There have been many questions about what direction Arduino would take after being bought by Qualcomm. Now it would seem that we’re getting a clearer picture. Perhaps unsurprisingly the answer appears to be ‘AI’, with the new Arduino VENTUNO Q SBC being advertised as ‘democratizing AI’ in the Qualcomm press release, although it also references robotics.
This new board is based around the Dragonwing IQ-8275 SoC along with an STM32H5F5 MCU, making it somewhat of a beefier brother of the previously covered Arduino Uno Q, which also offers an SoC/MCU hybrid solution. On the product page we can see the overall specifications for this new board, where the release date is specified as ‘soon’.
Its IQ-8275 SoC is part of Qualcomm’s IQ8 series, with eight 2.35 GHz ARM cores and an Adreno 623 GPU, paired with 16 GB of LPDDR5. The Cortex M33-based STM32H5F5 MCU comes with its own 4 MB of Flash and 1.5 MB of RAM, all on a board that’s significantly larger than the Uno Q and isn’t crippled by a single USB-C port as SoC I/O.
Although clearly more aimed at industrial and automation applications than the solution-in-search-of-a-problem Uno Q board, it remains to be seen whether this board will catch on with Arduino fans, or whether Qualcomm’s goal is more to break into whole new markets under the Arduino brand.
so they bought a company famous for making bicycles with training wheels, so that they put that name on 18 wheeled nuclear powered monstertrucks, in what way does that mak any kind of sense?
They perhaps want the prestige of a product/brand/franchise, rather than what it stands for.
This happens more often these days.
Maybe they also want the support of the community/fans or attract the existing user base, but we see also see the opposite.
I’m just glad that the Arduino IDE is independent of it and that the most important Arduinos (Uno R3, Mega etc) are made by other manufacturers, too.
An Arduino Uno R3 equivalent can be built on a breadboard using a 16 MHz crystal and an AVR (Atmega328p and similar). Bootloader is free, too.
QCOM made 10,1 Billion USD revenue in 2024.
Their accounting clerk might not notice Arduino among all the other stuff big boss bought during his lunch break. Just another asset, cheap pick on the edge of the road. QCOM portfolio looks a little better.
QCOM will ride the AI wave as long as it goes. Arduinos name has advertising appeal, a nice maker toy for the engineers, don’t underestimate the playfulness of those customers.
And Massimo can finally sleep well, no more hunting for money.
slopduino
Arrr!
Great! I’ll probably take one or two if it’s under $30 like the Arduino Uno R3.
/s
Pricing on Amazon indicates just a little lower pricing than the Raspberry Pi 3B+ 4G SRAM but the UNO-Q integrates a STM32U585 on board making it a superior selection for many data acquisition projects. It will be interesting to how well Node-RED runs on the UNO-Q as it has no issues on the RPi3B.
Video over USB-C may be a bit of a pain for folks having already purchased HDMI monitors but for a fully contained project, I like the concept.
I have done previous projects (airplane engine monitoring) with Arduino Mega feeding the processed data to RPi for analysis with Node-RED with great success.
http://www.stm32duino.com/viewtopic.php?p=6299
Interesting, and I am glad Mega is noted for being what it really is, quite reliable ware, regardless how seemingly outdated now.
As a side note, I’ve tweaked one of the older Nano Pie Neos to run Node Red in 512MB RAM. I went for the DietPi OS and tweaked it down to its bare minimum, but it did run quite well.
20 years too late into the party. Now braley anyone can program arduinos when better solutions are available for lower prices. It’s like promoting bidets when everybody switch to using more hygenic toilet paper.
I’m confused because bidets are significantly more hygienic than toilet paper, as water provides a more thorough, gentle, and effective cleaning method that reduces the spread of fecal matter and bacteria. While toilet paper can cause irritation or leave residue, bidets offer a hands-free, eco-friendly, and cost-effective alternative that improves hygiene.
Well, this discussion went down the crapper fast.
