Generally people equate the Arduino hardware platforms with MCU-centric options that are great for things like low-powered embedded computing, but less for running desktop operating systems. This looks about to change with the Arduino Uno Q, which keeps the familiar Uno formfactor, but features both a single-core Cortex-M33 STM32U575 MCU and a quad-core Cortex-A53 Qualcomm Dragonwing QRB2210 SoC.
According to the store page the board will ship starting October 24, with the price being $44 USD. This gets you a board with the aforementioned SoC and MCU, as well as 2 GB of LPDDR4 and 16 GB of eMMC. There’s also a WiFi and Bluetooth module present, which can be used with whatever OS you decide to install on the Qualcomm SoC.
This new product comes right on the heels of Arduino being acquired by Qualcomm. Whether the Uno Q is a worthy purchase mostly depends on what you intend to use the board for, with the SoC’s I/O going via a single USB-C connector which is also used for its power supply. This means that a USB-C expansion hub is basically required if you want to have video output, additional USB connectors, etc. If you wish to run a headless OS install this would of course be much less of a concern.
Yay, just what open source needs, a massive, restrictive manufacturer buying up the biggest open source hobbyist organisation and it’s IP
If you can drive an oil tanker, it should be easy to drive a bicycle! :-D
Captain Hazelwood?
At least it is Qualcomm, and not Oracle or AutoCAD.
or broadcom
That’s the end of Arduino, I fear.
The end was when the Arduino in-fighting happened and they stopped being innovative.
This could be a new beginning. Hopefully there will be more than misaligned shield-headers…
I haven’t bought an actual Arduino in years. ESP32-critters and Pi-like things are much more interesting to me now, especially considering the price/performance difference.
Ah well all good things come to an end [this space reserved for examples].
I honestly don’t see the Qualcomm buyout having any real impact. Everyone I know is working on esp32s or some flavor of adafruit or seeedstudio board, and most of them are using Platformio instead of the Arduino IDE.
As far as I’m concerned, Arduino is just a common API for a decent-but-not-great hardware abstraction layer. The valuable parts aren’t IP that Qualcomm can buy.
I’m sure someone out there is still using official Arduino hardware and that weird cloud thing I never looked into, but I can’t imagine who or why.
I’ve never really been a fan of the early Arduino, mostly as it came a decade late or me. I envy the people using it as a learning platform and building their first projects. Earlier compilers were not easy to come by, and free versions were quite limited. I use Arduino IDE sometimes to short-circuit otherwise complex issues. Flashing hundred boards with basic firmware to test them, for example. If the LED doesn’t blink, the chip is dead.
Having a chip with a large NAND and RAM feels like an odd decision when it comes to the UNO form factor. I’ve always felt an Arduino is like taking a Ferrari for grocery shopping around the corner, but that analogy quickly breaks with boards like this. Immensely overpowered compared to the previous board.
Arduino was formative for my learning, and I developed a pretty cool product around the atmega328p simply because all I had to do was modify the config file and I could be rolling with a full tool chain and familiar performance. If I were to do it again I’d probably slap on an stm32, but I would have taken far longer to learn embedded if Arduino (hardware, software, and the countless guides and forum posts) hadn’t been there to hold my hand
Honestly Arduino just had me misinformed and confused for a few years until I walked away from their IDE. I had no idea how peripherals worked. What memory mapped IO was. Timers. Really anything that makes an embedded system interesting. Arduino abstracts all that away such that it feels like software. So as soon as you use any other toy the abstraction disappears and you suddenly don’t know anything. I honestly did not benefit from my years with them at all.
I’m honestly puzzled by why Qualcomm would bring arduino into this; when Qualcomm basically doesn’t make parts that target the traditional size/power level that arduinos target(they probably do incidentally; just because of how much is going on with a USB-PD implementation, probably a cortex M0 hiding in more than a few cell PMICs these days); and what they do make is more rPi sized.
It is true that arduino supports the STM32 that they bolted on to this board; but so do the ~$2.50ish mini dev boards; and it’s not like the arduino team has exclusive hold on the secret of not pricing your dev boards like the only customers are engineers who will be expensing the $1,500/unit as soon as Legal finishes the NDAs.
If they want in on what rPi does; they could just sort of…do it. Apparently the QRB2210 already has a debian build; and it’s not like Broadcom is selling on the strength and openness of their firmware blob and videocore driver implementation; so why do they want to take on either the burden of ongoing development for microcontrollers they don’t make; or the PR hit of murdering a popular piece of software for various microcontrollers?
this board is an odd duck…at first i thought the Cortex-M33 core was like a “big.LITTLE” sort of thing but it seems to be a separate chip? i’m not sure i see the point, or how the two chips interact with eachother. i’m curious about the power save modes of the qualcomm “mpu” there. there’s a lot of demand for something pi-like with decent idle and suspend modes.
anyways the thing that caught my eye is the 8×13 LED matrix. on the one hand, it seems like it’s in that awkward state between being too cool to ignore and too limited to use. but on the other hand, man, as someone who has done debugging with a single flashing LED, or sometimes just using the two channels of my oscilloscope…to have a whole LED matrix available out of the box for debugging is pretty exciting!
FWIW the article is misleading – I/O is also through the “uno shield” style connector. i’m not sure what that’s worth, but it’s not just the USB-C, depending on what you’re trying to do.
I specifically said ‘SoC I/O’, as I’m not sure that the Uno headers are connected to the SoC, or only the MCU. From the little info that I could find it seems that it’s solely connected to the STM32 MCU, but I could be wrong.
Either way, you’re not going to output HDMI via the Uno headers :)
I only bought one UNO over the years. Still not used in a project. I’ve been using the Metro boards from Adafruit if I need the form factor / capabilities. Like the new Adafruit Metro RP2350 board as an example.
This might be a nice board, but it is a johnny come late to the party. I tend to use Linux only when I need the power for a camera, storage, or whatever service I need that i don’t want to develop… But with Pico and Pico 2 W and other RP2040 or RP2350 based vendor boards is usually is enough to do the job at hand.
is “AI Overview Modern compilation toolchains like
LLVM and Clang” an example of Big Tech AI?
No Google AI response!
Putting 104 LED’s only to be covered up under any shield you plug in – priceless.
It seems like a silly board, and it has HDMI apparently. Is that an “UNO”?