Additionally, they're launching their first joint product, the $44 Uno Q SBC, which has a Dragonwing SoC and STM32 microcontroller on an Uno form factor board[1].
It seems like Arduino will keep their brand, maintain their existing product lines, and continue building devices using other vendor's chips (besides Qualcomm), etc... but as with all acquisitions—I wonder how long that state of affairs will last.
Alternatives like the Pi RP2040/2350 and Espressif's vast selection of boards can fill the gaps, but Arduino was what got me and many people I know into microcontrollers, so I have a special fondness for them!
I don't think Qualcomm bought them to destroy them. I think they see Arduino as a gateway. Instead of hoping students will learn ARM it's more reasonable to leverage Arduino's simple nature to act as an on-ramp for more low level developers. I wouldn't be surprised if Arduino IDE saw a revamp to better support jumping the gap between the Arduino to Snapdragon.
ST and TI do the same thing with their boards too and it's not a bad strategy.
People are making so much of this when it seems so much simpler. Qualcomm likes buying high-margin businesses, and Arduino is a high-margin business. Gross margin on their boards is over 90% (hence why you can buy a Chinese clone of a $30 board for $3) and this trend shows no signs of slowing down. The TI equivalent of the $30 Arduino Uno is $5, and it's a true gateway product.
Some years back when bluepills ran $2, Arduinos seemed to have no point. Today, you can buy an ESP32 dev board with wifi for $6. Or an Arduino Uno Wifi for $55.
I checked: there are board schematics for Uno Q there - but no datasheets or SDK or manuals or any documentation whatsoever for the QRB2210 SoC itself.
> Alternatives like the Pi RP2040/2350 and Espressif's vast selection of boards can fill the gaps, but Arduino was what got me and many people I know into microcontrollers, so I have a special fondness for them!
Exactly. For the people who did not follow a structured educational program on embedded programming, starting with an SMT microcontroller was very hard.
Arduino made this fun and easy with their language & IDE combo. Typing some code and seeing the lights on the board reacting is a hell of a drug.
Once you mastered the IDE, you could either program other microcontrollers in the same IDE, or at some point you hit the limits and started digging into the vendor-specific toolchains.
If I started again today, I would again start with an Arduino.
There is also the change of location here. In normal times, it wouldn’t matter where in the world a company is based but moving “entirely to the US” is just not a good look these days.
It is rather unfortunate. I haven't seen them mention moving manufacturing or their 'Arduino offices' (have you?), but even still I'd rather not support a country threatening to annex my homeland.
That is quite some board! Arduino has certainly progressed, I'm still playing around with R3 boards and ATMega chips. Other than the form factor, this looks like not only a completely different class of product, but a completely different hobby or business.
ATmega micros are still incredibly useful and the Arduino ecosystem (especially the open source libraries, thanks Rob Tillaart!) makes it so easy to whip up a firmware. I really hope no matter what happens Arduino doesn't go off the rails.
This board has onboard EMMC, wifi/ble and can run a full Linux. That is more of an rp 4/5 with an rp2xxx tagged on the side. It comes with their own arduino IDE installed too
It is kinda disappointing but I can see why Qualcomm wants to use the brand.
Yes, this new board is more of a Raspberry Pi replacement than an Arduino Uno replacement.
More specifically, I can see it trying to compete with things like those funny Chinese boards built around SoCs like SG2000. Those embed a Linux capable core, a small NPU, a camera interface with ISP and video codecs, and a secondary RTOS core for realtime control. Basically built for drones and simple robots. The caveat of those boards being: the documentations sucks, the SDK is wack, you get 3 example scripts and are entirely on your own outside that.
Qualcomm could be trying to branch into drones/robotics/etc with this move.
I'm speaking in a broader sense, comparing the variety of other Arduino boards like the Uno R3/R4. That wasn't too clear in the OP, sorry!
The concern I have with the $44 Q is it has 2GB of RAM and 16GB eMMC, and a processor that's probably between a Pi 3 and Pi 4 in terms of speed and IO (though 4nm, so probably much more efficient).
For $45 I can buy a Pi 5 with it's own built-in GPIO, PCIe, and a much faster SoC, though it lacks a few niceties like the Q form factor, the more efficient SoC, a realtime microcontroller, and a USB-C port with display out capabilities (I really wish Pi had that...).
Do you happen to know how good the Linux environment is on the Dragonwing SoC.
I think their slides say Debian, but didn't mention what binary blobs one needs to have for enabling various functionality the SoC provides / how much their kernel deviates from mainline kernel
...
The problem is that there just isn't a whole lot of money to be made in providing hobby hardware for enthusiasts. Every time a big player gets involved, they think they can change this. A decade ago, Intel tried that back in the day with Galileo / Edison, and tellingly, they came up with the same "ideas": IoT / AI.
If you're doing cheap IoT trinkets, you're never going to pay extra for a brand. You're going to buy the cheapest wifi / BT chipset out there and make do with that.
And if you're doing serious AI, you basically go for a real computer with real computing power, and in that segment, the Arduino brand means nothing.
I suspect there was an internal deck saying how this acquisition is going to give them foothold in the hobby community, but if they wanted that, there's a million better ways. Starting with making documentation, SDKs, and toolchains accessible and easy to use. There's a reason why you see Microchip, STM, RPi, and Espressif chips in every other DIY project.
> If you're doing cheap IoT trinkets, you're never going to pay extra for a brand.
Except for the Arduino brand. Arduino boards have margins that traditional hardware vendors can only dream of achieving. The only thing carrying that profit margin is the Arduino brand. The software stack is not tied to their hardware, but they make tons of money on hardware.
> The problem is that there just isn't a whole lot of money to be made in providing hobby hardware for enthusiasts.
With Arduino, the hardware is probably the least interesting/important part. The software side is more important, providing an easy-to-use IDE and a simplified API and platform abstraction layer to make it super-easy to get started. Then there's the documentation, sample code, and community.
Indeed, at this point, there are possibly hundreds of Arduino compatible boards, and the other pieces of the puzzle are more important. Arduino is the Python of microcontroller development.
Come for the odd little microcontroller board. Stay for the community.
> A decade ago, Intel tried that back in the day with Galileo / Edison, and tellingly, they came up with the same "ideas": IoT / AI.
Intel's execution - as usual - was poor and lacking.
Both the Galileo and Edison were much more expensive than their Arduino counterparts, and their x86 cpu's were of little value within that space (especially at the time). Neither made it past 5 years without being killed - which is exactly what people feared. A stunning lack of long-term commitment from Intel to develop and grow a community, leaving anyone that actually built products based on their devices holding a useless bag.
and their x86 cpu's were of little value within that space
Intel could've attracted the entire retrocomputing community if they realised that the peripherals around x86 and the PC ecosystem were what got them to where they were in the first place, and made Galileo/Edison actually PC-compatible, but they ended up making a SoC with a 486DX+ core and mostly-incompatible peripherals (one would think they should've learned their lesson with the 80186/88...) and somehow convinced Microsoft to make a special version of Windows(!) for it despite a complete lack of any video output capabilities.
"WTF were they thinking!?" is the most concise summary of that fiasco.
Intel Edison/Galileo didn’t work because everything they could do is replaced by purpose built ASICs, much cheaper at scale and energy efficient, important metrics for IoT. They were at best PoC material in the lab.
I wonder if even inside the hobbyist space, Arduino got obsoleted by the Raspberry Pi and its clones/compatible devices.
Basically, if you already got the skills to work with "bare" microcontrollers, you won't need all the simplification and handholding that Arduino provides and you can just buy the individual chips and fully utilize the tiny form factor and low power requirements.
If you want to learn programming microcontrollers, then locking yourself into Arduino's abstractions is probably counterproductive.
On the other hand, if you do want to just combine different ready-made modules, focus on programming and don't want to worry too much on the low-level stuff, you will probably use a raspberry pi or similar: The form factor is only slightly larger than an arduino, but you get a full-fledged PC instead of a microcontroller.
> Arduino got obsoleted by the Raspberry Pi and its clones/compatible devices.
Not entirely. Arduino was always targeted at the "casual DIY" segment - artists, school robotics clubs, and other folks who wanted automation without a steep learning curve. This was a notch below the "serious hobbyist" tier where you could save a lot of money by just buying a bare-metal version of the same chip and write some code in C (or Rust). Or the pro tier, where there's way you're paying $20+ for a glorified breakout board.
Casual DIY always had a ton of inertia. It's also the reason why every other design for an analog guitar pedal or whatever is using components that are 50 years old: ancient designs are just copied-and-pasted forever. So I don't think Arduino is dead there, although other platforms are definitely eating some of their lunch.
Getting a full-fledged PC is an anti-feature for a small project. I don't want to fart around with a Linux install just to set the thing up. I don't want to worry about SD card longevity or power supply compatibility. And I definitely don't want to spend $50+. I'll buy a cheap Arduino-compatible board that will immediately run whatever code I load it with. I've built several Arduino projects and RPi would have been more annoying and much more expensive.
The RPi Pico looks great for this, but that's pretty much an Arduino equivalent. You can even used the Arduino IDE with it.
I feel like the raspberry pi pico is more of a competitor to the arduino than the raspberry pi - there's quite a few applications where having a whole linux operating system is a hindrance compared to running on bare metal, especially anything that needs real time control of signals. (Although you can get around this on the pi by connecting peripherals via USB/serial/i2c which themselves might use MCUs).
Then again, one of the more accessible (IMO) ways of using pi picos is with the arduino environment, or its cousin platformio. I do think that even if in some ways the arduino abstractions can be limiting in some ways, in practice it's often a big timesaver for more casual (and not so casual) applications. It gives you easy access to a large ecosystem of libraries across a lot of hardware platforms.
Perspective: Former college robotics team member a while ago (2022) (IEEE SoutheastCon)
I definitely see niches for both. Even if you've got some experience an Arduino uno or mega is just an atMEGA with good software support and IO headers.
We'd usually use an RPI and Arduino - connect our 'out of the box' modules to the pi, pi to arduino via uart serial, and wire arduino to the meat and potatoes. The RPI's IO was generally not as good in terms of latency but also if the wrong wire gets crossed suddenly we'd have a dead Pi but the Arduino would shrug it off.
> If you want to learn programming microcontrollers, then locking yourself into Arduino's abstractions is probably counterproductive.
Arduino isn't a pipeline from zero to professional embedded dev. It's a stepping stone, and a crucial one at that. I'd know. I'm an embedded firmware engineer. Got my first Arduino when I was 11.
Arduino's success comes from the legibility of their API and the simplicity of their tooling. It allows kids or a novice to get comfortable with core principles of the trade (GPIO, other basic peripherals, limited memory, etc) without the cognitive overhead of makefiles and JTAG adapters. You aren't getting "locked in" by anything, you're building skills that you'll need for the next step.
If all you're doing is twiddling some GPIOs, as is the case with most beginner/educational projects, RPi isn't teaching you any skills that translate to industry. So there's one niche: Arduino is a practical educational tool.
That simple tooling and API also make Arduino great for small side projects that don't demand a sophisticated uC. Once that project is finished, you can plop an ATMega328 onto a piece of perfboard with a crystal and a couple caps, and your Arduino is free to use on whatever your next project will be. Can't do that with a Pi.
Also, I'd much rather just plug an Arduino into my PC and throw some code on it, than clear off half my desk to make way for a monitor and keyboard for the Pi. Point Arduino.
> I suspect there was an internal deck saying how this acquisition is going to give them foothold in the hobby community,
No. This is to give them a foothold in the "IoT hammer" manufacturing business. They looked at how the Raspberry Pi went from cheap hobby computer running Linux to low effort rapid prototyping embedded platform that can run a full web stack. They want to be part of a full dev pipeline from prototype to product.
The real target audience are people building things who don't care how it works as long as it works. So expect 99.9% of these projects to use some sort of Python or JS thing running in a container on the Linux while the microcontroller runs a few lines of c to manipulate IO pin state from the Linux thing. Just like all those abandoned Spin scooters in Seattle that had raspberry Pi's in them. That is the market they are after, not the person who builds a one-off Arduino fish feeder.
I agree. The Arduino brand isn't for professionals.
But let's say tomorrow they come together with bundle/partnerships to create a new, great dev environment, very easy, that a mechanical engineer can prototype a great robot for a niche use case,and continue to use that chip and code, with some changes in V1 production ?
Is there value to the Arduino brand and community than ?
Arduino is used by many professionals. It is cheap enough that you can buy it on your corporate cards and you boss won't ask many questions. As such many products start with an Ardunio based demo, and if/when the demo is a success it moves to a real company project with a real budget.
The question though is does this add value for the owners of Arduino? All too often when a project moves from the demo to real engineering (making a demo something you can sell is typically about ten times harder than the demo) you select all new hardware.
There is a whole lot of commerical products built out of what we consider hobby projects (Adruino, Raspberry Pi). Eg: digital displays, industrial equipment controllers etc. All of this is clubbed under the nebulous IoT moniker.
My take: Qualcomm hopes to leverage Adriano adoption to expand their IoT share, and also to grow Adruino's footprint to include more smart IoT devices using Qualcomm's chipsets (Eg: Robotics)
I think it might be related to them charging say $100 instead of $5 for the device and providing "lifetime" (read: "indefinite") access to their IoT Cloud. Except there are no guarantees on the duration of that access.