Along with trust in arduino :-(…
Well, flowing water provides for a way better cleaning back down there. That is about the only thing the western world really can and should learn from the muslim world. (That, and the pattern of islamic water legislation).
Since the toilet paper hoarders party of 2020 I own a shattaf (a premium model with a two stage trigger). Toilet paper is only needed to dry the crack afterwards.
Definitely not to mention that Muslims laid the ground work for basically all modern science. Basically inventing or fundamentally improving algebra and trig, modern medicine practices, surgical tools, Hospitals, Astronomy and Navigation (both for trade and prayer direction), and Universities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wisdom
While the advances are all very important, you are going way overboard. These concepts have a variety of sources, there most important takeaway in most contexts that the origin is not often in Europe, not that they are all a product of Arabs, Muslim or not.
So does this have enough number crunching ability to cross correlate raw IR/visible images from a high resolution camera with a high resolution two dimensional map read from SSD ? Because in my mind a lot of low power cheap ‘AI’ chips could easily be repurposed to work, when GPS is jammed, as guidance systems that could be used for good (ships/planes) or evil(ships/drones). And should end up on EAR or ITAR lists
TBH, this includes most smartphones and basically all PCs.
Not as described, no. On a cell phone you are thinking of services that are hardly using local hardware at all, and a desktop doesn’t have the sensor integration necessary.
It can be done, but isn’t of the shelf and offline.
The horsepower is there, using it is more complicated. The dead reckoning systems you are talking about widely vary in actual functional capacity (often far below your description), but are the only reason long range drones function.
I don’t think Arduino branded products are targeted at us anymore.
I see you understand the problem. Greed wins out…
fun fact, arduino already sold “professional” boards that weren’t open source.
raspi is going the same way, and they were never open source to begin with.
Luckily there are clones made by others who won’t care about what qualcom thinks.
FWIW, I have lost all faith and trust in arduino. Fortunately I have a decent pile of stuff from then the were still trustworthy…
Since inability to edit:
FWIW, I have lost all faith and trust in arduino. Fortunately I have a decent pile of stuff from then they were still trustworthy…
Does seem a bit of a silly use of the name – maybe they should have started a new name that we would have all associated with them ie like the esp32 name did…
After the shit they did with the uno Q I dont expect this is gonna be much better.
Still regreting for the 40€ spend is this crappy enviroment(also tires of waiting for the daugther board…)
All I know is this board isn’t targeted for my use as a hobbyist. AI-Centric isn’t in my vocabulary. Moving along.
Yep. This has nothing to offer me. I’ll stick with the other mcus
The promised performance would put it above a RPi5-16GB and almost in spitting distance of a Nvidia Jetson Orin. As such i highly doubt this board is going to be sold for any less than 250 USD…
This would make the board a better fit for the Arduino Pro brand like the Portenta, but instead they list it in the regular Arduino line-up. Which suggests that they are indeed turning Arduino into just a marketing vehicle for their own processors.
Not that it matters that much. I haven’t used anything from Arduino outside of the IDE in ages. ESP32, Raspberry Pico, Easy to use standalone controllers like AVR-Dx. All better options that all work with the IDE thanks to well-written Cores by others. And if you do need a ATMega in particular: clones dominate the market. So long as the IDE (or a fork of it) exists. They can do whatever they want with the brand for all i care.
I don’t really care what brand they want to put such a product under as long as what it is is made clear and the other product lines are not ‘replaced’ by a rather different and more profitable product. Not like the Raspberry Pi folks haven’t branched out in the Pico etc and that works just fine.
The bit that matters is that the product fits in the brand conceptually enough and has the expected level of support etc. As that expected high performance will be a good fit for plenty of our projects if the price and power consumption is in the right ballpark.
to me arduino is the ide. the dev boards are just suggestions. i cant remember the last time i bought a legit arduino board. my personal favorite are the pro micro clones since i do a lot of usb stuff. i also use a lot of loose attinys and atmegas. should probibly move to 32 bit boards but i really dont think i need the performance.