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The Arduino Uno Q is a weird hybrid SBC
- jqpabc123 1y agoThis is an example of what happens when your wallet is bigger than your imagination.
- thomasjb 1y agoI think its another symptom of the problem of there not being a clear way to get from your smart brainbox which you run a proper operating system on and do heavy computation on to driving lots of motors or similar. There are options, but there's not one that everyone defaults to and you can get good information on.
- exasperaited 1y agoRight — 3D printers, robotics, etc.; some sort of isolation of the microcontroller stage from the monitoring/apps stage.
- ACCount37 1y agoI've seen multiple SoCs from China that integrate a high performance Linux core and a smaller MCU-like RTOS core into the same die. SG2000 being one example. Pretty clear to me that they're aiming at drones, 3D printers and robots with that.
- zokier 1y agoFeels like everyone is doing that sort of thing these days, it is very common to see Cortex M series core integrated into big SoCs. Quickly checking TI, NXP, and ST all have M4 (or similar) cores integrated to their SoCs
- jockm 1y agoNot just Chinese companies, Ti has done this forever with their Sitara SoCs. This is the chip in the beaglebone. The chip includes two PRUs which are microcontrollers that run at 200mhz and share memory with the rest of the system. TIs latest version of it (AM625x) has four A53 cores, one PRU, and a Cortex M4F. It is similar in performance to the Qualcomm chip in my own benchmarks
- HeyLaughingBoy 1y agoThe reason there's no obvious default is probably because of the differing price points and complexity of the products that are being built. e.g., from some of the products that I've worked on. - UI/database on desktop with multiple real-time processors connected via serial/Ethernet - UI/db on Linux SoM with embedded processor connected through serial - UI/db on Linux SoM and the SoM has an embedded ARM processor connected via shared memory - UI on one core of an ESP32 with real time control on a separate core. This isn't something I've done, but many 3D printers and other low-cost machines are using this architecture right now.
- ThrowawayR2 1y agoWeird take. The Raspberry Pi Zero 2W would have seemed more like the natural comparison rather than the Raspberry Pi 4 or 5. I find it more interesting to think of the Arduino Uno Q as a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W but with 2GB / 4GB of RAM and even lower idle power than the other options with that much RAM. That makes it intriguing as a very low power always-on headless server with GPIO as a bonus.
- sarmadgulzar 1y agoRP Zero 2W is $15 and Uno Q is $44
- ThrowawayR2 1y agoThe Uno Q has 4 times the RAM plus 16 GB of eMMC built in so what's your point? Its idle and max power consumption and CPU benchmarks are more in line with the Zero 2W.
- utopiah 1y agoDepends on which dimension, e.g. https://www.jeffgeerling.com/sites/default/files/images/arduino-uno-q-benchmark-1-geekbench-6.jpg https://www.jeffgeerling.com/sites/default/files/images/ardu... from https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/arduino-uno-q-weird-hybrid-sbc https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/arduino-uno-q-weird-h...
- Havoc 1y agoWhat problem are they solving for with the hybrid approach?
- oytis 1y agoThe problem of showing "synergy" between Arduino and Qualcomm.
- phoronixrly 1y agoThank you for pointing this out. RIP Arduino.
- 0xEF 1y agoIt's not exactly a big problem, but my company makes a three-axis desktop CNC machine powered by an ATMega328P that is dependent on having a Windows PC connected to it in order to run the proprietary software. Uno Q has me thinking we can eliminate the PC along with our custom PCB, making a more compact and convenient stand-alone system that would also come with a lower price tag. I may order a few to experiment with this idea, but again, it's not a huge problem and something only specific customers would care about. I'm curious what the Maker community comes up with, provided it sticks around and remains supported, unlike the Edison.
- bonzini 1y ago> Uno Q has me thinking we can eliminate the PC along with our custom PCB If you know how to eliminate the PC, why not replace it already with a Pi?
- 0xEF 1y agoBecause then I have two seperate boards to power, house and protect. Combining those into one would make for a smaller design footprint, in our case. With this particular product, portability and compactness is ideal, since it is intended to be used on job sites to mark steel banding or tags. Often times, these guys are working out of a very dirty trailer that's already crammed with equipment, so space is at a premium for them. The machine does nothing special, so size tends to be where the competative edge is in that admittedly niche market.