As a side note, I don't get why they can't find the NPV of actually lifetime cloud compute. Compute costs are decreasing rapidly, so a $5/yr perpetuity has a NPV of $185 assuming 2.7% inflation?
> And if you're doing serious AI, you basically go for a real computer with real computing power, and in that segment, the Arduino brand means nothing.
What about cheap AI for toys and gadgets? Maybe the next Furby or some smart Toaster could run on their chips. AI is spreading, moving into casual corners outside of hobbyists and high professionals, maybe they aim to get a foothold there?
>If you're doing cheap IoT trinkets, you're never going to pay extra for a brand. You're going to buy the cheapest wifi / BT chipset out there and make do with that.
It's the opposite of that. Hobbyist/low volume maker gonna spend extra money to buy a familar tool, instead of going extra miles finding the cheapest available.
Even ESP32 is bad in term of perfomance/features and how much it cost.
Maybe. New people means new perspective. Maybe they see value in an ecosystem of developers who are keen to spend their free time to drum up interesting content, based on their projects and applications. This grassroots interest is what drove Apple to displace Sun Microsystems as the de facto, UNIX system.
I mean, if you have seen RasPi prices lately, I'm not so sure this is true. Seems like a really profitable biz..granted, I wouldn't pay their absurd prices for such underpowered hardware. Virtually nobody should buy their $200 CM5 product for example.
One of their key points is that the AI component is completely tied to the Qualcomm stack, the opposite of Open. Essentially the Arduino brand will live on as a marketing layer over Qualcomm hardware, which you will still need an NDA and significant volume to gain access to.
Are they buying it up to kill it or phase it out? Seems like corporations never do anything like this to the "good" of the community, it's always bad. I'd love to be pointed at exceptions where a megacorp bought some small relatively benevolent project and then didn't squeeze all the profit out of it and leave it for dead.
I don't think it's malicious, it's just that Qualcomm offered a big payday to people who have been working on the project for a very long time and are probably on the verge of wanting to go something else in their life. And then they're gonna force them to navigate the Kafkaesque bureaucracy at BigCo to get an approval for every blog post, conference talk, etc. Expense reports, headcount planning, performance management, you name it. After a year or two, they're gonna be thoroughly cooked and leave.
I would guess they want to keep it - there are a lot of company advanced engineering projects run on Arduino and when those prove useful (most don't) the company starts looking for how to make it production. Thus having Arduino as a push to their chips is a useful in to more companies.
Of course companies change directions all the time. I wouldn't surprise me if the people who bought Arduino believe the above vision, but there are other political factions that will try to kill it.
Killing Arduino doesn't serve their interests based how many as-like boards there are. This is more akin to Microsoft's acquisition of Minecraft. Quick and easy way to get people in the door through recognition and a large user base.
They just won a significant case in its licensing battle with Arm, securing rights to use Oryon cores in Snapdragon chips. Add in a decent x86 to ARM translation layer, and you have the basis of the next generation of handheld gaming. If Valve or someone paired with them for the next Steamdeck style project, they'd dominate.
At the high-end they announced two new flagship processor platforms at its 2025 Snapdragon Summit. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 they claim to be the world’s fastest mobile SoC.
Outside of Snapdragon its basically 5G Telecoms atm
- iPhone 17 Pro Max relies on Qualcomm's Snapdragon X80 Modem for 5G
- 5G Edge solutions for RAN, presumably harnessing AI
- Non-Terrestrial 5G Provisioning in their partnerships with Thales/Ericsson.
- IoT and Wearables - presumably low power/footprint modems
I think the AI bit is overblown. Why does every large company have to do everything in technology, AI is horribly over valued in the market right now. The other issues are much more important as those are threats to Qcom's current profit method mostly MediaTek squeezing the lower tier market. It's unclear if Qcoms going to be able to dominate upper tier where they own like 60% of market share if they don't also compete at lower tier where MediaTek has been very successful
Apple's vertical integration is formidable but Google are still really struggling with their execution, their Tensor SOCs are consistently years behind Snapdragon in performance and efficiency even after their switch to TSMC this generation. Qualcomm is probably safe at the high end of the Android market for a while yet.
Qualcomm is and will remain patent holding company. They have a crazy number patents for all manner of wireless communication, and they treat them like their golden geese.
I've been out of the hardware game a minute but Qualcomm was a great partner for helping you ship products. Everything about them sucks, but they will actually send engineers to your office. They always took bug reports seriously and pretty much always delivered patches. Also they always had ample samples, both in terms of dev boards and software. I know of several products that basically shipped the sample code with minimal modifications.
If I were a company trying to ship V1 of our first product, I would hands down pick Qualcomm. MediaTek et al are great for when you know what you're doing with minimal handholding.
I absolutely hated working with them, but at least they were a vendor you could work with. Perhaps the cheaper vendors have upped their game here but I wouldn't know.
Qualcomm still are the only relevant ones in town who actually sell high performance ARM designs to third parties and have no political quarrels attached, there's a lot of money to be made in that game.
As you said there is competition from Mediatek, but who knows how long Mediatek has before the US government sanctions them to hell and beyond. Apple doesn't sell to third parties (no matter how much one might dream) and so does Google. Samsung I haven't ever seen used outside of their own phones and TVs.
The remainder is NVidia's Tegra lineup but other than automotive and the Nintendo Switch I haven't seen these in third party products either, I doubt they'll even take your calls if you are not coming in with millions of units sold of demand.
Cooked how exactly?
- Completely missed out on the LLM boom, just like everyone except nvidia.
- Apple never used qcom SoCs, just their modems, Google doesn't even register on the radar of sales, their first foray into SoCs isn't great.
- Idk where you get that, they still hold the entire market in their firm grasp and Nuvia stuff has been nothing but outstanding, it's just a shame that MS are cowards and dropped the Windows-on-Arm stuff again.
- Google are partnering with them for the Android on PC projects.
I hope they provide better Linux support for the next gen PC grade chips.
Cooked hardware companies get bought into it seems. Intel is the most egregious example, but AMD is being circled by OpenAI now for 10%. Companies like Marvell and even hard drive companies are up due to how they fit into the AI pipeline.
You should feel dread. They're a pretty awful company... one of those outfits that seems to employ more lawyers than engineers. Basically the Oracle of chips.
I can't begin to guess what motivated them to engage in an intentional culture clash of this magnitude.
Don't look at just the specs. You also need to look at the board design and programming environment. I've used the ESP32 native tools and they are a lot more complex than Arduino. But I'm an embedded firmware developer, so it's kind of what I expect. But I used an Arduino, with 5V tolerant outputs, to light up Halloween costumes for years. I do it in 1 page of code that's I write in their IDE. I don't have to set up an SDK. And the Arudino API hides all the details I don't care about. Especially if I'm really just slinging solder and wiring something up quick.
I plug the USB in and its the same as an Arudino, can even use Arduino IDE, but I prefer VS Code with the PlatformIo extension. You can even use the Arduino Library (#import <Arduino.h>
Trouble is, this kind of trivial throwaway application is all that Arduino is really good for. Because the framework is designed to support thousands of chips, it supports none of them well. Any arduino code you write is easily 5x more terse than any of the native libraries, but it's also 10x slower. If you don't care, you don't care. But if you do care, Arduino is the least appropriate way to make a microcontroller go.
Besides that, IMO hiding hardware details from the developer is the worst thing about Arduino. The hardware details matter and it's far too easy to get footgunned by some implementation detail hidden from you.
But really, esp-IDF isn't that much more complex, nor are most of the other native frameworks. It's a bit more verbose, but esp-IDF provides helper libraries that replace almost everything Arduino provides, but in a way that is actually designed for the hardware and doesn't have to do things like lookup pin numbers in a giant table for each and every gpio call.
On the other hand, their competitors haven't been sleeping either.
Companies like Adafruit and Sparkfun sell dozens of tailor-made dev board variants, and their I2C module system allows you to mix & match a whole bunch of peripherals.
The code? A handful of lines of Python, which you can drag&drop onto it like it's a flash drive. Or use a browser-based IDE if you want one-click library install and serial logging.
Arduino's IDE was groundbreaking in 2010, but these days there are easier (and cheaper!) alternatives for beginning hobbyists, and better alternatives for power users.
Even if you like the Arduino programming environment (and I do), there seems to be little reason to use Arduino hardware unless it’s for compatibility with other hardware you have? For example, there is a very nice unofficial port of Arduino for the Raspberry Pi Pico. There are also many fine Arduino-compatible single-board computers from Adafruit. The Arduino board form factor seems big and clunky in comparison.
I don’t even use the Ardiuino IDE anymore; I've switched to VS Code using PlatformIO.
It’s great that all these microcontroller boards and peripheral breakout boards can be programmed using the same basic API’s, but I don’t think it helps Arduino the company very much.
> I've used the ESP32 native tools and they are a lot more complex than Arduino.
How so? All of that is abstracted away from the users just like it is for Arduinos. In fact you can use the Arduino IDE to develop for most ESP32 chips.
If anything Arduino is holding back everyone with their horrible IDE. Their Board and Library managers are painfully slow and having no way to store configuration with your sketch means that you're taking a screenshot of a drop down menu if you have to make any changes.
Eventually people want to write their own libraries to make their code more manageable and the Arduino IDE makes it difficult for someone who knows what they're doing.
> But I used an Arduino, with 5V tolerant outputs, to light up Halloween costumes for years.
I have yet to encounter a piece of hardware that doesn't respect 3.3v as signal high. All of the neopixel variant's data pins work off 3.3v and most people have moved on to 12v and even 24v for larger projects while still raw dogging 3.3v on the data pin without issue.
Arduino's insistence on 5v logic levels is for maintaining backward compatibility which is honestly unnecessary.
I'm an amateur with this stuff and honestly find the ESP experience significantly more pleasant than Arduino. I'm sure there are footguns I haven't encountered, but I get so much more bang for the buck out of random ESP builds + the incredible line of various bundled ESP devices that come with touchscreens, sensors, etc. for incredibly low prices.
I know a million people have replied to you, and while I don't want to be jumping on the dog pile, I just want to say that along with PlatformIO (which automates the setup of ESPIDF and/or Arduino for the ESP, (and it also does it for a ton of other micros)) and Expressif having their own Arduino Core for their chips with integrates into Arduino's IDE, Expressif have also released their own extensions for VSCode and Eclipse that greatly aid the end user in getting ESPIDF setup and configured.)
You no longer have to break your back going from zero to blinking an LED. I remember when I first got into espressif chips and it was a right pita back then. But no more!
Personally I'm a fan of PlatformIO because its not just because of the wide selection of platforms it supports and that it uses VSCode which is my IDE of choice.
I use arduino ide to build esp projects. I have not found it much different than the arduino as a beginner, except much cheaper and faster. I like not having to do all the shield stuff. But will admit, it was helpful to start on arduino as its built in pins helped me get going as I tried to avoid soldering and breadboarded everything. That only lasted a short time before I realized I had to solder some things if I wanted to grow the project. I still like the idea of breakout boards for specific things but I usually solder them in now.
You can make the argument that esp32 supports Arduino but you can quickly run into “here be dragons” which sends most people for a loop. Arduino has a fantastic reputation for a very good reason.
ESP stuff is very cheap and works well, but the Arduino Uno is a great board/ecosystem for beginners and simple projects. Being 5V is more convenient for a lot of things, and having the pin headers already on the board that you can just start plugging things in with jumper wires is great.
The Arduino IDE is awesome for an extremely quick setup time. You can very easily download libraries and add them to your project, you don't have to create a blank source file, you just have to fill in setup() and loop(). The Arduino IDE makes it very easy to set up a new board and download code to it.
Much of this also applies to the Arduino IDE with and ESP32, but what I really appreciate about the whole Arduino ecosystem is if you want to do something really simple, like say, activate a servo when some sensor reaches a certain value, you literally only have to type 5-6 lines of code. You're not messing around with SDKs and Makefiles and git cloning repositories etc etc etc. You can get kits for $70 that have an Arduino clone, and a bunch of different sensors, servos, steppers, etc. It's absolutely fantastic for teaching basic programming and electronics.
With ESP you can do that without even coding, using ESPHome it can be done using YAML config, it can also be paired with Home Assitante, MQTT or many other thing without any coding
Various ESP dev boards, Arduino, Pi Pico -- any of these are good places to get started from on the road towards doing useful things with microcontrollers, I think.
Arduino is just a familiar name with a long (~20 year!) history. There's a plethora of pre-existing projects that a person with no prior programming or electronics experience can implement easily to get their feet wet.
Some manner of ESP32 (or STM or MSP or RP2...) may be a good choice for a project for someone with some experience, but if you put a reasonably-motivated person in a room with a computer and an Arduino starter kit then they'll successfully be building simple things in no time.
It remains a friendly place to start doing stuff, and that was always the primary intent.
Yeah I'm kind of puzzled by what Qualcomm is getting out of this.
Arduino has so little presence in production devices and is largely an enthusiast and hobbyist product. To be clear, this is good! Having well-supported high-quality enthusiast products is awesome.
But it just doesn't... seem to overlap with the bulk of Qualcomm's business, which is large-scale silicon sales to consumer and industrial clients.
