Whither the Arduino STAR Otto?

From what I’ve gathered (e.g., from the forums as well as the complete lack of information since May) it seems the Arduino STAR Otto is no more.

It’s too bad, really – Arduino as a product is moribund, focused solely on relatively slow boards and slow processors. Even the Due – once ahead of its time – seems to be in short supply, and still at a high price to pay for a relatively slow clock. The Espressif ESP32 is currently king of the hill in terms of connectivity, raw speed, and even dual cores; the Teensy is making an impressive 180MHz ARM showing with their 3.6 boards; and even STMicro’s own STM32 boards have a friend in STM32Duino.

Meanwhile, the boards actually produced by the recently merged Arduino.cc remain slow and overpriced – and mostly out of stock. It’s not clear what’s going on there at this point.

I had hoped the STAR Otto, for all its flaws (security as an afterthought, and not-quite-open design) would still have been the vanguard of a new era in the Arduino family. Now it appears it will simply be a footnote in a product line that increasingly trails the very ecosystem it inspired.

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