- brcmthrowaway 1y agoI see the bean counters are still in control at QCOM
- rattan12138 1y ago[flagged]
- lawik 1y agoI wonder if the limitation of the application processor and Linux starting is mostly a default for the standard OS or an actual limitation. Typically with a hybrid SoC like this part of the point is that you can use the micro-controller as the power efficient thing that decides when the bigger application processor should boot or not. I'd be curious to see if that's possible with this one. Shipping only Debian to start is fine by me. It has to start somewhere. And they seem quite responsive to making it work with other things. James Harton is plugging away at getting it working with Nerves (https://nerves-project.org https://nerves-project.org) and he has it running with Buildroot already. Current repo: https://github.com/jimsynz/buildroot https://github.com/jimsynz/buildroot Most recently they pushed their special sauce for the bootloader and how to produce the relevant mystery binaries. https://forum.arduino.cc/t/buildroot-support-for-uno-q/1410877 https://forum.arduino.cc/t/buildroot-support-for-uno-q/14108... I share the sentiment that I don't trust that there won't be issues with Qualcomm over time. That company does have some pretty relevant chips though so I'm hopeful this means that we see them become more accessible on SBCs and embedded boards. I feel like they've been popping up more and more. If they value this investment in Arduino they should now have a small wing of the company that pushes for things to be more open and even if they only consider that a marketing vector, if things are opened up for that purpose, quite possibly a win. But Arduino might also be absorbed into the amorphous megablob and this is the last we see. I hope not. I don't think this board is that weird. It is just coming from the Arduino side and moving into Raspberry Pi territory. Personally I want to run Nerves on the application processor and get some practice with Zephyr on the MCU. Seems to already be supported: https://docs.zephyrproject.org/latest/boards/arduino/uno_q/doc/index.html https://docs.zephyrproject.org/latest/boards/arduino/uno_q/d... Also why no mention of the LED matrix. This is something RPi devices fail at. Providing som default way of neat output. First time plugging this in it starts doing fun stuff.
- ACCount37 1y agoModern Qualcomm SoCs have "RPM" - a dedicated always-on ARM core for managing clocks, sleep modes and power states. And usually at least one low power DSP core that can be up when the rest of the system is down. Good luck getting your hands on any docs on how to use any of that shit tho.
- 1y ago
- wibbily 1y agoThe buried lede here is that Qualcomm is selling chips to hobbyists now? https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/qualcomm/QRB-2210-0-NSP752-TR-00-0/27904331 https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/qualcomm/QRB-2210... $20 for something that can compete with a Pi 4 is intriguing, more so if it has a real low-power sleep state like the Pis don't. It's a gnarly chip though: 0.4mm pitch and like two dozen power rails, plus the fanout looks tight even on an eight layer board. I don't see the PMIC they're using anywhere online either... fingers crossed anyway.
- beeflet 1y agoThe openness of this market gives me home that we could make something like a pinephone with actually decent hardware and open-enough drivers.
- tecleandor 1y agoAlthough the graphics part is weird: 720 x 1680 @ 60 Hz Vertical, and a bit longer than 720p? It's probably some standard size in some industry or type of device, but caught me off guard...
- trq01758 1y ago1680 x 720 is resolution for ultrawide 21:9 aspect ratio
- bradfa 1y agoThat display orientation and resolution is likely a carry-over from a phone project. Was probably cheap and easy for them to integrate an existing IP block from an older phone SOC.
- tecleandor 1y agoAh, makes sense!
- phoronixrly 1y ago> something that can compete with a Pi 4 Qualcomm being as hostile to open-source as Broadcom is definitely something in common for both SBCs.
- dezgeg 1y agoIt'd be interesting to see a setup where a Linux-capable SoC would run the Arduino application on a isolated CPU core with no interrupts handled, so you'd still have real-time guarantee for the Arduino app
- alex7o 1y agoIt runs the Arduino app on a separate mcu stm32l4 I think. So you have the realtime as well, but what you describe is already possible with the pi and asymmetric multiprocessing using openamp and zephyr. I remember reading about this in some blogs so here is one I found that describes just that: https://telmomoya.blogspot.com/2016/10/asymmetric-multi-processing-amp-with.html https://telmomoya.blogspot.com/2016/10/asymmetric-multi-proc...
- minetest2048 1y agoMicrochip PolarFire boards (and PIC64 chips, which is basically just the CPU part of PolarFire without the FPGA fabric) can do that with asymmetric multiprocessing: https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/fpgas-and-plds/system-on-chip-fpgas/polarfire-soc-fpgas/asymmetric-multiprocessing https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/fpgas-and-plds/syst...
- exasperaited 1y agoIt really looks like is it two thirds of what a Klipper-based 3D printer with a monitoring camera would need. It lacks the stepper controllers/power control stuff but it has the CPU/MCU duality you'd want, it could comfortably run a proper LCD panel, run an on-board slicer, even run on-board CAD.