The earlier up the product development stream you can place your product, the bigger share you'll have down the road. There's the saying about planning for 1 year, rice, 20 years, trees, 100 years schools. Windows is the leader because most kids grow up using windows in elementary school and blindly continue on. If you own arduino, maybe they start on ardunio, continue on to qualcomm products, and they're already trained in the qualcomm ecosystem before they've started engineering school. Adobe famously was very lax on closing Photoshop cracks in the early 2000s and trained up an entire generation on their product with great success.
I run a medialab at an university. ESP32 is great, but there are some downsides that are all not dealbreakers, but can in some cases lead me to recommend a classic Arduino-type device:
1. Lack of 5V tolerant pins. Beginners may or may not be aware of the possibility of destroying the device or the need to level-shift signals.
2. Tooling may not work out of the box. As of today the tooling step boils down to pasting a URL into a field in the preferences, but that is something you need to know. You need to select the right uploading options which are much more complex than with arduino type devices.
3. IMO less clear naming of different dev boards, thus also harder to find docs.
4. Examples may not work out of the box, simple Arduino examples may fail with hard to debug issues (for beginners) where they don't know whether it is a hardware issue, wrong board/uploader setup or a pinout issue (e.g. if the onboard LED pin differs).
These are all examples of issues students had when they used the ESP32 boards without my guidance, so not just my opinion or a theory. And as I said none of these are dealbreakers, but depending on the patience, stress levels, perceived skill etc. of the student this might make me recommend an Arduino over an ESP32.
I use it for learning and play with my kids. I load the program on the board then we wire the components together and get all excited about blinking LEDs or a LCD.
The lack of features (notably Wifi on our boards) and somewhat larger size are benefits for us.
The ATMega AVR devices are not cost effective for what they deliver. However, the new ATtiny 0/1/2-series devices are worthwhile for applications the Cortex-M devices aren't a good fit for. The Arduino ecosystem doesn't really acknowledge these parts.
It used to be that but since Arduino and Pi have both gone full commercial, it's not longer viable. I teach kids coding and have been looking at alternatives like ESP or other boards that are much more cost effective and friendly for beginners.
It's not the hardware but the ecosystem, libraries and support which is available. Sure there are alternatives like platformio but when you're learning most of the stuff out there eg youtube use Arduino IDE and libs. And just try and get an LLM to produce code based on Espressif libraries not Arduino lols...
"Arduino" is more a framework than it is a specific piece of hardware. You can run "Arduino" the framework on an ESP32. Not that I would, I don't recommend it as ESP-IDF is way better, but you can run "Arduino" code on an ESP32.
Just wait for a few years and then you can forget everything about open or open source about Arduino.
And maybe in 2030, you will only be able to run the Arduino IDE on Windows with a specific driver to ensure that you only flash a firmware to a DRM controlled authentic Arduino device.
It is a nightmare when such an acquisition happen.
Shame to see Arduino go, but honestly how relevant are they anymore? The Arduino framework is one of the worst ways possible to write firmware for any slightly serious use, and their hardware is... quaint in the era of Espressif and the Cambrian explosion of devboards with any number of highly advanced features.
Arduino was a great way to get into microcontrollers back when the only alternative was vendors' native libraries in straight undocumented C and wiggling CPU registers manually. But that's not really a niche anymore, there's plenty of other, better designed, frameworks and libraries. Arduino has always been the worst, slowest framework available.
Honestly it's high time to replace Arduino with something else that doesn't instill such awful habits in new engineers.
There's still relevance in making it stupidly easy to make an LED blink and make basic apps on circuit boards. Education + weekend hardware hackers might look for something different in a framework than a professional.
But certainly for pro use cases the hardware specific frameworks are way more powerful (but also complex).
The native AVR libraries are really good. It's not quite as idiomatic as Arduino, but it's really not all that different.
Beginners can learn frameworks more complicated than Arduino and I think they should. Before Arduino, beginners were expected to write plain C or assembly, and the industry got along just fine. There were still countless hackers and weekend tinkerers. They just had to learn more, which is not a bad thing
>
There's still relevance in making it stupidly easy to make an LED blink and make basic apps on circuit boards. Education + weekend hardware hackers might look for something different in a framework than a professional.
This group is has been moving to circuitpython, which is much less performant, but even easier to use. The more serious cross-platform development environments, like Zephyr, have also become much better.
Broad support for many different chips is precisely why Arduino is so bad. It has to check pin numbers against a gigantic table for every gpio call.
You want chip-specific libraries. When the software is designed for the hardware everything works better.
The native AVR and esp-IDF frameworks are very good. There's also micropython and circuit python. I've heard good things, but I don't partake in Python.
Personally I think attempting to provide a cross-platform library for microcontrollers is an enormous mistake. This is not x86, you can't rely on any CPU feature existing, which results in awful branching code in places that in a sane framework is a single instruction updating a CPU register
If you want a "framework", Zephyr is the only thing i can think of, that is somewhat hardware agnostic, have great software packages, and fairly widely used.
This is a recipe for disaster. Arduino is great for education/tinkering. Qualcomm won't sell you anything even if you are ready to commit to buying 1000s. I tried to source some Qualcomm chips for a startup @ 10k qty and was told there would be no information or support. Qualcomm can have a much bigger market if they simply open up some product lines for distribution like MediaTek do.
China has a way more vibrant, innovative hardware industry simply because you can source everything made by Chinese firms.
This is the exact reason why they bought Arduino... So now startups have a way to buy say 1,000 devices for prototyping. Qualcomm gets used to supporting smaller developers/startups/tinkerers and will hopefully push different types of chips into the Arduino product lines.
The issue is that their corporate culture does not support it. Arduino will be too small to matter. This is the same issue as with Coral, the Google TPU. They are not refreshed as they are too small. They are too small cause they are not updated or supported widely.
People need mainline kernel support and regular refreshes to reliably build projects based on it. This will require some level of building their BSPs in open and providing APIs for people to take advantage of the QCOM specific features. A QCOM that won't talk to anyone without an NDA cannot adapt to this.
> This is the exact reason why they bought Arduino... So now startups have a way to buy say 1,000 devices for prototyping. Qualcomm gets used to supporting smaller developers/startups/tinkerers
For this, Qualcomm does not have to buy Arduino for a big amount of money: Qualcomm could simply offer this option on their own and save the acquisition cost.
Addendum: For the acquisition cost, Qualcomm could do a lot of marketing of their offering towards makers.
The problem is that massive semiconductor companies like Qualcomm rarely follow through. They want their lottery ticket to be included in the next smartphone revolution but won't care about random under 5k unit Kickstarter. Everyone knows that those are two sides of the same coin, but they always choose to wait for the bankruptcy trustees to show up.
Seems like a similar play to what Broadcom did with Raspberry Pi— create a new entity/brand that could resell their chips on hobby boards and be stewards of a "community" support framework but largely without distracting the company from its enterprise customers or risk cannibalizing those relationships.
That said, interesting that Qualcomm would buy twenty years of Arduino legacy for this rather than launching something new in the space.
As other have pointed out, that doesn't make any sense. Qualcomm doesn't want anyone buying their products at 1k quantities for prototyping. They want huge customers that place huge orders consistently. The return for supporting those small orders is miserable and doesn't align with their business objectives
Qualcomm has bought plenty of companies that serviced small customers, and what happed is exactly what the person you’re replying to described. You can’t even get a quote many times.
What I expect short term is what happened to Eagle in the PCB space when Autodesk bought it (best thing that happened to kicad).
Longterm Arduino goes into the periphery of the maker market, similarly to beaglebone.
It's cheaper and easier to just spin your own boards at that point. Arduinos are not complex or special in any way. Even if you did need a ton of off the shelf boards, there are countless clones that will sell you as many as you want for next to nothing.
Plus the market you're implying exists is so small as to be utterly worthless to Qualcomm. They are in no way interested in individuals or small businesses
> Entrepreneurs, businesses, tech professionals, students, educators, and hobbyists will be empowered to rapidly prototype and test new solutions, with a clear path to commercialization supported by Qualcomm Technologies’ advanced technologies and extensive partner ecosystem.
At the least the official line is to remedy this situation. Could be embrace/extend/extinguish but tech companies spend all kinds of money on getting students and smaller businesses into their monolithic ecosystems.
The data center AI race was won by nvidia, embedded AI might still be up for grabs and it helps to have developer adoption.
Yeah, I was going to say this is like the worst-case scenario for the average user.
One of the benefits of the main Arduino line is it was very simple to convert to your own design. Companies like Broadcom and Qualcomm won't sell (many of) their chips on normal distributer sites.
Same reason why Raspberry PIs kind of suck in my opinion. Great you've come up with a neat thing you want to build with it; you are forced to utilize either their compute modules which may not be sufficient for your task, or might be out of stock, or XYZ.
Yep. Same here but dramatically lower quantities. Was told basically we'd have to pay for a partner's support. Not that I'm expecting better from Arduino, but the community makes up for it. You Google "dragonwing stackoverflow" and there are 604 results, but even the first few aren't remotely relevant. "Atmega328p stackoverflow" is over 14k and relevant. Arduino is 52 million. It's a nonstarter
Arduino has been trying out a new "pro" line for about a year now, making PLC-level devices to be used in automation but hopefully attracting developers by letting them use the same family of tools as the educational line.
10k? Sorry, pal! We're in QualcommLand, and you need to be at least 100k units tall to ride this ride!
But if you are a small developer, there are options for you! Have you tried to: eat shit? And die? So that you don't insult our PRECIOUS FUCKING TIME by IMPLYING that a MERE 10K would be ENOUGH for THE GREAT QUALCOMM to ACTUALLY CARE?
The optimist in me wants to believe that this acquisition is a sign of Qualcomm actually trying to be better than that. But realistically? Yeah no. It's Qualcomm. They wouldn't have let it get this bad if they ever cared.
afaik, Raspberry Pis move around 7M units annually.
Based on their first announced product (https://www.arduino.cc/product-uno-q), I think Qualcomm is trying to get into that space, and they bought Arduino for the brand name.
You're right that Qualcomm isn't in the business of small business. But maybe they expect that the market is big enough that it's worth their while to pay a subsidiary (Arduino) to do it.
I had the same knee-jerk reaction, but the optimist in me wants to say "isn't that the point of the acquisition?" Another comment linked to the Uno Q, which looks like a Qualcomm dev kit by Arduino. Perhaps Qualcomm is trying to get better at exactly the kind of thing you're talking about.
They're more fun. The programming is easier (although you can get an Arduino like experience on a ESP32). They have 5V options, which make some projects easier without having to add additional components. The ESP32 API (and the Pico for that matter) are better suited professional programmers.
An Arduino is better if you're doing something and want a quick, easy, simple to program controller. It started as a way for artists to add MCUs to the projects without having to become embedded programmers.
The fact we don't have viable western competition for Espressif is likely to become far more of a headache than all the angst about AI GPU production.
Where can you get a half decent microcontroller with wifi integrated on it? Espressif. All the others are flat out bad in some very important dimension, which isn't to say the Espressif products are perfect, but they fit in the important ways.
Yea... ST, Nordic etc have been sleeping on the Wi-Fi, letting Espressif corner that market. They both now have standalone Wi-Fi ICs, but no MCUs still; and it took them a while to release the ICs.
MCHP has been slowly coming up with decent radio devices, finally.
If you don't use the radio going bare metal is basically effortless, if you need to use the radio the dev Tools are actually improving, though they are still nowhere as good as IDF in hiding the ugliness.
Of course they are more expensive (not much more, really, compared to simillar specced ESPs) but they are western and the peripheral actually work as intended. In my projects with ESP32 i had to basically bitbang every peripheral that i needed to use beyond their simplest mode.
Built-in no, but the Pi Pico W is decent and inexpensive if the form factor isn't an issue. The RP2040/RP2350 are nice chips to work with and documentation is good. I can live with an external module, and it's certified too.
Arduino offered tiny, inexpensive, easy-to-program computers and dominated the hobby space at first. This lasted for a few years, but then they started getting competition. The ESP8266 offered comparable performance at a fraction of the price, while the Raspberry Pi was about the same price as an Arduino but way better performance. Hard to compete when other companies are selling better hardware for a lower price.
> while the Raspberry Pi was about the same price as an Arduino but way better performance
If you are cross shopping a full single board computer (Pi) with a microcontroller (arduino/esp32 etc) for a project, it's almost always a sign you don't know what you are doing. With the exception of the recent Pi Pico, non of the raspberry pis are Arduino/microcontroller competitors - they are typically full blown linux computers with all the benefits and drawbacks that provides.
While you can absolutely solve microcontroller-style problems with full blown computers, it's rarely the best/cheapest option.
Right but if you're a hobbyist, "cheap" isn't the priority. I mean, what's the harm of using a $40 SBC instead of a $10 one if you're going to be spending hundreds of dollars and dozens of man-hours on it?
The bigger concern is the overhead of the Linux OS in terms of interacting with it vs just flashing a microcontroller... but linux lets you run an SSH and FTP servers and wifi and a debugger on the thing easily.
So you get easier access to remotely playing with the programming of your gizmo, but you have the OS in the way of just talking to hardware in real-time. I haven't done projects like that since my undergrad, does it really make that much difference?
To me the big deal-breaker would probably be if the thing I was building was battery-powered.
For a long time I did a lot of Arduino stuff because you could get Nano clones for less than 1 EUR - which pretty much makes them throwaway, if you mess up.
I recently was doing a few projects with the Arduino Every, which is a nice board - but it's just too expensive. I did fry a few - so now I'm just using them as development board (the additional UARTs help a lot there), and for the actual project still use Nanos where I no longer care about the serial debug output, and therefore am fine with just the one serial port.
