrunch event? You were on right before. The Genius Guys. Lyric Genius. And Bill Blasio. And he was like three hours late. He was really late. But he's really tall. TechCrunchExpo or something. Yeah, maybe. Or is it like Crunchfest? I don't know the name of it. Crunchy. Serial. Crunchman? Crunchyman. So anyways, we're talking about TechCrunch. TechCrunch had an article. And the article was, and I saw this in our newsletter, because Arduino has moved to doing more Python on hardware a million years ago when Arduino had a dispute between, there was two Arduinos at one point. We were helping the good guys manufacture Arduinos. And for us, this is very interesting. And then there's this question about what is a clone counterfeit. So let me go to this. So the article is called, you can go to TechCrunch and search for it at Google, whatever web search you use. Arduino Exploring India Manufacturing to Limit Counterfeit Sales. Now, here is my gripe about this article. So this is a rant, maybe? I don't know. This article, I did promise a rant. This article, I don't think it was on purpose, but this always happens. So at this point, I'm going to say the article is basically somewhere saying there's counterfeit Arduinos, and that's the problem with India. So the quote here is, in India, there's 3.2 million downloads of the Arduino IDE. But in India, for Arduino sales, it's less than 1%. And the CEO, now of Arduino, considers fake Arduino boards the key reason for this discrepancy. Now, the problem with saying this is it's open source hardware. Now, if it says Arduino and it's a counterfeit, like it says Arduino, they're the Arduino branding, that's different than fake boards. Because then it goes on to say that there's compatibles, there's other Arduinos, and then there's knockoffs from China. The problem is it's kind of like, well, blame open source hardware or blame counterfeits or blame stuff, and Lady Aida may have a different or another opinion. So what's not how, here's what's not going on in India. There's not full on identical counterfeit trademark infringing Arduinos that are flooding the market in India. It's like ESP32s and other hardware, 3.2 million downloads. That's what it actually is. Yeah, I have an opinion which is that the thing is there's no way to know because there's no telemetry on what people are actually, it's just fine. I don't think there should be telemetry. We don't know what people are learning. So we're, yeah, the other thing is Arduino changed a lot, they have venture capital, and we don't, LaMoure is, we don't know now, but I think the top contributor, still to Arduino libraries, but we don't get information about the downloads. We don't get information about what boards are used. There used to be that, but I get it, companies change. But the thing, when you read this article, and I think this is where Arduino needs to make it really clear, please don't get open source hardware confused with counterfeits, because yeah, there's people using Arduino compatibles, but don't call those counterfeits. They're Arduino compatibles, open source hardware. And if you look at what people are actually using, they're not using, you know, Arduino shaped, 15 year old Arduino designs. And India, they're using things like ESP32, they're downloading the ID for different reasons. It's not a trademark infringing Arduino, it's an Arduino compatible. And I think that, just saying knock off some China, like it doesn't really help people want to get involved with hardware either. So the other part of this is they call them clones. So Arduino says that the company currently sells one original board for every five to six clones in the market. So this is where it gets confusing again. So a clone is different than a counterfeit. So now they're blaming clones. Or compatibles. Or compatibles. Yeah. And it says it's a challenge because we are an open source and make money from selling original hardware. Okay, so the clones and counterfeits are a big chunk of the market. So now the quote is clones and counterfeits. So this is now saying clones and counterfeits are equal. No, they're not. A clone hardware. So Adafruit, at one point, we even had the same like trademark attorney as Arduino. So there's Adafruit clones. It's great. Tons, yeah. It's fine. My boards are- Adafruit clones, please go and make Adafruit clones. We don't mean put the word Adafruit on the board. That would be an Adafruit counterfeit. Clones are fine. It's compatible clones. This is the point of doing hardware and getting it out there, especially to some markets that can't get it. Like Adafruit can't serve India. There's a lot of Arduino clones in India. And I think another thing is like I said, we don't have telemetry. We don't know what they're using. I actually have an opinion that I don't believe a lot of people are using at Mega328 compatible. Maybe there's some. But I think the vast majority are using WiIMOs, ESP32 and ESP1866 boards because they're IoT and they're like $2, right? And like, I think the challenge is that's what people are using and that's not a counterfeit or clone. It's something that