- smiler 1y agoCombining a Linux capable CPU and MCU is not new or that weird... I think a Cortex A9 and Cortex M4 appeared on a combined SoC on the IMX6 platform around 10 years ago. Plenty of use cases in embedded!
- zrail 1y agoHeck, the Raspberry Pi 5 does this. GPIO is handled by an MCU that is effectively a Raspberry Pi Pico.
- shadowpho 1y agoDoes it let you run any code on the small MCU?
- zrail 11mo agoUnfortunately not. The RP1 controls the stuff on the 40 pin connector and the firmware is locked down. That said, you do have access to the PIO block, which is a programmable state machine that can talk to (I think?) any GPIO on the connector. Pretty fun stuff, good for real time or things with really tight timing requirements. https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/piolib-a-userspace-library-for-pio-control/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/piolib-a-userspace-library-...
- bradfa 1y agoIt will be interesting to see if Qualcomm end up deploying an open sourced standards compliant UEFI implementation. This would be a big deal in my eyes as the Raspi firmware solution is really a pain in the butt to deal with as it's closed source and the documentation is very fragmented and hard to comprehend if you're doing anything beyond their recommended approaches (for example, trying to use an A/B update scheme on a Raspi CM 5 with proper failed boot fallback is not straight forward without resorting to using u-boot as well).
- my123 1y agoQualcomm IoT likes U-Boot with UEFI compat
- tomsonj 1y agoNice integrated LED matrix
- extraduder_ire 1y agoThe UNO R4 WiFi already has that, and launched in the middle of 2023. It uses an onboard esp-32 for wifi and bluetooth.
- andrewstuart 1y agoQualcomm owning Arduino is a real mismatch as evidenced by this device. A great pity because likely it’ll end up in the demise of Arduino which is central to the hobbyist microcontroller scene.
- JKCalhoun 1y agoI think the "Arduino platform" will live on in Teensy, others.
- andrewstuart 1y agoThe hardware is the least important bit of Arduino. It’s the IDE, as crappy as it is.
- extraduder_ire 1y agoThe "batteries included" nature of their IDE is remarkable for getting up and running with any random hardware that's meant to be arduino compatible. Like, you can install support for a board or some hardware and have premade example code running on it within a few minutes. Without even reading any extra documentation.
- HeyLaughingBoy 1y agoNot even the IDE. Those of us that care have switched to VS Code + PlatformIO. The arduino ecosystem is all that matters, and that won't die for a long time. Heck, there are many chip manufacturers building in an Uno header pinout into their dev boards so you can try them out with off the shelf Arduino shields.
- platevoltage 1y agoThe IDE is absolute dogshit. IMO they should pivot to contributing to PlatformIO instead to keep this awful IDE going.
- 8cvor6j844qw_d6 1y agoI'll be always "grateful" to Arduino UNO R3 for my first foray into hardware-related stuff.
- bArray 1y agoWayback-when, I used the Arduino Yun [1] for a project successfully. It took a USB web camera and streamed it via a browser with a button overlay to remotely control a robot. The OS was OpenWRT and was very limited, but just about good enough. The Arduino side was doing the tight control of the motors and reading the sensor data. Why was the Arduino Yun cool? It allowed me to use WiFi easily in an embedded project (this was pre-ESP32). It also allowed me to interface with a native USB device. The Arduino Uno Q has failed on multiple fronts (in my opinion): * You cannot leverage the enormous number of Linux USB drivers for an embedded project. It needs two USB (A) ports for interfacing with interesting devices on the SBC. A single USB-C port for power, display and peripherals is crazy. * It makes a large point about having a GUI, but does not offer a HDMI port. Why would you do that? On the HDMI output you would have a bootloader in ROM that tests the system is okay and tells you if it cannot boot. ARM systems have an awful feature of just not booting at all and providing no feedback. "No valid OS detected in main flash storage." * No micro-SD to flash the SBC seems like a large oversight. You want to encourage people to experiment and break the OS, and have it be super simple to restore or experiment. * 50 euros [2] is too much for what this is. It probably should have been a single-side surface mount * If you're going to make the HDMI output a large part of your project, do away with the LED matrix. They should be asking themselves "does this add value to all users, or could it be a shield?". [1] https://docs.arduino.cc/retired/boards/arduino-yun/ https://docs.arduino.cc/retired/boards/arduino-yun/ [2] https://store.arduino.cc/products/uno-q https://store.arduino.cc/products/uno-q
- pcdoodle 1y agoCrazy, I just checked the full pinout on the bottom connectors: no USB D+ / D- pins at all. Mostly more MCU and MPU breakouts for 3 cameras...
- howard941 1y agoIs this Arduino hobbled by the lack of JTAG debugger support? I've always stayed far away from Arduinos because of this unforgivable omission.