It's still one of the best boards if you want to do stuff on "bare metal". While I agree they missed a few product innovations, it's still a product that is in demand and gets used by industry for real products.
You can make a low volume product by buying a bunch of Arduinos as your controller. You just stick them in the device. There's no license issue. While I haven't exhaustively looked, one vendor's kit I did look at explicitly stated their boards were not licensed for that kind of commercial use. Qualcomm could very well make their boards for development, test, and evaluation purposes only. And that would be my worry. It wouldn't effect tinkering at home or use in a classroom, but would mean you couldn't buy a stack of Nanos, flash them, and plug them into your project, if it is for a commercial purpose.
> one vendor's kit I did look at explicitly stated their boards were not licensed for that kind of commercial use. Qualcomm could very well make their boards for development, test, and evaluation purposes only.
The "we have lawyers and lots of money to enforce things that are on shaky legal ground and you will likely settle instead of fighting in court" legal theory, I presume.
As far as I can tell, if they even attempted that, all they could do is deny any kind of warranty claims from you and try and stop distributors selling you any more of their brand parts.
> You can make a low volume product by buying a bunch of Arduinos as your controller. You just stick them in the device. There's no license issue.
Note that the Arduino libraries are LGPL licensed. Unless you have a commercial agreement with Arduino, you have to distribute your firmware to your customers as object files so it can be linked to updated/modified versions of the Arduino libraries. This means that I wouldn't use Arduino for a shipping product unless you're fine with the firmware on the device being publicly available.
That's not my reading of https://support.arduino.cc/hc/en-us/articles/4415094490770-L.... The LGPL is usually a requirement to publish your modifications to the LGPL licensed code, but not necessarily your binary blobs. And for some low-volume Arduino based products, the software isn't the valuable part of the project, anyway.
Arduino has always been a naked cash grab disguised as a "hacker-friendly nonprofit." The gross margin on their boards is >90%, and yeah, the software is mostly a ripoff of wiring.
The software was based on Processing. It was never a secret, just open source working as intended. It doesn't look the same any more.
A non-profit is still a business. Success is necessary for existence.
Think about the number of companies that have been created to make, or heavily specialize in Arduino clones and accessories without having to pay Arduino a cent because the designs were intentionally open-sourced. It doesn't sound like a naked cash grab to me.
Hopefully it will make Qualcomm behave more like Arduino and not the opposite.
Qualcomm is one of the worse companies I have had the pleasure to work with.
Their support model is hellish and they provide very little information and documentation, so usually you’ll end up doing a lot of guessing and reverse engineering. They will tell you to sign a contract with one of their “design partners”, but even they can’t get answers for basic questions.
Seriously, if they want more small cap companies working with them they have to treat them better, I worked with them as a small company and as a larger company and in both cases their support was basically non existent even if we were buying chips from them for more than 10m$ a year.
Qcom is a corporate behemoth, much like Oracle. In the immortal words of Bryan Cantrill, it is a lawnmower and if you stick your hand in it you'll get it chopped off.
I'm not sure how it is possible to compete against the RP2040/RP2050 at this point: quality, great programming environment, awesome hardware specs, cheap.
Yeah, I just did a project at work with an RP2040 and was really impressed with the Pico SDK. It hits a sweet spot in between ST’s insanity and Arduino’s easy-but-not-powerful tradeoff.
No crazy code generation, going from 0 to blinky is quick, but also going from blinky to DMA’s and interrupts is also a breeze.
I will say that I think the hardware peripherals in STM32’s are miles ahead, and PIO’s don’t necessarily make up the difference.
Yep the STM32 has certain advantages, even if they are usually complicated to program. With the Flipper Zero I programmed a low level timer interrupt and had to setup don't know how many registers... And the documentation is lacking. Also I love the fact that the STM32 comes in 5v variants that are great to interface it directly with things like a Commodore 64 or a Spectrum.
With their goal of 50/50 handset/non-handset revenue split by 2030, and their recent acquisitions pointing in the same direction, it stands to reason that they will do a lot of high capex investments into things like chiplet/chiplet communication for datacenters, automation/automotive, as well as edge AI. We can also observe they're baking in a lot of fpga-style configurability into a lot of these product lines - the connectivity fabric they acquired along with alphawave semi, their hexagon dsp, nuvia(oryon which they won the legal case for recently), etc,. which is another hint for the type of market they're targeting.
My opinion is that they should productize ESP [1] (no, not that one) which will be super harmonious with their goals.
Arduino acquisition, IMO, is putting one foot into manufacturing automation/automotive/sensors field. They have done similar in the past, arriver was an ADAS compute thing.
Personally I don't believe they will take the execution risk and scale up on all of these things. They will probably wait for the right time and chop off a few of these things and focus on whatever looks like it's going to be a cash cow.
Finance wise, there will be near term margin pressure but long term (IMO) they will execute superbly on a portion of their bets.
The main problem is the clock is ticking, handsets becoming commodified leading to vertical integration, licensing losing value, etc. Apple modem agreement running out soon too, and 6G modems too will not be as high margin due to diminishing improvements in telecom tech, even operator uptake at this point is looking unlikely after the 5G... debacle.
Which explains the very diverse bets they have made.
Will be interesting to see what they execute in this limited timeframe.
I moved to using Arduino compatibles due to the "two Arduino companies" drama a while back. I don't even recall how they resolved that dispute (or even if they did), but luckily I don't have to care as long as compatibles still work in the dev environment (or some fork thereof)
I love it when my device stays dumb (or at least connect-local) and not become abadonware 6 months after release because the cloud provider felt it a chore to keep running.
That's not exactly easy. I doubt on-device training will become much of a thing. But on-device inference is desirable in all sorts of distributed use cases. We're still a long way off from reliable internet everywhere. Especially when you want to start pushing large quantities of sensor data down the pipe.
I can't even get reliable internet on my phone in the centre of London.
Not necessarily. There are lots of use cases for on device AI inference. I run YOLO on an Nvidia Jetson powered Lenovo Think Edge, which processes incoming video at full frame rates on four channels with recognition and classification for a bespoke premises security system. No clouds involved other than the Nix package manager etc.
Make sure your argument May carry more weight when you're talking about ultra low power devices like an Arduino running AI inference locally that seems like more of a stretch.
true, true, very true, but i observe you use a nvidia chip. which is perfectly logical. why would you use something that is worse in every single way, right? which is exactly what qcom offerings are...
its cool... but thats not gonna last long at all. soon theyre gonna put their own custom soc into it, just like google did.
especially for such a specific, space/power/thermal constrained platform. itd be weird if meta didnt put their own custom soc into it.
running a big tech company these days, theres enough custom work going around that basically all the big players have internal silicon teams. hell, even fintech shops with ~100 employees are doing tape-outs these days!
Sadly, it seems that privacy is something that HN readers care about, but precious few others.
Look at the success of Facebook. The covers have been off that stinker for years, yet people still regularly use it; often to the exclusion of more traditional media. I have quite a few friends that I don't get invited to their occasions, because they only advertise them on FB. They invite a bunch of randos they've never met, but not those of us, they see all the time.
To be fair, if I sit down, and describe exactly what the ramifications of the "always on, always open" Facebook presence means, people will usually suddenly value privacy, but it seems that no one actually ever does that, at a level most folks can understand.
Hysterical rantings (even when well-founded), by geeks, don't get through to most folks. It needs to be done in the vernacular, and via media they actually consume.
This is desperation and I think it will go nowhere good.
Arduino has neither technical (standards, form-factor, pinouts), nor mindshare among developers that can be useful for high-speed, modern and upcoming AI-on-the-edge applications.
It sounds like Qualcomm is making a belated move towards robotics, but acquiring these assets is only going to distract them from becoming a successful player.
My takeaway from this announcement is that are going to ruin Arduino's current IDE and replace it with... something called Arduino App Lab? They didn't go into specifics as to what this is, other than it will integrate AI, somehow.
The other thing they announced is that they are going to sell at least one of their SBCs under the Arduino brand. That's kind of cool, I guess.
This announcement was very difficult to read. The whole thing sounds like it was written by chatGPT and it and it really shows. It took them roughly four pages to announce these two things and nothing else. I can't help but feel there is some level of malice to this, like they are taking out of Microsoft's playbook of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish".
No they won't. I've seen them coming a looooong way. I even re-baptised arduidiots [0] quite a while ago. Since the "branding" fiasco I've stayed well clear of them.
I hope this will make Arduino more suitable as a quick & easy dev tool for professional products.
I recently tried it out, with an STM32 board, but found out that the USB communication buffer is overwritten when data comes in too quickly. This is quite disappointing because the relevant communication protocol is perfectly capable of stalling transfers. Some internet searching revealed that many people are complaining about this. And the proposed solution of increasing the buffer size is of course not really a solution.
Someone should fix this. I know Arduino is marketed as hobbyist, and I can live with not being able to squeeze the juice out of my hardware to the fullest, but I was surprised to see that apparently they don't take correctness seriously.
Qualcomm is one of the worst vendors out there to deal with if you're a small hardware developer - let alone the kind of hobbyist who wants to use Arduino boards.
In a perfect world? Qualcomm would use Arduino to bring some of their chipsets and devices to public, and have the Arduino team open them up to small developers. Essentially doing what Pi Foundation is doing for Broadcom - package their unpalatable ICs into something that people actually use.
But we're not in a perfect world. We're in the kind of world where Qualcomm exists in the first place.
The pessimist in me fully expects Qualcomm to make Arduino worse rather than Arduino to make Qualcomm better.
Is arduino even relevant at all in 2025? I mean i gotta hand it to em they're getting an insane amount of life out of marketing a 20 year old chip but I haven't seriously considered using one for a decade or so because of how much better in literally every way the esp32 is. I mean it's like $10 for three of them, they're dual core, have a radio on board and you can even use the arduino IDE for em, what's the downside? I especially love the two cores because I can have a web stack and bluetooth on one core, and whatever realtime actual programming i need to do on the second core.
My first instinct to this piece of news is a five-char word starting with 'S'.
But reading through the news, it seems to be fine?
> Arduino will preserve its open approach and community spirit while unlocking a full‑stack platform for modern development—with Arduino UNO Q as the first step.
> The new Arduino UNO Q is a next-generation single board computer featuring a “dual brain” architecture—a Linux Debian-capable microprocessor and a real-time microcontroller—to bridge high-performance computing with real-time control.
Looks like they want to use the brand to push out their own stuffs, which seems to be reasonable. As long as they don't touch the education/OSS part I guess it will benefit both.
> Looks like they want to use the brand to push out their own stuffs, which seems to be reasonable. As long as they don't touch the education/OSS part I guess it will benefit both.
Given the current market for Qualcomm, it honestly wouldn't surprise me if in a few years they drop that education and OSS platform in favour of a paid approach. Recent Slack news doing the same has tainted my confidence.
33 Million audrino users, you can guarantee they want a piece of their wallets.
Whenever a VC backed company is acquired, the press release says "nothing will change, except for all these wonderful new things that the parent company will let us now do". A year later, things start to change. Two years later, the situation is unrecognizable. Qualcomm has no immediate financial incentive to support the education/OSS portion, and so they'll let it die. That's how these things always go.
Arduino is over. In reality, as soon as they took VC funding, it was over.
This news is making me much sadder than maybe it should.
Arduino is what pulled me into electronics. I have such fond memories of those old chonkers blinking LEDs. It felt like magic.
Unless they've had a major staffing and leadership shakeup, there is a zero percent chance Qualcomm is going to suddenly become some kind of open, sharing, culture. The company DNA is patent troll.
The recent joint ventures are a perfect example. I got so excited by those newish super powerful penta-whatever Qualcomm chips from Arduino a few years ago.
Then learned the chips were unobtainable outside the Arduino modules.
I heard the rumor quite some months ago but it was mostly speculation, altough it made sense after they acquired Edge Impulse.
I'm not sure whether to be happy or not to be fair. Main issues with Arduino while I was there was the leadership lack of vision and the unwillingness to support projects coming from the engineers. It was a company kinda coasting and unsure where to go.
If they replace leadership with people that have an clear vision and focus this might be good.
My greatest hope is that people with stocks don't get screwed over though, they used to distribute them quite "easily" at a certain point to avoid raising salaries.
Seems like a shrewd move. Historically Qualcomm products were only available to the top 5 phone vendors. You couldn't even steal a datasheet... If they're serious about opening up their products to more potential customers this might be a great way. Follow the raspberry pi model. You never know when a garage product will grow into the next multi-billion dollar socket. TI/ST/NXP/etcc could do this too and all it takes is cheap PCB's (mass produce at scale) and lots of documentation.....
Professional embedded developer and Arduino afficionado here: the amount of misinformation and hot takes here is astounding. First, Arduino is aimed at making technology usable for non-engineers. The ease of use makea them a breeze for engineers though. There's nothing wrong with making something serious with Arduino as long as the project fits within the confines of Arduino.
Arduino refers to a company as well as a hardware and software platform. It doesn't only mean an ATMega based board. You can have an ESP32 based Arduino board.
Arduino boards aren't designed for high performance or very high speed signal integrity.They are designed to be easy to use by non technical people.
