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Arduino UNO Q bridges high-performance computing with real-time control

• 19 Comments
• As someone else said in the previous thread when it was announced: it's about the software first. Qualcomm likely doesn't get this and likely never will
  Writing traditional MCU software without an RTOS always sucked for a multitude of reasons. Vendor lockin, expensive specialty compilers, and so on
  Arduino showed that it could be done differently with some not too expensive abstractions. Sure it is looked down on by traditional embedded engineers but the productivity gains and accessibility was hard to argue against
  ESP didn't (only) grow huge because the hardware was cheap and available. The integration in the Arduino ecosystem was done brilliantly. It truly felt like a natural citizen in between usual Arduino code

  By LarsKrimi an hour ago

• What do you mean "vendor lock in"? Developers become accustomed to a particular SDK, and it is hard to move to new silicon because you need to relearn where the peripherals differ. If that's what you mean, I don't consider that lock-in, just inertia, but by your definition the Arduino SDK is "vendor lock in" (for all but the most trivial code it is portable). ESP32 integration with Arduino's ecosystem is severely limited to just a handful of APIs, and you need to use the ESP32 function calls if you want to do anything sophisticated (and idf.py). The Arduino API is too topical. I know from experience. Zephyr blows away Arduino, it has portable stacks, security, update, wifi/ble, etc...
  Also, near everyone is offering GCC/LLVM/IAR/ARMCC (except for Synopsys ARC and Renesas RX).

  By why-o-why an hour ago

• Zephyr is a baby project. From the embedded devs I know they have only started seriously considering Zephyr in the last 2-3 years for commercial projects.
  And you may call it inertia sure, but in the mid 2000's everyone was doing their own hardware abstraction. You had to get books and stuff because documentation sucked. MCU vendors seemingly made a point of making especially stuff like ADCs and timers very hard to abstract away between vendors.
  Back then you had a choice of GCC/IAR/KEIL/CCS/Codwarrior and probably more. Each worse and less standards-compliant than the next, except for GCC/avr-gcc as was the key enabler of Arduino
  All that text to say: The situation was different, and Arduino showed that there's a wider unmet demand for custom embedded stuff and that people will sacrifice a bit of performance for something that's easy to develop

  By LarsKrimi 10 minutes ago

• "People will sacrifice a bit of performance" was also enabled by all the MCU advances.
  Those bytes of memory really mattered when 512B was all the RAM you'll ever get. Nowadays, you can buy a RTOS capable 32-bit MCU for $0.20. Why count bytes when you can just... not?

  By ACCount37 2 minutes ago

• Before I clicked I expected a single SoC with a hybrid architecture (powerful cores to run Linux, MCU cores for real time control). This is a board with two physically separate chips. They put an MCU next to the quad-core application chip.
  It will be interesting to see how they make this arrangement approachable for Arduino’s audience which generally expects ease of use to be a high priority.

  By Aurornis 3 hours ago

• > It will be interesting to see how they make this arrangement approachable for Arduino’s audience which generally expects ease of use to be a high priority.
  Would not be surprised to see both approaches to developing only for one of the two systems: programming the MCU and deploying some ready-made stuff to the big Qualcomm chip, like a stacking a shield on top of the Uno only that the shield is software-defined (providing some compute service), and running some ready-made interface abstraction on the MCU, running everything individually programmed on the powerful Linux chip. Likely within some form of JVM or a Python runtime, or node.

  By usrusr an hour ago

• Nice try, Qualcomm.

  By itomato 3 hours ago

• Some context for people who haven't been following recent the recent Qualcomm/Arduino developments: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/arduinos-new-terms-o...

  By ethagnawl 3 hours ago

• I saw this the other day. I’m not sure exactly what the concerns are, nor why Qualcomm deserves any shade. I don’t know much about Qualcomm, but at least on the face of it, they’re keeping Arduino alive and infusing a lot of cash and expanding the platform, and they’re also keeping the board designs fully open source. It seems reasonable (and probably necessary in today’s world) to have terms on the cloud services. Arduino’s website itself was never open source, the chips they’ve always used aren’t open source. And it was Arduino’s decision to sell to Qualcomm, right? Why should the cloud services be open source?

  By dahart 2 hours ago

• Arduino has four layers, only two were ever truly open:
  1 Hardware reference designs (sort of open by intent)
  2 Core software (open-source licensing)
  3 Services and “happy path” tooling (not open)
  4 Brand and governance (never open)
  Qualcomm’s move is about owning layer 4 and using it to grow layer 3, while keeping layers 1 and 2 open enough to preserve credibility and community adoption.

  By itomato an hour ago

• That makes sense to me. Adafruit’s complaint relates to layer 3, right? Is Qualcomm changing the openness of layers 1 & 2 in meaningful ways that affect makers & hobbyists? And I guess layer 1 is PCB design, not [MC]PU design, right? Is that what you mean by ‘sort of’?

  By dahart an hour ago

• How would it stack up against BeagleBoard BeagleY-Ai, save for the lack of drama?

  By smarx007 3 hours ago

• BeagleY-Ai is probably a better board overall.
  I expect it to have much less community support, but better hardware, more hardware compatibility (with Pi peripherals) - and much better documentation availability, because Texas Instruments actually puts TRMs up online.

  By ACCount37 8 minutes ago

• I bought one of these to play with when it was announced, but with all the drama I’ve been hesitant to invest any time with it. Anyone make anything interesting?

  By crims0n 4 hours ago

• If you already bought it dont let the drama waste your money. You just buy different next time if you feel they no longer meet your expectations.

  By giancarlostoro 2 hours ago

• It's kind of hard to use. I considered putting it to use for a project, but, no official camera sensor boards, not even a Pi camera adapter yet, and the official ISP tuning guides are NDA'd, because, Qualcomm. Would have rolled my own sensor board otherwise.
  Very silly. They make a board that screams "for robotics", market it "for AI", and then neglect the cameras.
  It would be worthwhile still if this had LTE on board, but it doesn't.

  By ACCount37 2 hours ago

• > the official ISP tuning guides are NDA'd
  Oof.

  By myself248 2 hours ago

• Why would we want to use anything Arduino after all those horrible QCOM licensing changes?
  Am asking because an OSS project asked me the same thing when I mentioned possibly using an Arduino platform for something related to their project.

  By OrvalWintermute 21 minutes ago

• Let’s see where they are in a few years.

  By cramcgrab an hour ago