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?
More like “Airplane!” :-D
At least it is Qualcomm, and not Oracle or AutoCAD.
At least it’s cholera and not bubonic plague…
Docs say Ethernet is supported – IF you add a dongle to the USB-C PD port.
Now I’m wondering if it could replace a Raspberry Pi, as a Pi-hole node on my home network.
or broadcom
That’s the Element-14 stage of grief then.
element14 stage of grief?
Hey at least Qualcomm isn’t embroiled in a £480m anti-trust case…
Oh wait…
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn0rn7rwk24o
And remember that they once tried to go after the Raspberry Pi market. Qualcomm is a Microsoft partner and the Raspberry Pi has been a thorn in that company’s side since it hit the market because it’s spreading Linux instead of Windows.
Could this be a trick to bring Windows into the hobbyist market at the expense of Raspberry Pi marketshare? Watch for any signs of Linux incompatibilities and shifts towards Windows. They’ve changed their colors too quickly to be trusted.
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.
I like Pi-like things for mini servers and PCs. As microcontroller substitutes though.. nah. Microcontrollers should be real time not multitasking.
Haven’t played with ESP32 yet. I bet it’s great for wall powered devices. How’s the current for battery power? I still have my $4.30 MSP430 board. Are those still going strong? I would think that would be the best choice on batteries except when you NEED processing power.
The Arduino Uno R4 WiFi had an ESP32 module.
That Arduino from 2023 with the LED matrix, you don’t know.
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.
raises hand I learned how to do basics there…
Well, yes and no. It depends on point of view.
The Arduino Unos based on atmega168 or atmega328 were a bit special.
These binary compatible chips basically were spiritual successors to the PIC16F84 in the tinkerer scene.
For both groups, there had been HEX files distributed on various hobby websites.
You didn’t require a source code to simply re-built an existing hardware project, in short.
Or you could use your own development tools,
because you could be assured the underlying architecture wouldn’t change.:
The person “on the other side” always had access to the same reference platform, so to say.
But without the classic Uno (up to R3), Arduino IDE nolonger has that, um, “tower of strength”.
Not sure how to put this into words..
Then, there’s the legacy.
Uno and the Uno R3 still had a connection to the “Wiring” platform.
https://wiring.org.co/hardware/compare.html
https://arduinohistory.github.io/
More accurately, Arduino is an in-credited fork of Massimo’s student’s work. That student is basically anonymous and not holding millions in Arduino shares either.
In circa 2007ish, the earliest “Arduino “ projects were Wiring.
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 :)
The exact same words were spoken after every buyout by: Intel, EA, Logitech, Meta, Alphabet, etc…
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.
About the criticism for the abstraction..
Before the Arduinos we had to learn assembly language for each different microcontroller chip.
Like for the popular Microchip PIC16C84, for example.
Now, other PICmicro chips had a different instruction set again.
That’s why the existence of the successors PIC16F84 and PIC16F84A were so important to us!
We couldn’t just switch to another model without re-learning everything and re-write our programs from scratch.
Back then, we would have been happy if a free and hardware-independent development tool was available.
Because things like PIC Basic etc had been commercial products not seldomly.
Which was okay for personal use, but not if you were going to share your projects with others.
The Arduino IDE greatly helped to keep projects portable.
So you could switch your board during development, maybe if it turns out to be too limited.
So you can migrate from an Arduino Uno to an Arduino Mega to an Arduino Due.
this isn’t a bad thing. Arduino never presented itself as a high performance electronics platform, but as a platform to help people (artist types mostly) deliver their concept. it had always been about, basically, flashing LEDs as part of something bigger
I don’t know what’s up with your statement about “the abstraction disappears and suddenly you don’t know anything”. huh? this IS the experience with any, literally any embedded platform. everything you learned about esp32 with the esp-idf is completely useless if you want to jump to stm32.
back to the intended use case of Arduino: try flashing an LED with Arduino and then try it with STM32 and compare the obscene amount of boilerplate you need for it. same for even Pi Pico.
sometimes all you need is a little timer and an LED. at 42 I learned thats far more fun and satisfactory to use the a MCU for this rather than spending hours doing it with a 555 for no real benefit. I’d rather spend my time having fun with the RP2040 PIO module to generate video signals than tuning the capacitor value of a 555.
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
Yes! You can have a LED for every bug you mention. :-D
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..
And the shield headers are still misaligned
Gotta keep their DRM.
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
I have lately come across quite a few buildroot-only SBCs, and they are a big pain to work with, so it’s nice to see you can put a “full” distro on this, at least, though it’s a bit concerning they only mention Debian (wrt driver openness).