I see people saying stuff like the ESP IDF and FreeRTOS are easy enough to use for most people. First, Arduino on ESP32 is built on the FreeRTOS based IDF, so people who would rather use FreeRTOS don't exactly know what they are talking about. Second, anyone who thinks FreeRTOS is easy enough to use for Arduino's core audience is delulu.
Use the proper tool for the job. Arduino is for beginners, non-technical people, and for projects with undemanding requirements. Stop pretending that it's a half baked solution for engineers; that completely misses the point of Arduino.
Guess the corporate development team needed to justify its existence. We've been through many dubious acquisitions in the tech sector for the last 5 years or so.
I love making random IOT things with the UNO R4 Wifi. I hope this means that Arduino will around (and as fun and easy) for years to come. But dang...Temo que...
Arduino wasn't strictly confined to Atmel/Microchip for a while now. Their newest mainstream boards roll with Renesas chips.
And Qualcomm itself is not in the business of making mass market MCUs. Does Qualcomm want to be?
They can, they already have the kind of dies they could put into those. But they would be competing against the likes of ST, and they wouldn't have the wide ass margins they're used to.
They would also have to be writing public documentation, and dealing with hobbyists and small developers. And the impression I got from dealing with Qualcomm? They'd rather douse themselves in gasoline and set themselves on fire than acknowledge that small developers exist.
Arduino is an open-source platform — both its hardware and software are open to everyone, right?
The first Arduino I built cost me just $5. I assembled all the parts on a breadboard, and it worked perfectly with the Arduino IDE, just like the ESP32 does nowadays.
Is Qualcomm basically paying for the brand? I didn’t even realize Arduino was a brand at first.
The brand. All of their other stuff is essentially open, so they're just going to start adding new features that aren't open to force people to use their brand and probably claim ownership of any code that is published through their app or something, or make it so that builds will only work on their qualcomm chips.
Oh, and likely there will be telemetry and user data acquisition in the arduino app so they'll probably also get some juicy user data to sell along the way.
They'll sell a few more chips while they're at it.
I'm glad there's nothing I need to do that an ESP32 or ESP8266 can't do.
Currently, no. But currently, the only gateway drug to Qualcomm chips is being a large enough company that your company can beat Qualcomm into submission.
Qualcomm may want to change that? But if Qualcomm's treatment of small developers remains the usual Qualcomm scorn, they'll get nowhere.
This reminds me of Intel and Samsung's brief forays into the microcontroller world (Edison and Artik, if anyone's wondering what to Google). Maybe Qualcomm is in it for the long haul though. IoT is going to grow, and Intel and Samsung just lost focus.
Interesting, but I do wonder if Arduino is close to the peak of its market share. Basically every hobbyist already knows about them - opportunities for growth would seem limited. Still exciting though!
I'm a bit baffled by this. For those of you who were paying attention there was a big controversy when Arduino split with Arduino and filed a lawsuit[1]. That made it hard to get hardware and resulted in a bunch of open source folks who had been contributing to redouble their efforts to insure that all of the copyrights and licenses were FOSS so that this couldn't happen again.
And that makes me wonder what Qualcomm "bought." Was it the trademark? The form factor? Presumably this won't affect things that leveraged the infrastructure like platform.io ? Was there money involved? Who got it and how much?
Part of me wonders if this is in response to Qualcomm being unable to acquire the Raspberry Pi foundation, and given their focus on the new 'Q' and "Linux-Debian"[2] its not much different than a Raspberry Pi[3]. So many questions and "We heard you liked AI so we put some AI in your AI" kinds messaging?
[2] I always chuckle at distro specific Linux as a 'thing.'
[3] "Hey look we have this computer that runs Linux and has a connector on the board so you can plug I/O devices into the top of it! Isn't that neat and unique?"
Interesting how Arduino is now planning to release a SBC, while Raspberry Pi also has a microcontroller lineup. Now using a RPi or an Arduino board in a project won't mean much when their products are nearly the same.
Why would any large corporation need Arduino for strategic pruposes. They could simply and easily create any board they want. I guess they just want to take and slowly destroy the brand
Seems natural as both Qualcomm and Arduino feel like companies that have struggled to keep up in markets they previously were at the forefront of. Maybe they can work better together.
rpi is owned by broadcom since the begining
the moment they stop selling them their closed source firmware’s cpu, be the end of rpi project
anyway, rpi is just a PR stunt to push brand recognition among nerds, so they buy real business broadcom products for real profits
after more than a decade of releasing CPUs for Linux based Android they released Snapdragon X CPU with Windows only support, intentionally not providing Linux drivers, to chum up with M$.
it was one of the rare opportunities to break the AMD / Apple duopoly for PC CPUs/SoCs.
I don't have any faith in them doing anything good. Feels like the microcontroller ecosystem is going to get replaced with a quad core application CPU running Kubernetes on Linux while a companion microcontroller runs 5 lines of c code to blink an LED.
Are we going to get datasheets or are we getting Raspberry Pi 2: nodatasheet boogaloo and the community has to spend the next 5 years reverse engineering the fuckin thing while loading binary blobs.
call me cynical but I can't imagine this ending very well. Even if qualcomm does nothing to alter the operations at Arduino, what happens if they go belly-up in a decade?
IDK, what kind of innovation we need from Arduino now? Arduino IDE exists and is open source. Arduino Uno exists and is open source. Arduino cores, both from Arduino itself and third-party exist and are open source. Not sure how they made money recently, I hope they are up to something good with Qualcomm.
That's an easy riddle to answer: Nothing sold by Arduino is particularly inexpensive. They've got room for profit margin. It's easier to make money when the things are several times more expensive than the competitors.
To pick an example: I can get a sketchy-feeling ESP32 board that was manufactured by some nameless entity and sold by a company that calls themselves "QQQMFXFDCX" or something. It'll probably generally work, but the pins will be in whatever order, labeled however, and I might have to spend some time documenting its unknown [mis]features. It will cost me a few dollars.
Or, I mean: I can get one from Arduino with their name on it (and with a ublox-branded module) in their Nano form-factor for ~$20. It will work fine. The pins will be [mostly] in numeric order, and labeled on both sides of the board. It will cost me about $20.
There's a lot more potential profit margin in a $20 sale than there is in a $3 sale.
(Do they add enough value to make me want to spend $20 instead of $3? Not necessarily, but I'm pretty cheap.)
Arduino lost the narrative when official Arduino boards were $35, and a clone was $5, if that.
Arduino Megas? $110 official, $12 on Ali. Extra $10 gets you a RAMPS 1.4 board for full 3d printer platform. Yeah, a whoile Marlin-capable 3d printer board for $20. Id argue that THIS is what caused the 3d printer boom.
Arduino nano? Officially? Who knows. I bought them in bulk $1.40 and were pin compatible, and breadboardable.
And this was all true back in 2012 and up. Even their "Motor Shield" official driver was a pile of crap. Used an LM298 iirc. I would just go buy an a4988 stepper driver for a whole $.99 and run steppers.
They made the ecosystem, but they haven't properly stewarded or oversaw it. And now that Qualcomm is now owner, eh, fuck it. Stick with clones or ESP. (And for those who've had the displeasure of dealing with Qualcomm, yeah, just dont.)
Any article that uses 'empower' is automatically in my books bullshit and bad for downstream receivers of the news. This uses it Five times. I can see their strategy; data-center with VMware and now Arduino on the edge, but in the first case unless you have massive budget you're leaving ASAP, and really many Arduino users are precisely in that bracket, so they are 'already left'. Platform.io maybe? What are other OSS alternatives?
What I was actually hoping for.. and so far turned out disappointed, is a half-decent LTE/4/5G module that can be Arduino compatible.
Just like ESP8266 (and later -32) variant opened up the IoT over WiFi, there is a potential industry-wide opportunity space for a decent, low-cost, always-online (just bring SIM) hobby board. Without awful vendor tooling. And ideally without "modem-to-something" bridge (which almost always means AT+ and vendor tooling..)
This new product could be neat, but it just doesn't have even the slightest appeal that an MCU-based Arduino does to me. I would also have concerns about the enshittification of Arduino in general.
Already in their future plans I can see the seeds of enshittification. I loved Arduino and built many projects with it. Hoping I am wrong about their future.
Hmm... maybe not less, but IMHO majority of the startups now focus on "discrupting the market" and colleting enough VC money that they could survive to be bought up by the bigger player.
The whole landscape is put on the head - instead of promoting creating something new that could survive on its own and be useful and provitable for the creator we are now in the market of creating a fodder for the BigCorp
Additionally, they're launching their first joint product, the $44 Uno Q SBC, which has a Dragonwing SoC and STM32 microcontroller on an Uno form factor board[1].
It seems like Arduino will keep their brand, maintain their existing product lines, and continue building devices using other vendor's chips (besides Qualcomm), etc... but as with all acquisitions—I wonder how long that state of affairs will last.
Alternatives like the Pi RP2040/2350 and Espressif's vast selection of boards can fill the gaps, but Arduino was what got me and many people I know into microcontrollers, so I have a special fondness for them!
[1] https://www.arduino.cc/product-uno-q
I don't think Qualcomm bought them to destroy them. I think they see Arduino as a gateway. Instead of hoping students will learn ARM it's more reasonable to leverage Arduino's simple nature to act as an on-ramp for more low level developers. I wouldn't be surprised if Arduino IDE saw a revamp to better support jumping the gap between the Arduino to Snapdragon.
ST and TI do the same thing with their boards too and it's not a bad strategy.
People are making so much of this when it seems so much simpler. Qualcomm likes buying high-margin businesses, and Arduino is a high-margin business. Gross margin on their boards is over 90% (hence why you can buy a Chinese clone of a $30 board for $3) and this trend shows no signs of slowing down. The TI equivalent of the $30 Arduino Uno is $5, and it's a true gateway product.
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Some years back when bluepills ran $2, Arduinos seemed to have no point. Today, you can buy an ESP32 dev board with wifi for $6. Or an Arduino Uno Wifi for $55.
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I checked: there are board schematics for Uno Q there - but no datasheets or SDK or manuals or any documentation whatsoever for the QRB2210 SoC itself.
Yep, it's Qualcomm alright.
Take it with a grain of salt, but the rep I've been in contact with said they'd be releasing more on the SoC...
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Genuine Qualcomm! And u/geerlingguy already has a youtube video up promoting the new SoCs...
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> Alternatives like the Pi RP2040/2350 and Espressif's vast selection of boards can fill the gaps, but Arduino was what got me and many people I know into microcontrollers, so I have a special fondness for them!
Exactly. For the people who did not follow a structured educational program on embedded programming, starting with an SMT microcontroller was very hard.
Arduino made this fun and easy with their language & IDE combo. Typing some code and seeing the lights on the board reacting is a hell of a drug.
Once you mastered the IDE, you could either program other microcontrollers in the same IDE, or at some point you hit the limits and started digging into the vendor-specific toolchains.
If I started again today, I would again start with an Arduino.
There is also the change of location here. In normal times, it wouldn’t matter where in the world a company is based but moving “entirely to the US” is just not a good look these days.
It is rather unfortunate. I haven't seen them mention moving manufacturing or their 'Arduino offices' (have you?), but even still I'd rather not support a country threatening to annex my homeland.
STM32 MCUs are 3V3, not 5V right?
Arduino really isn't great with naming, a Uno can be an AVR or ARM based board, now either 3V3 or 5V based and also a SBC rather than just a MCU.
I think to Arduino, Uno just means 'Uno form factor, with shield pins in the same place'
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Depends on the MCU, but generally STM32 is 1.7-3.6V
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Yes, but many (most?) of them are 5V-tolerant.
This reminds me of the Arduino Intel Galileo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Galileo
or Samsung Artik. Went nowhere in a hurry
This was cool but the software support from intel was terrible.
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At this point in time, the shield headers rather look like a trademark than a useful connecter.
That is quite some board! Arduino has certainly progressed, I'm still playing around with R3 boards and ATMega chips. Other than the form factor, this looks like not only a completely different class of product, but a completely different hobby or business.
ATmega micros are still incredibly useful and the Arduino ecosystem (especially the open source libraries, thanks Rob Tillaart!) makes it so easy to whip up a firmware. I really hope no matter what happens Arduino doesn't go off the rails.
This board has onboard EMMC, wifi/ble and can run a full Linux. That is more of an rp 4/5 with an rp2xxx tagged on the side. It comes with their own arduino IDE installed too
It is kinda disappointing but I can see why Qualcomm wants to use the brand.
Yes, this new board is more of a Raspberry Pi replacement than an Arduino Uno replacement.
More specifically, I can see it trying to compete with things like those funny Chinese boards built around SoCs like SG2000. Those embed a Linux capable core, a small NPU, a camera interface with ISP and video codecs, and a secondary RTOS core for realtime control. Basically built for drones and simple robots. The caveat of those boards being: the documentations sucks, the SDK is wack, you get 3 example scripts and are entirely on your own outside that.
Qualcomm could be trying to branch into drones/robotics/etc with this move.
I'm speaking in a broader sense, comparing the variety of other Arduino boards like the Uno R3/R4. That wasn't too clear in the OP, sorry!
The concern I have with the $44 Q is it has 2GB of RAM and 16GB eMMC, and a processor that's probably between a Pi 3 and Pi 4 in terms of speed and IO (though 4nm, so probably much more efficient).
