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.
At least it’s cholera and not bubonic plague…
or broadcom
That’s the Element-14 stage of grief then.
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].
Example #1 – Mikhail Gorbachiv who dissolved the USSR, bringing an end to the empire of evil.
That was my first thought, too.
Gratefully, the Uno can be built on a breadboard using an ATMega328 (or ATMega168).
Let’s just hope the Arduino IDE will remain the same and keep support for all different boards.
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 hope this encourages Qualcomm to become more open with their products… Maybe we could see more powerful SBCs as a result?
Either way I don’t think arduino’s openness will come to an end… Why would Qualcomm complete the buyout in order to basically run it into the ground? (Who would buy a closed source arduino lol)
Interestingly the processor used in the new UNO has a publicly available datasheet… Never thought I’d see that from qualcomm :)
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 :)
haha oh in my mind an STM32 is an SoC too :)
i also struggled to find out what exactly is connected to the headers.
At first i thought the stm32 might be a bootloader for the qualcomm chip, which might or might not make sense. But now i feel like it’s backwards of that…almost as if you might ssh into the big computer just to run a program to program the small computer? Could be a nice way to mop up bitbanged I/O sort of tasks. i’ve long considered the rp2040 to be the perfect accessory to a pi if you need traditional microcontroller I/O.
i guess we’ll have to wait and see if anyone finds a good use for it
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”?
The not so old Arduino Uno R4 had two versions, one with LED matrix.
Also, the R4 did fit in the clear chassis meant for R3 and original Uno..
i don´t get the point of having a relatively powerful SoC in this crappy form factor with that error of layout with misplaced connectors that was the original “Arduino” FLAW. And so few GPIOs and not even Ethernet or CAN. Looks like breeding an elephant with a snail.
Many traditional semiconductor manufacturers have recently discovered that ignoring the maker market is a foolish business strategy. Careful observers have noticed that maker-oriented development tools, and inexpensive boards are often one the primary routes by which a particular embedded microcontroller finds its way into a commercial product. Why buy a $500 Atmel dev board from Digikey when you can purchase a $25 Arduino Nano with complete soup-to-nuts IoT support? Proto your product on the Arduino and spin a board for your real product. Raspberry Pi began its life as a non-profit dedicated to putting inexpensive computers into the hands of school-aged children. It has morphed into phenomenally-successful, stock traded company, with over 70% of their sales now going into boards used in commercial products.
Qualcomm issued a press release today talking about the Arduino acquisition and how it gives them an entre into the maker universe. Time will tell Qualcomm actually changes their absurdly secretive policies on requiring NDAs for data sheets, forcing developers to treat portions of their parts as black boxes because the only access is through object-code only blobs provided by Qualcomm. Even though Qualcomm stated in its press conference, and press releases that they intend to allow Arduino to exist as a stand-alone, autonomous entity, I feel very confident in predicting that they will likely break Arduino. TI, Atmel, ST, and quite a few other major semiconductor manufacturers have successfully made the transition to supporting the “I only need 5 pieces” market. However, secrecy seems to be baked into Qualcomm’s DNA.
I wish them well, it would be a tragedy to lose the very rich ecosystem that has evolved around Arduino over the past 17 or so years.
An honest question (I have no idea of the answer is), what are Qualcomm like when it comes to documentation, is it all NDA’s for everything ? Or do they provide enough public information that the developers of OpenBSD could easily port their OS to run correctly on Qualcomm hardware with minimal effort ?
Documentation is a big oof in some parts – of course NDA everything and at least from what I’ve seen they got a datasheet which mostly just says “we are following specs of xy”, there are integration training slides (yep, just a large pdfed PowerPoint presentation), no technical reference manuals and the register map is both incomplete and not quite accessible. Createpoint (their document platform) is quite meh, the search functions as so good you just download everything related to your product and do a local search on the files. Everything else you need to know is behind a paywall called ticket system.
Support can be great if you’re an interesting customer for them (including direct lines to the engineers) or it’s just mediocre at best.
As much as I learned to dislike Nvidia for different reasons, their documentation was actually not too bad, despite the shit they were doing with most of their PDFs: password protected, Server based DRM with ping back (of course it was down in hot project phases…) and you couldn’t even print a single page… They seem to be quite paranoid…
The entire point of the Arduino, I thought, was you’ve got lots of friendly libraries for newbies to cut their teeth on, and then once they’re ready to dive deeper the ATMEGA datasheet is small enough to be readily comprehendable.
These massive chips with Arduino bolted onto them have way too steep a learning curve.
Seems to be all covered by NDA, Licenses, hidden.
The new Arduino board seems to have an OS so somebody is developing it but I suspect this will be like many, many of the Pi competitors, whizzy spec, flashy launches and “sooo much cheaper” until you dig into the specs and then b**ger all support after the first release
Seems this is kinda like the Arduino Yún.
Maybe 7 or 8 years ago, Qualcomm did make something like an RPi, or maybe closer to a BeagleBoard. But it was more expensive (over $100 IIRC), and didn’t seem to generate a community like the RPi.