Arduino

Raised as a usability problem by 19 people on Hacker News over 15 years (2011–2025), in 19 threads.

People raised many different problems with Arduino, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 19 complaints

Serial.println blocks the whole program until the string is transmitted2025-11-21
DigitalWriteFast often compiles to a function call and runtime lookup instead of a single inline instruction2025-10-07
Simplified abstraction breaks down and becomes confusing once users hit real problems2023-10-30
Controller inputs sent via Arduino over USB had horrible lag2023-09-15
Video auto-plays and the user can't find how to stop it2023-06-27
The IDE is awful, making the Arduino tooling hard to work with2023-02-24
Pausing the video opens a popup while audio keeps playing2022-11-04
Guardrails make String vs char* handling frustrating for an inexperienced C/C++ developer2022-08-02
Tools don't support FPGA development and the bitstream upload process is poorly documented2022-06-10
Documentation is often embarrassing and the platform hides how things work2021-11-17
Bare integer pin arguments give no warning, so wrong pins silently misbehave2021-03-14
Must install extra software to get the serial port connection working2020-10-19
Can't find how to purchase the device2020-06-29
Sketch flashing succeeds only about half the time; devices switch ports or fail to show up2020-01-08
Hardware code relies on mysterious constants and registers that are hard to understand2019-11-21
Tracking and manually downloading and renaming many libraries is tedious and error-prone2017-12-01
Couldn't find documentation explaining how to switch shared pin functions2015-03-27
Arduino programming environment is horrible, so user had to switch to plain C2014-10-14
Shield pin headers are spaced 0.160 inches apart, so shields don't line up or fit cleanly with the board2011-05-12