For $45 I can buy a Pi 5 with it's own built-in GPIO, PCIe, and a much faster SoC, though it lacks a few niceties like the Q form factor, the more efficient SoC, a realtime microcontroller, and a USB-C port with display out capabilities (I really wish Pi had that...).
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Because Jetson is getting traction?
I guess I'm replying to you with your own video? But it seems interesting and relevant [1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfKX616-nsE
Almost a “do you know who I am?” moment :)
Arduino is dead, ESP is better.
They're trying to bring Arduino back from the dead.
dragonwing docs are where?
Do you happen to know how good the Linux environment is on the Dragonwing SoC.
I think their slides say Debian, but didn't mention what binary blobs one needs to have for enabling various functionality the SoC provides / how much their kernel deviates from mainline kernel ...
Does it have video output? Otherwise, yawn!
Were you paid to make this comment? As a youtuber, are you partnering with Qualcomm or Arduino and are you positioning their brands and products?
Edit: I see you already have a video out about the acquisition that looks a lot like an ad as well...
No, and also no.
The problem is that there just isn't a whole lot of money to be made in providing hobby hardware for enthusiasts. Every time a big player gets involved, they think they can change this. A decade ago, Intel tried that back in the day with Galileo / Edison, and tellingly, they came up with the same "ideas": IoT / AI.
If you're doing cheap IoT trinkets, you're never going to pay extra for a brand. You're going to buy the cheapest wifi / BT chipset out there and make do with that.
And if you're doing serious AI, you basically go for a real computer with real computing power, and in that segment, the Arduino brand means nothing.
I suspect there was an internal deck saying how this acquisition is going to give them foothold in the hobby community, but if they wanted that, there's a million better ways. Starting with making documentation, SDKs, and toolchains accessible and easy to use. There's a reason why you see Microchip, STM, RPi, and Espressif chips in every other DIY project.
> If you're doing cheap IoT trinkets, you're never going to pay extra for a brand.
Except for the Arduino brand. Arduino boards have margins that traditional hardware vendors can only dream of achieving. The only thing carrying that profit margin is the Arduino brand. The software stack is not tied to their hardware, but they make tons of money on hardware.
If life is so sweet for them, why sell arduino?
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> The problem is that there just isn't a whole lot of money to be made in providing hobby hardware for enthusiasts.
With Arduino, the hardware is probably the least interesting/important part. The software side is more important, providing an easy-to-use IDE and a simplified API and platform abstraction layer to make it super-easy to get started. Then there's the documentation, sample code, and community.
Indeed, at this point, there are possibly hundreds of Arduino compatible boards, and the other pieces of the puzzle are more important. Arduino is the Python of microcontroller development.
Come for the odd little microcontroller board. Stay for the community.
> A decade ago, Intel tried that back in the day with Galileo / Edison, and tellingly, they came up with the same "ideas": IoT / AI.
Intel's execution - as usual - was poor and lacking.
Both the Galileo and Edison were much more expensive than their Arduino counterparts, and their x86 cpu's were of little value within that space (especially at the time). Neither made it past 5 years without being killed - which is exactly what people feared. A stunning lack of long-term commitment from Intel to develop and grow a community, leaving anyone that actually built products based on their devices holding a useless bag.
and their x86 cpu's were of little value within that space
Intel could've attracted the entire retrocomputing community if they realised that the peripherals around x86 and the PC ecosystem were what got them to where they were in the first place, and made Galileo/Edison actually PC-compatible, but they ended up making a SoC with a 486DX+ core and mostly-incompatible peripherals (one would think they should've learned their lesson with the 80186/88...) and somehow convinced Microsoft to make a special version of Windows(!) for it despite a complete lack of any video output capabilities.
"WTF were they thinking!?" is the most concise summary of that fiasco.
Intel Edison/Galileo didn’t work because everything they could do is replaced by purpose built ASICs, much cheaper at scale and energy efficient, important metrics for IoT. They were at best PoC material in the lab.
I wonder if even inside the hobbyist space, Arduino got obsoleted by the Raspberry Pi and its clones/compatible devices.
Basically, if you already got the skills to work with "bare" microcontrollers, you won't need all the simplification and handholding that Arduino provides and you can just buy the individual chips and fully utilize the tiny form factor and low power requirements.
If you want to learn programming microcontrollers, then locking yourself into Arduino's abstractions is probably counterproductive.
On the other hand, if you do want to just combine different ready-made modules, focus on programming and don't want to worry too much on the low-level stuff, you will probably use a raspberry pi or similar: The form factor is only slightly larger than an arduino, but you get a full-fledged PC instead of a microcontroller.
So I don't really see a niche there.
> Arduino got obsoleted by the Raspberry Pi and its clones/compatible devices.
Not entirely. Arduino was always targeted at the "casual DIY" segment - artists, school robotics clubs, and other folks who wanted automation without a steep learning curve. This was a notch below the "serious hobbyist" tier where you could save a lot of money by just buying a bare-metal version of the same chip and write some code in C (or Rust). Or the pro tier, where there's way you're paying $20+ for a glorified breakout board.
Casual DIY always had a ton of inertia. It's also the reason why every other design for an analog guitar pedal or whatever is using components that are 50 years old: ancient designs are just copied-and-pasted forever. So I don't think Arduino is dead there, although other platforms are definitely eating some of their lunch.
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Getting a full-fledged PC is an anti-feature for a small project. I don't want to fart around with a Linux install just to set the thing up. I don't want to worry about SD card longevity or power supply compatibility. And I definitely don't want to spend $50+. I'll buy a cheap Arduino-compatible board that will immediately run whatever code I load it with. I've built several Arduino projects and RPi would have been more annoying and much more expensive.
The RPi Pico looks great for this, but that's pretty much an Arduino equivalent. You can even used the Arduino IDE with it.
I feel like the raspberry pi pico is more of a competitor to the arduino than the raspberry pi - there's quite a few applications where having a whole linux operating system is a hindrance compared to running on bare metal, especially anything that needs real time control of signals. (Although you can get around this on the pi by connecting peripherals via USB/serial/i2c which themselves might use MCUs).
Then again, one of the more accessible (IMO) ways of using pi picos is with the arduino environment, or its cousin platformio. I do think that even if in some ways the arduino abstractions can be limiting in some ways, in practice it's often a big timesaver for more casual (and not so casual) applications. It gives you easy access to a large ecosystem of libraries across a lot of hardware platforms.
Perspective: Former college robotics team member a while ago (2022) (IEEE SoutheastCon)
I definitely see niches for both. Even if you've got some experience an Arduino uno or mega is just an atMEGA with good software support and IO headers.
We'd usually use an RPI and Arduino - connect our 'out of the box' modules to the pi, pi to arduino via uart serial, and wire arduino to the meat and potatoes. The RPI's IO was generally not as good in terms of latency but also if the wrong wire gets crossed suddenly we'd have a dead Pi but the Arduino would shrug it off.
> If you want to learn programming microcontrollers, then locking yourself into Arduino's abstractions is probably counterproductive.
Arduino isn't a pipeline from zero to professional embedded dev. It's a stepping stone, and a crucial one at that. I'd know. I'm an embedded firmware engineer. Got my first Arduino when I was 11.
Arduino's success comes from the legibility of their API and the simplicity of their tooling. It allows kids or a novice to get comfortable with core principles of the trade (GPIO, other basic peripherals, limited memory, etc) without the cognitive overhead of makefiles and JTAG adapters. You aren't getting "locked in" by anything, you're building skills that you'll need for the next step.
If all you're doing is twiddling some GPIOs, as is the case with most beginner/educational projects, RPi isn't teaching you any skills that translate to industry. So there's one niche: Arduino is a practical educational tool.
That simple tooling and API also make Arduino great for small side projects that don't demand a sophisticated uC. Once that project is finished, you can plop an ATMega328 onto a piece of perfboard with a crystal and a couple caps, and your Arduino is free to use on whatever your next project will be. Can't do that with a Pi.
Also, I'd much rather just plug an Arduino into my PC and throw some code on it, than clear off half my desk to make way for a monitor and keyboard for the Pi. Point Arduino.
> I suspect there was an internal deck saying how this acquisition is going to give them foothold in the hobby community,
No. This is to give them a foothold in the "IoT hammer" manufacturing business. They looked at how the Raspberry Pi went from cheap hobby computer running Linux to low effort rapid prototyping embedded platform that can run a full web stack. They want to be part of a full dev pipeline from prototype to product.
The real target audience are people building things who don't care how it works as long as it works. So expect 99.9% of these projects to use some sort of Python or JS thing running in a container on the Linux while the microcontroller runs a few lines of c to manipulate IO pin state from the Linux thing. Just like all those abandoned Spin scooters in Seattle that had raspberry Pi's in them. That is the market they are after, not the person who builds a one-off Arduino fish feeder.
I agree. The Arduino brand isn't for professionals.
But let's say tomorrow they come together with bundle/partnerships to create a new, great dev environment, very easy, that a mechanical engineer can prototype a great robot for a niche use case,and continue to use that chip and code, with some changes in V1 production ?
Is there value to the Arduino brand and community than ?
Arduino is used by many professionals. It is cheap enough that you can buy it on your corporate cards and you boss won't ask many questions. As such many products start with an Ardunio based demo, and if/when the demo is a success it moves to a real company project with a real budget.
The question though is does this add value for the owners of Arduino? All too often when a project moves from the demo to real engineering (making a demo something you can sell is typically about ten times harder than the demo) you select all new hardware.
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There is a whole lot of commerical products built out of what we consider hobby projects (Adruino, Raspberry Pi). Eg: digital displays, industrial equipment controllers etc. All of this is clubbed under the nebulous IoT moniker.
My take: Qualcomm hopes to leverage Adriano adoption to expand their IoT share, and also to grow Adruino's footprint to include more smart IoT devices using Qualcomm's chipsets (Eg: Robotics)
I think it might be related to them charging say $100 instead of $5 for the device and providing "lifetime" (read: "indefinite") access to their IoT Cloud. Except there are no guarantees on the duration of that access.
As a side note, I don't get why they can't find the NPV of actually lifetime cloud compute. Compute costs are decreasing rapidly, so a $5/yr perpetuity has a NPV of $185 assuming 2.7% inflation?
> And if you're doing serious AI, you basically go for a real computer with real computing power, and in that segment, the Arduino brand means nothing.
What about cheap AI for toys and gadgets? Maybe the next Furby or some smart Toaster could run on their chips. AI is spreading, moving into casual corners outside of hobbyists and high professionals, maybe they aim to get a foothold there?
>If you're doing cheap IoT trinkets, you're never going to pay extra for a brand. You're going to buy the cheapest wifi / BT chipset out there and make do with that.
It's the opposite of that. Hobbyist/low volume maker gonna spend extra money to buy a familar tool, instead of going extra miles finding the cheapest available.
Even ESP32 is bad in term of perfomance/features and how much it cost.
Maybe. New people means new perspective. Maybe they see value in an ecosystem of developers who are keen to spend their free time to drum up interesting content, based on their projects and applications. This grassroots interest is what drove Apple to displace Sun Microsystems as the de facto, UNIX system.
Not everything in life is about money.
I mean, if you have seen RasPi prices lately, I'm not so sure this is true. Seems like a really profitable biz..granted, I wouldn't pay their absurd prices for such underpowered hardware. Virtually nobody should buy their $200 CM5 product for example.
Lady Ada is not impressed:
https://blog.adafruit.com/2025/10/07/qualcomms-latest-ai-pla...
One of their key points is that the AI component is completely tied to the Qualcomm stack, the opposite of Open. Essentially the Arduino brand will live on as a marketing layer over Qualcomm hardware, which you will still need an NDA and significant volume to gain access to.
That post is written by Mr. Lady Ada, Philip Torrone (nevertheless an authority matters of open source hardware.)
Are they buying it up to kill it or phase it out? Seems like corporations never do anything like this to the "good" of the community, it's always bad. I'd love to be pointed at exceptions where a megacorp bought some small relatively benevolent project and then didn't squeeze all the profit out of it and leave it for dead.
I don't think it's malicious, it's just that Qualcomm offered a big payday to people who have been working on the project for a very long time and are probably on the verge of wanting to go something else in their life. And then they're gonna force them to navigate the Kafkaesque bureaucracy at BigCo to get an approval for every blog post, conference talk, etc. Expense reports, headcount planning, performance management, you name it. After a year or two, they're gonna be thoroughly cooked and leave.
I would guess they want to keep it - there are a lot of company advanced engineering projects run on Arduino and when those prove useful (most don't) the company starts looking for how to make it production. Thus having Arduino as a push to their chips is a useful in to more companies.
Of course companies change directions all the time. I wouldn't surprise me if the people who bought Arduino believe the above vision, but there are other political factions that will try to kill it.
Google bought Android, but did not kill it. Same with YouTube. But, I admit, there are a lot more examples of the other way...
> Google bought Android, but did not kill it.
True, but they are currently in the process of further locking hobbyists out of it.
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https://killedbygoogle.com
Killing Arduino doesn't serve their interests based how many as-like boards there are. This is more akin to Microsoft's acquisition of Minecraft. Quick and easy way to get people in the door through recognition and a large user base.
Not sure why they would intentionally kill it, it's a good brand to drive people towards your chips.
I only feel dread when I see a Qualcomm story on HN anymore.
genuinely, what is the survival story for qualcomm entering the next decade?
