Up Next for Arduino After Qualcomm Acquisition: High-Performance Computing (eetimes.com) 26
Even after its acquisition by Qualcomm, the EFF believes Arduino "isn't imposing any new bans on tinkering with or reverse engineering Arduino boards," (according to Mitch Stoltz, EFF director for competition and IP litigation). While Adafruit's managing editor Phillip Torrone had claimed to 36,000+ followers on LinkedIn that Arduino users were now "explicitly forbidden from reverse engineering," Arduino corrected him in a blog post, noting that clause in their Terms & Conditions was only for Arduino's Software-as-a-Service cloud applications. "Anything that was open, stays open."
And this week EE Times spoke to Guneet Bedi, SVP of Arduino, "who was unequivocal in saying that Arduino's governance structure had remained intact even after the acquisition." "As a business unit within Qualcomm, Arduino continues to make independent decisions on its product portfolio, with no direction imposed on where it should or should not go," Bedi said. "Everything that Arduino builds will remain open and openly available to developers, with design engineers, students and makers continuing to be the primary focus.... Developers who had mastered basic embedded workflows were now asking how to run large language models at the edge and work with artificial intelligence for vision and voice, with an open source mindset," he said. According to Bedi, this was where Qualcomm's technology became relevant. "Qualcomm's chipsets are high performance while also being very low power, which comes from their mobile and Android phone heritage. Despite being great technology, it is not easily accessible to design engineers because of cost and complexity. That made this a strong fit," he said.
The most visible outcome of this acquisition is Uno Q, which Bedi described as being comparable to a mid-tier Android phone in capability, starting at a price of $44. For Arduino, this marked a shift beyond microcontrollers without abandoning them. "At the end of the day, we have not gone away from our legacy," Bedi said. "You still have a real-time microcontroller, and you still write code the way Arduino developers are used to. What we added is compute, without forcing people to change how they work." Uno Q combines a Linux-based compute system with a real-time microcontroller from the STM32 family. "You do not need two different development environments or two different hardware platforms," Bedi added... Rather than introducing a customized operating system, Arduino chose standard Debian upstream. "We are not locking developers into anything," Bedi said. "It is standard Debian, completely open...." Pre-built models covering tasks like object detection and voice recognition run locally on the board....
While the first reference design uses Qualcomm silicon, Bedi was careful to stress that this does not define the roadmap. "There is zero dependency on Qualcomm silicon," he said. "The architecture is portable. Tomorrow, we can run this on something else." That distinction matters, particularly for developers wary of vendor lock-in following the acquisition. Uno Q does compete directly with platforms like Raspberry Pi and Nvidia Jetson, but Bedi framed the difference less in terms of raw performance and more in flexibility. "When you build on those platforms, you are locked to the board," he said. "Here, you can build a prototype, and if you like it, you can also get access to the chip and design your own hardware." With built-in storage removing the need for external components, Uno Q positions itself less as a faster board and more as a way to simplify what had become an increasingly messy development stack...
Looking a year ahead, Bedi believes developers should experience continuity rather than disruption. The familiar Arduino approach to embedded and real-time systems remains unchanged, while extending naturally into more compute-intensive applications... Taken together, Bedi's comments suggest that Arduino's post-acquisition direction is less about changing what Arduino is, and more about expanding what it can realistically be used for, without abandoning the simplicity that made it relevant in the first place.
"We want to redefine prototyping in the age of physical artificial intelligence," Bedi said...
And this week EE Times spoke to Guneet Bedi, SVP of Arduino, "who was unequivocal in saying that Arduino's governance structure had remained intact even after the acquisition." "As a business unit within Qualcomm, Arduino continues to make independent decisions on its product portfolio, with no direction imposed on where it should or should not go," Bedi said. "Everything that Arduino builds will remain open and openly available to developers, with design engineers, students and makers continuing to be the primary focus.... Developers who had mastered basic embedded workflows were now asking how to run large language models at the edge and work with artificial intelligence for vision and voice, with an open source mindset," he said. According to Bedi, this was where Qualcomm's technology became relevant. "Qualcomm's chipsets are high performance while also being very low power, which comes from their mobile and Android phone heritage. Despite being great technology, it is not easily accessible to design engineers because of cost and complexity. That made this a strong fit," he said.