works with the board package, the capability of the Arduino IDE. So, yeah. Normally I'd write an article, but you know, I just wrote an article not too long ago about the changing faces of open source hardware. And this is kind of the thing I was talking about in my article because it's like, uh, you know, you're conflating things. Please don't do this. So here's the other quote. Arduino is looking to address problem of fake boards globally by making the hardware more sophisticated which makes it more difficult to counterfeit. Okay. So there's reasons to add complexity and features, but it seems like if you're adding hardware to make it harder to copy, that's not the mission of education, open source. It's if you're purposely doing it like DRM chips and just like, let's make it so complicated no one can make it. What's the point? The whole point about open source hardware is to make it so other people can also make it. So, I mean, I think the innovating constantly is good, but like in using sophisticated parts, but I think that there's a little bit of like a miss, there's a mismatch between like, look, you know, make more advanced boards, we want to make more advanced boards, but like that is not, like believe me, any single mic controller board that Arduino or anybody can design, you can send to a reverse engineering company and within a week they'll send you a full schematic and we give you CAD files. And on the other hand, they, they released the CAD files for the non-pro series. So it's like, it's a little bit like, you know, I think there's a lot of mix and match. Like for example, they talk about like the UNO R4 that's open source hardware. They released all the files. Yeah. So I feel like, you know, and it's it. When I wrote about how some companies that were doing open source hardware, they take funding, they stopped doing open source hardware, they eventually blame open source hardware. One example was Prusa, the 3D printing company. I just saw them on like Hacker News and people are like, oh, they're, you know, they're not doing open source hardware anymore because there's too many, you know, counter fits. Well, no, it's, that's not the problem. There's not Prusa counter fits. There's 3D printing market is really tough. And I was, I managed to get some, some interview time with some of these companies. We're considered a competitor. So often no one wants to talk to me anymore about this stuff, even though this is kind of the thing I wrote, but, you know, here's an interesting comment just at the end of this TechCrunch article. The person says, as your article observes, Arduino boards are open source. Let me, I made it big so I could see it. Let me show you here. Boop. There's this thing, yeah. Linus key? There's the Linus key. There's the Linus key. Yes, sir. Got a tiny keyboard here. The smallest keyboard in the world. Yeah. So the person says, as your article observes, our Arduino boards are all open source. All hardware and software designs, documents are freely available. So calling alternative sources rip-offs is prejudicial. Prejudicial. Prejudicial. So that's how I feel is like maybe don't call, like you have to be careful with these words because I think people who are interested in doing hardware now are gonna be like, I'm just gonna, they're just gonna be counterfeits everywhere. It's different than clones. And then the other thing is, if you have a bunch of funding and your investors are saying, make us money, and maybe it's hard to develop hardware now, you're like, well, all these counterfeits gotta blame the counterfeits. That's not really good for all of us. And purposely making the hardware more complex, do add features, do add new chips. But if you're making it more complex because you wanna try to stop people from copying and pasting, and that's from the article, that's not the mission that we all signed up for. And Arduino is built on open source hardware and open source software. So that's my like mini article that I'm not gonna get a chance to write. This is important, I think, especially as all of us who do open source see our things now getting put into closed source stuff. So anyways, I hope that Arduino opens up a factory and does open source hardware in India. That's the best solution, they're talking about that. I don't necessarily think that making it more complex and conflating clones and counterfeits is good. This has been going on for years, by the way. And like, we've, look at our old shows. But please don't confuse people with this because one is trademark infringing to counterfeit. It's using your name, it's pretending to be you. And one's a clone, and that just means it's compatible. Separate those two and, you know, blaming, seeing 3.2 million downloads is like, lost revenue is not, that's not, that's not lost revenue. That's people downloading ID and they're just using other stuff because it opens source software. So anyway, that's the newsletter. And that's the open source hardware news. You can sign up for exciting newsletters like this. Yeah. That will make you think. Over on 8fordaily.com, that's where we deliver this.