- completely missed out on AI
- phones become commodity, push for complete vertical integration from apple, google
- squeezed by chinese soc vendors from 'below' (mediatek, unisoc)
they're cooked, right? there's no way out, surely.
They just won a significant case in its licensing battle with Arm, securing rights to use Oryon cores in Snapdragon chips. Add in a decent x86 to ARM translation layer, and you have the basis of the next generation of handheld gaming. If Valve or someone paired with them for the next Steamdeck style project, they'd dominate.
At the high-end they announced two new flagship processor platforms at its 2025 Snapdragon Summit. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 they claim to be the world’s fastest mobile SoC.
Outside of Snapdragon its basically 5G Telecoms atm - iPhone 17 Pro Max relies on Qualcomm's Snapdragon X80 Modem for 5G - 5G Edge solutions for RAN, presumably harnessing AI - Non-Terrestrial 5G Provisioning in their partnerships with Thales/Ericsson. - IoT and Wearables - presumably low power/footprint modems
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I think the AI bit is overblown. Why does every large company have to do everything in technology, AI is horribly over valued in the market right now. The other issues are much more important as those are threats to Qcom's current profit method mostly MediaTek squeezing the lower tier market. It's unclear if Qcoms going to be able to dominate upper tier where they own like 60% of market share if they don't also compete at lower tier where MediaTek has been very successful
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Apple's vertical integration is formidable but Google are still really struggling with their execution, their Tensor SOCs are consistently years behind Snapdragon in performance and efficiency even after their switch to TSMC this generation. Qualcomm is probably safe at the high end of the Android market for a while yet.
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Qualcomm is and will remain patent holding company. They have a crazy number patents for all manner of wireless communication, and they treat them like their golden geese.
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Qualcomm are good at radios and associated signal processing. The rest is simply integrations around that.
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Buying random companies they have no use for like Arduino, they have firmly entered the Intel era.
I've been out of the hardware game a minute but Qualcomm was a great partner for helping you ship products. Everything about them sucks, but they will actually send engineers to your office. They always took bug reports seriously and pretty much always delivered patches. Also they always had ample samples, both in terms of dev boards and software. I know of several products that basically shipped the sample code with minimal modifications.
If I were a company trying to ship V1 of our first product, I would hands down pick Qualcomm. MediaTek et al are great for when you know what you're doing with minimal handholding.
I absolutely hated working with them, but at least they were a vendor you could work with. Perhaps the cheaper vendors have upped their game here but I wouldn't know.
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Qualcomm still are the only relevant ones in town who actually sell high performance ARM designs to third parties and have no political quarrels attached, there's a lot of money to be made in that game.
As you said there is competition from Mediatek, but who knows how long Mediatek has before the US government sanctions them to hell and beyond. Apple doesn't sell to third parties (no matter how much one might dream) and so does Google. Samsung I haven't ever seen used outside of their own phones and TVs.
The remainder is NVidia's Tegra lineup but other than automotive and the Nintendo Switch I haven't seen these in third party products either, I doubt they'll even take your calls if you are not coming in with millions of units sold of demand.
Cooked how exactly? - Completely missed out on the LLM boom, just like everyone except nvidia. - Apple never used qcom SoCs, just their modems, Google doesn't even register on the radar of sales, their first foray into SoCs isn't great. - Idk where you get that, they still hold the entire market in their firm grasp and Nuvia stuff has been nothing but outstanding, it's just a shame that MS are cowards and dropped the Windows-on-Arm stuff again. - Google are partnering with them for the Android on PC projects.
I hope they provide better Linux support for the next gen PC grade chips.
Cooked hardware companies get bought into it seems. Intel is the most egregious example, but AMD is being circled by OpenAI now for 10%. Companies like Marvell and even hard drive companies are up due to how they fit into the AI pipeline.
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>completely missed out on AI
Cheap on-device AI. Qualcomm to the moon, @webdevver BTFO.
If anyone can pull that move, it's them.
You just severely lack imagination, man.
just a correction: Mediatek is Taiwanese.
You should feel dread. They're a pretty awful company... one of those outfits that seems to employ more lawyers than engineers. Basically the Oracle of chips.
I can't begin to guess what motivated them to engage in an intentional culture clash of this magnitude.
Yeah, it might as well say “Oracle to acquire $FOO”
Could be worse. Could be Broadcom.
If you want to use SOTA camera sensors on an embedded system Qualcomm is great (in particular compared to NVIDA Jetson).
"Broadcom to acquire Qualcomm"
Better? :)
Would that be BroadQual? ComComm? QualBroad?
ESP stuff is so damn cheap and capable now I'm not sure what you would use Arduino for these days.
Don't look at just the specs. You also need to look at the board design and programming environment. I've used the ESP32 native tools and they are a lot more complex than Arduino. But I'm an embedded firmware developer, so it's kind of what I expect. But I used an Arduino, with 5V tolerant outputs, to light up Halloween costumes for years. I do it in 1 page of code that's I write in their IDE. I don't have to set up an SDK. And the Arudino API hides all the details I don't care about. Especially if I'm really just slinging solder and wiring something up quick.
What's hard about programming an ESP32?
I plug the USB in and its the same as an Arudino, can even use Arduino IDE, but I prefer VS Code with the PlatformIo extension. You can even use the Arduino Library (#import <Arduino.h>
And a ESP32C board with wifi/bluetooth is like $8 https://www.amazon.com/Seeed-Studio-XIAO-ESP32C3-Microcontro... (and thats from amazon, on alibaba its like couple bucks if that)
As a side note, you can power this with your IPhone's USB C which was surprisingly cool.
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Trouble is, this kind of trivial throwaway application is all that Arduino is really good for. Because the framework is designed to support thousands of chips, it supports none of them well. Any arduino code you write is easily 5x more terse than any of the native libraries, but it's also 10x slower. If you don't care, you don't care. But if you do care, Arduino is the least appropriate way to make a microcontroller go.
Besides that, IMO hiding hardware details from the developer is the worst thing about Arduino. The hardware details matter and it's far too easy to get footgunned by some implementation detail hidden from you.
But really, esp-IDF isn't that much more complex, nor are most of the other native frameworks. It's a bit more verbose, but esp-IDF provides helper libraries that replace almost everything Arduino provides, but in a way that is actually designed for the hardware and doesn't have to do things like lookup pin numbers in a giant table for each and every gpio call.
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On the other hand, their competitors haven't been sleeping either.
Companies like Adafruit and Sparkfun sell dozens of tailor-made dev board variants, and their I2C module system allows you to mix & match a whole bunch of peripherals.
The code? A handful of lines of Python, which you can drag&drop onto it like it's a flash drive. Or use a browser-based IDE if you want one-click library install and serial logging.
Arduino's IDE was groundbreaking in 2010, but these days there are easier (and cheaper!) alternatives for beginning hobbyists, and better alternatives for power users.
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Even if you like the Arduino programming environment (and I do), there seems to be little reason to use Arduino hardware unless it’s for compatibility with other hardware you have? For example, there is a very nice unofficial port of Arduino for the Raspberry Pi Pico. There are also many fine Arduino-compatible single-board computers from Adafruit. The Arduino board form factor seems big and clunky in comparison.
I don’t even use the Ardiuino IDE anymore; I've switched to VS Code using PlatformIO.
It’s great that all these microcontroller boards and peripheral breakout boards can be programmed using the same basic API’s, but I don’t think it helps Arduino the company very much.
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You can program the normal ESP32 Devboards with the Arduino IDE.
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> I've used the ESP32 native tools and they are a lot more complex than Arduino.
How so? All of that is abstracted away from the users just like it is for Arduinos. In fact you can use the Arduino IDE to develop for most ESP32 chips.
If anything Arduino is holding back everyone with their horrible IDE. Their Board and Library managers are painfully slow and having no way to store configuration with your sketch means that you're taking a screenshot of a drop down menu if you have to make any changes.
Eventually people want to write their own libraries to make their code more manageable and the Arduino IDE makes it difficult for someone who knows what they're doing.
> But I used an Arduino, with 5V tolerant outputs, to light up Halloween costumes for years.
I have yet to encounter a piece of hardware that doesn't respect 3.3v as signal high. All of the neopixel variant's data pins work off 3.3v and most people have moved on to 12v and even 24v for larger projects while still raw dogging 3.3v on the data pin without issue.
Arduino's insistence on 5v logic levels is for maintaining backward compatibility which is honestly unnecessary.
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I'm an amateur with this stuff and honestly find the ESP experience significantly more pleasant than Arduino. I'm sure there are footguns I haven't encountered, but I get so much more bang for the buck out of random ESP builds + the incredible line of various bundled ESP devices that come with touchscreens, sensors, etc. for incredibly low prices.
I know a million people have replied to you, and while I don't want to be jumping on the dog pile, I just want to say that along with PlatformIO (which automates the setup of ESPIDF and/or Arduino for the ESP, (and it also does it for a ton of other micros)) and Expressif having their own Arduino Core for their chips with integrates into Arduino's IDE, Expressif have also released their own extensions for VSCode and Eclipse that greatly aid the end user in getting ESPIDF setup and configured.)
You no longer have to break your back going from zero to blinking an LED. I remember when I first got into espressif chips and it was a right pita back then. But no more!
Personally I'm a fan of PlatformIO because its not just because of the wide selection of platforms it supports and that it uses VSCode which is my IDE of choice.
I use arduino ide to build esp projects. I have not found it much different than the arduino as a beginner, except much cheaper and faster. I like not having to do all the shield stuff. But will admit, it was helpful to start on arduino as its built in pins helped me get going as I tried to avoid soldering and breadboarded everything. That only lasted a short time before I realized I had to solder some things if I wanted to grow the project. I still like the idea of breakout boards for specific things but I usually solder them in now.
You can make the argument that esp32 supports Arduino but you can quickly run into “here be dragons” which sends most people for a loop. Arduino has a fantastic reputation for a very good reason.
May I ask what your go-to battery is for light up wearables?
I had the same opinion several years ago but today it's just as easy PLUS you have a bonus of WiFi and all this for a fraction of the price.
What do you think about the Arduino professional line? They have industrial PLC equipments and other high end boards etc.
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ESP32 is also 5V tolerant for input pins.
Page of code?
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ESP stuff is very cheap and works well, but the Arduino Uno is a great board/ecosystem for beginners and simple projects. Being 5V is more convenient for a lot of things, and having the pin headers already on the board that you can just start plugging things in with jumper wires is great.
The Arduino IDE is awesome for an extremely quick setup time. You can very easily download libraries and add them to your project, you don't have to create a blank source file, you just have to fill in setup() and loop(). The Arduino IDE makes it very easy to set up a new board and download code to it.
Much of this also applies to the Arduino IDE with and ESP32, but what I really appreciate about the whole Arduino ecosystem is if you want to do something really simple, like say, activate a servo when some sensor reaches a certain value, you literally only have to type 5-6 lines of code. You're not messing around with SDKs and Makefiles and git cloning repositories etc etc etc. You can get kits for $70 that have an Arduino clone, and a bunch of different sensors, servos, steppers, etc. It's absolutely fantastic for teaching basic programming and electronics.
With ESP you can do that without even coding, using ESPHome it can be done using YAML config, it can also be paired with Home Assitante, MQTT or many other thing without any coding
Various ESP dev boards, Arduino, Pi Pico -- any of these are good places to get started from on the road towards doing useful things with microcontrollers, I think.
Arduino is just a familiar name with a long (~20 year!) history. There's a plethora of pre-existing projects that a person with no prior programming or electronics experience can implement easily to get their feet wet.
Some manner of ESP32 (or STM or MSP or RP2...) may be a good choice for a project for someone with some experience, but if you put a reasonably-motivated person in a room with a computer and an Arduino starter kit then they'll successfully be building simple things in no time.
It remains a friendly place to start doing stuff, and that was always the primary intent.
You can use the exact same Arduino environment with ESP32 for a fraction of the price. A D1 mini dev board with wifi costs $5 (!) on AliExpress.
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Yeah I'm kind of puzzled by what Qualcomm is getting out of this.
Arduino has so little presence in production devices and is largely an enthusiast and hobbyist product. To be clear, this is good! Having well-supported high-quality enthusiast products is awesome.
But it just doesn't... seem to overlap with the bulk of Qualcomm's business, which is large-scale silicon sales to consumer and industrial clients.
To be selling shovels for the gold rush of AI-enabled embedded devices.
Is it going to happen? I don't know. But ollama on an SBC is a sandbox I'd play in.
The earlier up the product development stream you can place your product, the bigger share you'll have down the road. There's the saying about planning for 1 year, rice, 20 years, trees, 100 years schools. Windows is the leader because most kids grow up using windows in elementary school and blindly continue on. If you own arduino, maybe they start on ardunio, continue on to qualcomm products, and they're already trained in the qualcomm ecosystem before they've started engineering school. Adobe famously was very lax on closing Photoshop cracks in the early 2000s and trained up an entire generation on their product with great success.
I run a medialab at an university. ESP32 is great, but there are some downsides that are all not dealbreakers, but can in some cases lead me to recommend a classic Arduino-type device:
1. Lack of 5V tolerant pins. Beginners may or may not be aware of the possibility of destroying the device or the need to level-shift signals.
2. Tooling may not work out of the box. As of today the tooling step boils down to pasting a URL into a field in the preferences, but that is something you need to know. You need to select the right uploading options which are much more complex than with arduino type devices.
