Qualcomm's New Arduino Ventuno Q Is an AI-Focused Computer Designed For Robotics (engadget.com) 25
Qualcomm and Arduino have unveiled the Arduino Ventuno Q, a new AI-focused single-board computer built for robotics and edge systems. Engadget reports: Called the Arduino Ventuno Q, it uses Qualcomm's Dragonwing IQ8 processor along with a dedicated STM32H5 low-latency microcontroller (MCU). "Ventuno Q is engineered specifically for systems that move, manipulate and respond to the physical world with precision and reliability," the company wrote on the product page. The Ventuno Q is more sophisticated (and expensive) than Arduinio's usual AIO boards, thanks to the Dragonwing IQ8 processor that includes an 8-core ARM Cortex CPU, Adreno Arm Cortex A623 GPU and Hexagon Tensor NPU that can hit up ot 40 TOPs. It also comes with 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM, along with 64GB of eMMC storage and an M.2 NVME Gen.4 slot to expand that. Other features include Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.3, 2.5Gbps ethernet and USB camera support.
The Ventuno Q includes Arudino App Lab, with pre-trained AI models including LLMs, VLMs, ASR, gesture recognition, pose estimation and object tracking, all running offline. It's designed for AI systems that run entirely offline like smart kiosks, healthcare assistants and traffic flow analysis, along with Edge AI vision and sensing systems. It also supports a full robotics stack including vision processing combined with deterministic motor control for precise vision and manipulation. It's also ideal for education and research in areas like computer vision, generative AI and prototyping at the edge, according to Arduino. Further reading: Up Next for Arduino After Qualcomm Acquisition: High-Performance Computing
The Ventuno Q includes Arudino App Lab, with pre-trained AI models including LLMs, VLMs, ASR, gesture recognition, pose estimation and object tracking, all running offline. It's designed for AI systems that run entirely offline like smart kiosks, healthcare assistants and traffic flow analysis, along with Edge AI vision and sensing systems. It also supports a full robotics stack including vision processing combined with deterministic motor control for precise vision and manipulation. It's also ideal for education and research in areas like computer vision, generative AI and prototyping at the edge, according to Arduino. Further reading: Up Next for Arduino After Qualcomm Acquisition: High-Performance Computing
Don't (Score:3)
Qualcomm is known for their contracts written on flypaper. They have a whole department which does lawyerly things (QTL).
Stay Away
Arduino is dead (Score:2)
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Like all capital groups, bleed the IP dry, sell the carcass and then move on.
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It's nothing of the sort. In fact virtually all competitors go out of their way to support or emulate on the same underlying platform, if not the direct hardware pinout than at least support for the framework.
The first party hardware sale from the spat between the founders may be dead, but that's about it.
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The ethos behind Arduino no longer exists and competitors, hobbiests, educators etc will move onto something else like ESP32, or Pico based designs.
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More than a community, the company has excellent support for supporting the projects people buy their kits for. That is something anybody who wants to challenge them would have to match. It's not hard to build something that may be competitive, be it a RISC-V or an Intel N100: the key to success is having a team that provides excellent support to the people building things based on those
Meh (Score:3)
> It's designed for AI systems that run entirely offline like smart kiosks, healthcare assistants and traffic flow analysis, along with Edge AI vision and sensing systems.
Yes. Typical Arduino use cases, obviously.
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Yes. Oh wait were you being sarcastic? Arduino is an extensible platform. The use case itself is limited only by the underlying hardware. The fact that you may only be able to figure out how to make it blink a light is your failing not someone else's. The underlying framework has already been ported to a variety of hardware options that greatly exceed Arduino's first party hardware offerings.
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The attraction of Arduino is that it's simple enough for non-engineers to understand and make things with. It controls lights, can move things, can make sounds.
AI slop is a somewhat less compelling and less easily understood proposition.
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The attraction of Arduino is that it's simple enough for non-engineers to understand and make things with. It controls lights, can move things, can make sounds.
AI slop is a somewhat less compelling and less easily understood proposition.
AI is not just LLMs. That NPU can be used for things like object detection, which is highly useful for robotics.
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You not understanding it doesn't mean someone else doesn't. AI is very much tinkered with by all sorts of people with all sorts of backgrounds.
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That's not the point. It's meant to be a foundation for building embedded systems, be it blinking lights to managing various aspects of home automation. But this was certainly not one of the original goals of this project. Qualcomm acquiring it was fine, since most of the projects here are Arm based, but repurposing it as yet another AI platform is just the hijacking of one more project people can use to learn computing
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There's nothing at all that said the foundation was in any way supposed to be limited. The modern Arduino platform already supports wifi, bluetooth, and ARM cores. More choice with more options is better. You can still blink an LED if you want to. This in no way affects you, it just expands capabilities. Capabilities which in the past many people have taken the Arduino platform to other hardware to achieve.
but repurposing it as yet another AI platform is just the hijacking of one more project people can use to learn computing
Yeah computing is computing and fuck anyone who wants to tinker with what you specifically gatekeep, a
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At $300 or so, it's a long way from the typical arduino pricing too.
FWIW, it looks like a reasonable SBC for embedded projects - BUT it all depends on how usable it really is. The Raspberry Pi is probably the most usable SBC there is, not least because they've spent a long time making it easy, but also because there's a massive community of people ready to help others, or try out some of the edge cases or whatever else.
SBCs are nothing new, and actually there are loads of good looking ones with all sorts of
Pricing (Score:3)
Pricing was conveniently left out of the summary. It should be less than $300 in 2Q26.
Too much (Score:2)
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Meanwhile you can already buy a better-specced Titan board, with actual robotics interfaces like CAN and DBUS, for around $100.
Lol @ better specced!
Eight cores, 16GB, GPU, NPU vs an ESP32?
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Really... you could find a bottom of the line computer with better specs.
Plus, how many hobbyists are building pick-and-place machines or robots that choose to follow their owners... or The Latest Craze (slap AI in everything, complete with security holes)?
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Really... you could find a bottom of the line computer with better specs.
Plus, how many hobbyists are building pick-and-place machines or robots that choose to follow their owners... or The Latest Craze (slap AI in everything, complete with security holes)?
Haha, not with 8 cores, a GPU, and a tensor NPU! This device is perfect if you want to run an AI locally and portably.
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The specs of the thing say it'd work as the parents entire computer (with some work).
Arduino was meant as a cheap, little thing that would do what you programmed it to do (blink an LED, measure temps, display info on an LCD you bought, whatever)... not every single thing needs LLM-AI on it (hate to break it to ya).
I mean, For ****s sake, my huge tower only has 3x the cores and 8x the RAM (although, they didn't say the speed of the CPU, and integrated GPU means crap horsepower in the video side).
The Arduino
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Really... you could find a bottom of the line computer with better specs. Plus, how many hobbyists are building pick-and-place machines or robots that choose to follow their owners... or The Latest Craze (slap AI in everything, complete with security holes)?
Haha, not with 8 cores, a GPU, and a tensor NPU! This device is perfect if you want to run an AI locally and portably.
40 TOPS is a pretty decent NPU. Spec wise this looks to compete with the likes of Raspberry w/Hailo module, or possibly Nvidia Jetson. Desktops, laptops and phones all have TPU/NPUs nowadays. Makes sense that SBCs are going to include them more and bigger going forward.
Don't worry their next chip... (Score:2)