4 ms·

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

47 points by doener 11mo ago

crims0n 11mo 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?
- giancarlostoro 11mo 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.
- ACCount37 11mo 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.
  - myself248 11mo ago
    > the official ISP tuning guides are NDA'd Oof.
smarx007 11mo ago
How would it stack up against BeagleBoard BeagleY-Ai, save for the lack of drama?
- ACCount37 11mo ago
  BeagleY-Ai is probably a better board overall. I expect it to have much less community support, but it ships with better hardware, has more hardware compatibility (with Pi peripherals) - and much better documentation availability, because Texas Instruments actually puts TRMs up online.
itomato 11mo ago
Nice try, Qualcomm.
- ethagnawl 11mo 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-of-service-worries-hobbyists-ahead-of-qualcomm-acquisition/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/arduinos-new-terms-o...
  - dahart 11mo 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?
    - itomato 11mo 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.
      - dahart 11mo 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’?
Aurornis 11mo 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.
- usrusr 11mo 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.
- duskwuff 11mo 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. If history is any indication: they won't. See the previous Arduino Linux + MCU systems like Arduino Yún and Tian, for example, or the FPGA-based Arduino MKR Vidor - Arduino's approach has generally been to throw hardware over the wall with a bit of example code and hope the community can come up with a use for it.
cramcgrab 11mo ago
Let’s see where they are in a few years.
LarsKrimi 11mo ago
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
- why-o-why 11mo 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).
  - LarsKrimi 11mo 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
OrvalWintermute 11mo 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.
- analog31 11mo ago
  This can be hard to explain to both engineers and laypeople because there's Arduino, then there's Arduino, and then there's Arduino... For instance, "Arduino" could mean the Arduino branded boards, and the cloud based development stack. On the other hand, "Arduino" has become almost a generic term for any microcontroller board that happens to support the (open source) Arduino API. As in: "Just throw an Arduino in there." For instance I've got several ongoing projects using third party boards such as Teensy, where my entire relationship to Arduino is represented by a single line of code: #include <arduino.h>
  - OrvalWintermute 11mo ago
    We get that, but when some elements of the stack have incredibly onerous terms added to them, the 2nd order and 3rd order Arduinos become license untenable particularly for low-level developers working with minimal docs Am including a few different articles on this because viewpoint diversity is good for this issue https://www.molecularist.com/2025/11/did-qualcomm-kill-arduino-for-good.html https://www.molecularist.com/2025/11/did-qualcomm-kill-ardui... https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/arduinos-new-terms-of-service-worries-hobbyists-ahead-of-qualcomm-acquisition/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/arduinos-new-terms-o... https://itsfoss.com/news/enshittification-of-arduino-begins/ https://itsfoss.com/news/enshittification-of-arduino-begins/
    - analog31 11mo ago
      My expectation (well, maybe my hope) is that the Arduino community will diverge from the Arduino business and become self sustaining. Arguably, the cloud based development environment may have been a good idea, especially since a lot of students are stuck with locked down Chromebooks that can't install the toolchain locally. And I lack the expertise to speculate about this, but it would seem to me that if an entire Python toolchain can run in a web app (e.g., Jupyter Lite), then maybe an embedded dev environment could be make to work in a similar way.
v9v 11mo ago
At least some of the promotion images on the site seem AI-generated: The image next to "Single-board computer" features a very wonky keyboard.
- Arodex 11mo ago
  What do you mean? I see nothing wrong with the keyboard.
  - tzmlab 11mo ago
    Well, there are three keys labeled "A," to start with...
    - antod 11mo ago
      Aimed at AAA studios.
riedel 11mo ago
I somehow expect HPC systems to look different

47 points by doener 11mo 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?

giancarlostoro 11mo 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.
ACCount37 11mo 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.
- myself248 11mo ago
  > the official ISP tuning guides are NDA'd Oof.

smarx007 11mo ago

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

ACCount37 11mo ago
BeagleY-Ai is probably a better board overall. I expect it to have much less community support, but it ships with better hardware, has more hardware compatibility (with Pi peripherals) - and much better documentation availability, because Texas Instruments actually puts TRMs up online.

itomato 11mo ago

Nice try, Qualcomm.

ethagnawl 11mo 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-of-service-worries-hobbyists-ahead-of-qualcomm-acquisition/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/arduinos-new-terms-o...
- dahart 11mo 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?
  - itomato 11mo 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.
    - dahart 11mo 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’?

Aurornis 11mo 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.

usrusr 11mo 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.
duskwuff 11mo 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. If history is any indication: they won't. See the previous Arduino Linux + MCU systems like Arduino Yún and Tian, for example, or the FPGA-based Arduino MKR Vidor - Arduino's approach has generally been to throw hardware over the wall with a bit of example code and hope the community can come up with a use for it.

cramcgrab 11mo ago

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

LarsKrimi 11mo ago

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

why-o-why 11mo 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).
- LarsKrimi 11mo 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

OrvalWintermute 11mo 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.

analog31 11mo ago
This can be hard to explain to both engineers and laypeople because there's Arduino, then there's Arduino, and then there's Arduino... For instance, "Arduino" could mean the Arduino branded boards, and the cloud based development stack. On the other hand, "Arduino" has become almost a generic term for any microcontroller board that happens to support the (open source) Arduino API. As in: "Just throw an Arduino in there." For instance I've got several ongoing projects using third party boards such as Teensy, where my entire relationship to Arduino is represented by a single line of code: #include <arduino.h>
- OrvalWintermute 11mo ago
  We get that, but when some elements of the stack have incredibly onerous terms added to them, the 2nd order and 3rd order Arduinos become license untenable particularly for low-level developers working with minimal docs Am including a few different articles on this because viewpoint diversity is good for this issue https://www.molecularist.com/2025/11/did-qualcomm-kill-arduino-for-good.html https://www.molecularist.com/2025/11/did-qualcomm-kill-ardui... https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/arduinos-new-terms-of-service-worries-hobbyists-ahead-of-qualcomm-acquisition/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/arduinos-new-terms-o... https://itsfoss.com/news/enshittification-of-arduino-begins/ https://itsfoss.com/news/enshittification-of-arduino-begins/
  - analog31 11mo ago
    My expectation (well, maybe my hope) is that the Arduino community will diverge from the Arduino business and become self sustaining. Arguably, the cloud based development environment may have been a good idea, especially since a lot of students are stuck with locked down Chromebooks that can't install the toolchain locally. And I lack the expertise to speculate about this, but it would seem to me that if an entire Python toolchain can run in a web app (e.g., Jupyter Lite), then maybe an embedded dev environment could be make to work in a similar way.

v9v 11mo ago

At least some of the promotion images on the site seem AI-generated: The image next to "Single-board computer" features a very wonky keyboard.

Arodex 11mo ago
What do you mean? I see nothing wrong with the keyboard.
- tzmlab 11mo ago
  Well, there are three keys labeled "A," to start with...
  - antod 11mo ago
    Aimed at AAA studios.

riedel 11mo ago

I somehow expect HPC systems to look different