This is pretty pricey relative to something like Radxa’s Rock-2F, though I haven’t seen the $15 1GB variant available in the US since the first day I saw them and bought a handful. 1GB works great for terminal-only (I incidentally have one hooked up to a large RGBW LED array), but 2GB is going to be painful to use for conventional graphical desktops. It’s maybe useful for kiosks where they’re locked to doing specific tasks and won’t run into memory reaper trouble, but then you’re probably better off picking up any bargain-bin Android tablet on Amazon (I hate Android development process, but I can make a webview to a web frontend without having an aneurysm), or if you really want proper linux, Pine64’s PineTab lineup is excellent.
-And then on the STEM side for kids or newcomers otherwise, or just practical hobby stuff where you don’t need a display — I have these things all over my house and yard — it’s hard to justify something like this (or a RPi with how expensive they’ve become) over a bag of ESP32C6 boards from Seeedstudio. They’re so cheap (no sweat if you burn one), can run on cheap 5V USBC solar panels (or pretty much whatever) — and they’re tiny but not too tiny to work with (and you can put header pins in them if you insist on no-solder). Fantastic for starting out learning, and it even has a BMS integrated for single-cell LiPo battery (though I prefer USBC solar panels with a battery integrated). -and there’re enough resources to run an FTP or even HTTP server. They connect over USB, and you can flash MicroPython to them without much hassle if you like.
In conclusion, I have no idea who the product is for at this price, and I’d probably fire the guy at Qualcomm who thought there was synergy in buying Arduino. The upcoming 4GB variant, I can imagine uses for, but Idunno how you’re going to move them at $55-60, especially because ~nobody associates Arduino with SBCs. The MCU and SBC markets both have become very competitive in the past few years.
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.
So it’s like a Blue Pill, a Pi Clone, and an ESP 32 spotwelded together on one board? Feels like the price is a loss-leader like the Nucleo boards.
No, thanks!
Success IMO will be guaranteed only if Adafruit and Seeed Studio and others compete in the new ecosystem. Competition in the marketplace only happen when the economics are sufficient to support multiple manufacturers/suppliers.
Arduino is not simply a product, rather it is a paradigm which drives a set of development tools all of which can be invoked by CLI or scripted underneath the GUI.
Of critical importance is the Arduino open-source libraries that provide API’s as well as documentation of how low-level access is accomplished: good libs provide great educational opportunities.
I will keep an open mind on this and watch how Limor Fried (Adafruit) reacts: if she commits resources, then maybe there is a marketplace.
here reading, learning, and making and shipping open-source hardware, fun fact, i started hack a day 21 years ago…
So much negativity. Just check the web site: “Is UNO Q open source?
Yes, UNO Q schematics and gerbers are available under the CC-BY-SA 4.0 license.”
And not a single word about the software (and the required license and internet connectivity to use Qualcomm’s SDK). It’s very likely the STM32 firmware will be open source, but very unlikely the Linux on the Qualcomm chip will be.
You should be noting all the items NOT under Creative Commons..
Unless you were being subtly ironic.
Never purchased arduino with its brand pumped up prices. Basic board so underpowered for the buck. Community built around is the only good think.
The Arduino Uno (incl. R3) had been cloned many times throughout the years.
Some versions were sold as Genuino Uno, even, to not use Arduino brand.
On the Arduino website itself it is/was documented how to build yourself an Uno from scratch using an atmega168/atmega328.
You can even use a classic serial port connection instead of an USB-serial dongle.
The new Uno bootloader even was written by someone from community, if memory serves.
So there’s no reason to be angered. The Uno (up to R3) is/was as “free” as it gets.
The more complicated models, such as Mega and Due also had some clones from far east, I believe. Speaking under correction.
I first saw Jeff geerling talk about this new product and qualcom, id like to tell the author here that alott of the SoC io is exposed bottom headers https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/qualcomms-buying-arduino-%E2%80%93-what-it-means-makers
Personally i think this isnt doing either Qualcomm nor arduino any good. Good educational materials and easy to get parts is where people will learn. its an expensive toy, that doesnt teach what we expected from arduino level devices
Even if Qualcomm publishes a full datasheet and reference manual (including register map) of their SoC the board still has other proprietary bits such as the ANX7625. One can only dream of them also releasing the full datasheet and programming manual for that without NDA too.
This board simply is not an Arduino.
It’s reminiscent of the curie board that carried an intel quark. It’ll probably meet the same fate.
one question:
it is open source? I can create a clone? no blobs, good documentation?
everything else is not important
Time to fork Arduino.
Qualcomm is a huge software patent troll, no sympathy for them. Not a single cent should go in their pocket.
Enshittification in 3…2…1…
my interaction with qualcom was a salesrep throwing NDAs on us just to show their products. He proudly proclaimed that they hired more lawyers then engineers so we better not breach the NDA…