The most visible outcome of this acquisition is Uno Q, which Bedi described as being comparable to a mid-tier Android phone in capability, starting at a price of $44. For Arduino, this marked a shift beyond microcontrollers without abandoning them. "At the end of the day, we have not gone away from our legacy," Bedi said. "You still have a real-time microcontroller, and you still write code the way Arduino developers are used to. What we added is compute, without forcing people to change how they work." Uno Q combines a Linux-based compute system with a real-time microcontroller from the STM32 family. "You do not need two different development environments or two different hardware platforms," Bedi added... Rather than introducing a customized operating system, Arduino chose standard Debian upstream. "We are not locking developers into anything," Bedi said. "It is standard Debian, completely open...." Pre-built models covering tasks like object detection and voice recognition run locally on the board....
While the first reference design uses Qualcomm silicon, Bedi was careful to stress that this does not define the roadmap. "There is zero dependency on Qualcomm silicon," he said. "The architecture is portable. Tomorrow, we can run this on something else." That distinction matters, particularly for developers wary of vendor lock-in following the acquisition. Uno Q does compete directly with platforms like Raspberry Pi and Nvidia Jetson, but Bedi framed the difference less in terms of raw performance and more in flexibility. "When you build on those platforms, you are locked to the board," he said. "Here, you can build a prototype, and if you like it, you can also get access to the chip and design your own hardware." With built-in storage removing the need for external components, Uno Q positions itself less as a faster board and more as a way to simplify what had become an increasingly messy development stack...
Looking a year ahead, Bedi believes developers should experience continuity rather than disruption. The familiar Arduino approach to embedded and real-time systems remains unchanged, while extending naturally into more compute-intensive applications... Taken together, Bedi's comments suggest that Arduino's post-acquisition direction is less about changing what Arduino is, and more about expanding what it can realistically be used for, without abandoning the simplicity that made it relevant in the first place.
"We want to redefine prototyping in the age of physical artificial intelligence," Bedi said...
Oh good (Score:3)
Just what a microcontroller needs, AI.
Re: (Score:2)
*If* they can do it within a low power envelope why not?
Re: (Score:2)
Well... yes. Why should AI be restricted to the use of corporations with lots of budget and be out of the hands of tinkerers?
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Not like Jetson Nano and even the Beaglebone AI failure don't exist.
The concept even has a name, "edge intelligence".
It even works, if used appropriately.
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STM32s have AI too. https://stm32ai.st.com/ [st.com]
Re: Oh good (Score:2)
yes, it isn't much of a novelty. I have even done my own naive implementation of some ml bits on a gatemate fpga.
Welp (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the end of me [youtube.com]
To be fair maybe this is good and Qualcomm will be excellent stewards, etcetc but when a community thing gets swallowed up by a corporate overlord it just always feels like they never get the point of what made the thing popular in the first place.
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All Qualcomm bought was a name.
All the Arduino "bits" that make it useful to people are open-source, from the IDE and development tools and libraries to the bootloader that makes it easy to program. Even the schematics.
You can get plenty of Arduino compatible boards from AliExpress for cheap. They aren't official Arduino boards, but they work just like the official ones.
Even if Qualcomm does a Qualcomm, it doesn't matter, it'll just be forked and another community will form around the new fork.
Re: (Score:2)
Even if Qualcomm does a Qualcomm, it doesn't matter, it'll just be forked and another community will form around the new fork.
That's kinda my point though, Qualcomm alone probably has some people leaving the community and then forking is still a split, community becomes fractured a little more with each split, the official hardware becomes more... non-community, now it's just a product line. Kinda sad.
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Arduino the company has been irrelevant for a long time. The open source community and the Chinese vendors making boards and modules are where it's at. Special shout out to Adafruit too, for great hardware and tutorials.
Re: (Score:2)
Irrelevant to what exactly?
As someone who buys some of the higher end Arduino hardware on the regular I'm quite surprised to hear of their irrelevance!
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In that most of the interesting stuff is from third parties now. Libraries and modules. Even the third party Arduino boards are better than the official ones.
Their IDE is crap but default.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm using the official PLCs made in collaboration with finder (whose relays I also use).
Smoke and mirrors (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:1)
time to start a hard fork
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The later Arduino IDE was just a fork of vscode. You could always just...use vscode. And if you must have a gui to work with your arduino board instead of using cli, you might try the platformio extension.
Re: (Score:2)
ESP32 ?
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
ESP32, use PlatformIO IDE.
Re: Smoke and mirrors (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
How about Beaglebone?
Yea I always wondered what happened to them; they had momentum and didn't use it.
The only solution is to convince everyone to become cloud cutters and do it locally.
Re: (Score:2)
Not Yet Reads Ominous (Score:2)
Time to fork (Score:2)
Arduino "official" is dead and they are just trying to optimize money extraction.