3. IMO less clear naming of different dev boards, thus also harder to find docs.
4. Examples may not work out of the box, simple Arduino examples may fail with hard to debug issues (for beginners) where they don't know whether it is a hardware issue, wrong board/uploader setup or a pinout issue (e.g. if the onboard LED pin differs).
These are all examples of issues students had when they used the ESP32 boards without my guidance, so not just my opinion or a theory. And as I said none of these are dealbreakers, but depending on the patience, stress levels, perceived skill etc. of the student this might make me recommend an Arduino over an ESP32.
I use it for learning and play with my kids. I load the program on the board then we wire the components together and get all excited about blinking LEDs or a LCD.
The lack of features (notably Wifi on our boards) and somewhat larger size are benefits for us.
The ATMega AVR devices are not cost effective for what they deliver. However, the new ATtiny 0/1/2-series devices are worthwhile for applications the Cortex-M devices aren't a good fit for. The Arduino ecosystem doesn't really acknowledge these parts.
Community inertia / maker content.
It used to be that but since Arduino and Pi have both gone full commercial, it's not longer viable. I teach kids coding and have been looking at alternatives like ESP or other boards that are much more cost effective and friendly for beginners.
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It's not the hardware but the ecosystem, libraries and support which is available. Sure there are alternatives like platformio but when you're learning most of the stuff out there eg youtube use Arduino IDE and libs. And just try and get an LLM to produce code based on Espressif libraries not Arduino lols...
Arduino is an ecosystem of pushing solutions. This is likely what is partially the appeal.
My hope and wish is Arduino sincerely remains accessible as it's always been and not solely drift into B2B or enterprise spaces.
There is a lot of chip building and delivery capacity being aligned this year.
"Arduino" is more a framework than it is a specific piece of hardware. You can run "Arduino" the framework on an ESP32. Not that I would, I don't recommend it as ESP-IDF is way better, but you can run "Arduino" code on an ESP32.
Cheap fun, if you acquired a box of Arduinos from a defunct makerspace or startup in the mid 2010s
this. esp 32 supermini is $3 and has wifi and bluetooth. Arduino stopped being useful many years ago
you are comparing apple to orange, Arduino is not MCU. In fact, the uno r4 has a variant with esp32 module on it.
It's like saying AMD Cpu is so much better, why do you need Linux.
That's probably why these AI-capable Qualcomm boards are being introduced.
Just wait for a few years and then you can forget everything about open or open source about Arduino. And maybe in 2030, you will only be able to run the Arduino IDE on Windows with a specific driver to ensure that you only flash a firmware to a DRM controlled authentic Arduino device.
It is a nightmare when such an acquisition happen.
Qcom is one of the few SoC manufacturers in the Android space to do all their thing out in the open and properly honouring the GPL-v2 licences.
That's pretty useless when they won't release the documentation for their SoCs.
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Arduino made a lot of their boards closed source a while ago IIRC. I was surprised this one is supposedly going to be open source.
To anyone at Arduino/Qualcomm reading --
If you're looking to make Uno Q SBC a gateway to more companies building on Qualcomm SoCs, please also release:
- Affordable HQ camera modules, with drivers, tuned ISP support for the board
- Low volume SoC purchases on Mouser/Digikey so we can move from evaluation board to prototypes
- Reference schematics
- High quality documentation and maintained Yocto layers for embedded linux development
- Ability to use SoC features like AI acceleration / ISP without huge headaches
Shame to see Arduino go, but honestly how relevant are they anymore? The Arduino framework is one of the worst ways possible to write firmware for any slightly serious use, and their hardware is... quaint in the era of Espressif and the Cambrian explosion of devboards with any number of highly advanced features.
Arduino was a great way to get into microcontrollers back when the only alternative was vendors' native libraries in straight undocumented C and wiggling CPU registers manually. But that's not really a niche anymore, there's plenty of other, better designed, frameworks and libraries. Arduino has always been the worst, slowest framework available.
Honestly it's high time to replace Arduino with something else that doesn't instill such awful habits in new engineers.
There's still relevance in making it stupidly easy to make an LED blink and make basic apps on circuit boards. Education + weekend hardware hackers might look for something different in a framework than a professional.
But certainly for pro use cases the hardware specific frameworks are way more powerful (but also complex).
I wrote up a bit on Arduino vs ESP-IDF here https://bitclock.io/blog/esp-idf-vscode
The native AVR libraries are really good. It's not quite as idiomatic as Arduino, but it's really not all that different.
Beginners can learn frameworks more complicated than Arduino and I think they should. Before Arduino, beginners were expected to write plain C or assembly, and the industry got along just fine. There were still countless hackers and weekend tinkerers. They just had to learn more, which is not a bad thing
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> There's still relevance in making it stupidly easy to make an LED blink and make basic apps on circuit boards. Education + weekend hardware hackers might look for something different in a framework than a professional.
This group is has been moving to circuitpython, which is much less performant, but even easier to use. The more serious cross-platform development environments, like Zephyr, have also become much better.
Curious what the better frameworks are these days? Are they tied to specific hardware like arduino was? And what language do they use?
FreeRTOS is pleasant to use.
I've recently been getting into Rust + Embassy + Probe-rs and in my opinion it's been the best embedded experience by far.
Broad support for many different chips is precisely why Arduino is so bad. It has to check pin numbers against a gigantic table for every gpio call.
You want chip-specific libraries. When the software is designed for the hardware everything works better.
The native AVR and esp-IDF frameworks are very good. There's also micropython and circuit python. I've heard good things, but I don't partake in Python.
Personally I think attempting to provide a cross-platform library for microcontrollers is an enormous mistake. This is not x86, you can't rely on any CPU feature existing, which results in awful branching code in places that in a sane framework is a single instruction updating a CPU register
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If you want a "framework", Zephyr is the only thing i can think of, that is somewhat hardware agnostic, have great software packages, and fairly widely used.
What frameworks would you recommend for new people learning about embedded systems?
Why care about framework, just use whatever vendor HAL for your MCU and be good with it
This is a recipe for disaster. Arduino is great for education/tinkering. Qualcomm won't sell you anything even if you are ready to commit to buying 1000s. I tried to source some Qualcomm chips for a startup @ 10k qty and was told there would be no information or support. Qualcomm can have a much bigger market if they simply open up some product lines for distribution like MediaTek do.
China has a way more vibrant, innovative hardware industry simply because you can source everything made by Chinese firms.
This is the exact reason why they bought Arduino... So now startups have a way to buy say 1,000 devices for prototyping. Qualcomm gets used to supporting smaller developers/startups/tinkerers and will hopefully push different types of chips into the Arduino product lines.
The issue is that their corporate culture does not support it. Arduino will be too small to matter. This is the same issue as with Coral, the Google TPU. They are not refreshed as they are too small. They are too small cause they are not updated or supported widely.
People need mainline kernel support and regular refreshes to reliably build projects based on it. This will require some level of building their BSPs in open and providing APIs for people to take advantage of the QCOM specific features. A QCOM that won't talk to anyone without an NDA cannot adapt to this.
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> This is the exact reason why they bought Arduino... So now startups have a way to buy say 1,000 devices for prototyping. Qualcomm gets used to supporting smaller developers/startups/tinkerers
For this, Qualcomm does not have to buy Arduino for a big amount of money: Qualcomm could simply offer this option on their own and save the acquisition cost.
Addendum: For the acquisition cost, Qualcomm could do a lot of marketing of their offering towards makers.
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The problem is that massive semiconductor companies like Qualcomm rarely follow through. They want their lottery ticket to be included in the next smartphone revolution but won't care about random under 5k unit Kickstarter. Everyone knows that those are two sides of the same coin, but they always choose to wait for the bankruptcy trustees to show up.
Seems like a similar play to what Broadcom did with Raspberry Pi— create a new entity/brand that could resell their chips on hobby boards and be stewards of a "community" support framework but largely without distracting the company from its enterprise customers or risk cannibalizing those relationships.
That said, interesting that Qualcomm would buy twenty years of Arduino legacy for this rather than launching something new in the space.
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As other have pointed out, that doesn't make any sense. Qualcomm doesn't want anyone buying their products at 1k quantities for prototyping. They want huge customers that place huge orders consistently. The return for supporting those small orders is miserable and doesn't align with their business objectives
Qualcomm has bought plenty of companies that serviced small customers, and what happed is exactly what the person you’re replying to described. You can’t even get a quote many times.
What I expect short term is what happened to Eagle in the PCB space when Autodesk bought it (best thing that happened to kicad).
Longterm Arduino goes into the periphery of the maker market, similarly to beaglebone.
Qualcomm did not need to buy Arduino in order to do that.
It's cheaper and easier to just spin your own boards at that point. Arduinos are not complex or special in any way. Even if you did need a ton of off the shelf boards, there are countless clones that will sell you as many as you want for next to nothing.
Plus the market you're implying exists is so small as to be utterly worthless to Qualcomm. They are in no way interested in individuals or small businesses
> Qualcomm gets used to supporting smaller developers/startups/tinkerers
I'll believe it when I see it
From the presser:
> Entrepreneurs, businesses, tech professionals, students, educators, and hobbyists will be empowered to rapidly prototype and test new solutions, with a clear path to commercialization supported by Qualcomm Technologies’ advanced technologies and extensive partner ecosystem.
At the least the official line is to remedy this situation. Could be embrace/extend/extinguish but tech companies spend all kinds of money on getting students and smaller businesses into their monolithic ecosystems.
The data center AI race was won by nvidia, embedded AI might still be up for grabs and it helps to have developer adoption.
Yeah, I was going to say this is like the worst-case scenario for the average user.
One of the benefits of the main Arduino line is it was very simple to convert to your own design. Companies like Broadcom and Qualcomm won't sell (many of) their chips on normal distributer sites.
Same reason why Raspberry PIs kind of suck in my opinion. Great you've come up with a neat thing you want to build with it; you are forced to utilize either their compute modules which may not be sufficient for your task, or might be out of stock, or XYZ.
Yep. Same here but dramatically lower quantities. Was told basically we'd have to pay for a partner's support. Not that I'm expecting better from Arduino, but the community makes up for it. You Google "dragonwing stackoverflow" and there are 604 results, but even the first few aren't remotely relevant. "Atmega328p stackoverflow" is over 14k and relevant. Arduino is 52 million. It's a nonstarter
Arduino is great for education/tinkering
Arduino has been trying out a new "pro" line for about a year now, making PLC-level devices to be used in automation but hopefully attracting developers by letting them use the same family of tools as the educational line.
https://store-usa.arduino.cc/collections/pro-family
10k? Sorry, pal! We're in QualcommLand, and you need to be at least 100k units tall to ride this ride!
But if you are a small developer, there are options for you! Have you tried to: eat shit? And die? So that you don't insult our PRECIOUS FUCKING TIME by IMPLYING that a MERE 10K would be ENOUGH for THE GREAT QUALCOMM to ACTUALLY CARE?
The optimist in me wants to believe that this acquisition is a sign of Qualcomm actually trying to be better than that. But realistically? Yeah no. It's Qualcomm. They wouldn't have let it get this bad if they ever cared.
afaik, Raspberry Pis move around 7M units annually.
Based on their first announced product (https://www.arduino.cc/product-uno-q), I think Qualcomm is trying to get into that space, and they bought Arduino for the brand name.
You're right that Qualcomm isn't in the business of small business. But maybe they expect that the market is big enough that it's worth their while to pay a subsidiary (Arduino) to do it.
Yet another example of how corporate consolidation in America is hurting the consumer. FTC needs Lina Khan back to break up the oligopolies.
I had the same knee-jerk reaction, but the optimist in me wants to say "isn't that the point of the acquisition?" Another comment linked to the Uno Q, which looks like a Qualcomm dev kit by Arduino. Perhaps Qualcomm is trying to get better at exactly the kind of thing you're talking about.
s/1000/10,000,000/
Espressif has been eating their lunch, the boards are way more capable and much cheaper. Why would anyone pick an Uno over an ESP32?
They're more fun. The programming is easier (although you can get an Arduino like experience on a ESP32). They have 5V options, which make some projects easier without having to add additional components. The ESP32 API (and the Pico for that matter) are better suited professional programmers.
An Arduino is better if you're doing something and want a quick, easy, simple to program controller. It started as a way for artists to add MCUs to the projects without having to become embedded programmers.
I've only ever used my ESP32s with the Arduino IDE. I don't think there's anything "easier" about using an Arduino board vs that experience.
Ain't fun spending $40 for a 'fun' project. ESP32 is like a dollar for WiFi and GPIOs. That's fun.
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For what it’s worth, the original ESP32 is actually 5V tolerant, semi-officially acknowledged by Espressif. Good enough for hobby projects, anyway
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The fact we don't have viable western competition for Espressif is likely to become far more of a headache than all the angst about AI GPU production.
Where can you get a half decent microcontroller with wifi integrated on it? Espressif. All the others are flat out bad in some very important dimension, which isn't to say the Espressif products are perfect, but they fit in the important ways.
Yea... ST, Nordic etc have been sleeping on the Wi-Fi, letting Espressif corner that market. They both now have standalone Wi-Fi ICs, but no MCUs still; and it took them a while to release the ICs.
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MCHP has been slowly coming up with decent radio devices, finally. If you don't use the radio going bare metal is basically effortless, if you need to use the radio the dev Tools are actually improving, though they are still nowhere as good as IDF in hiding the ugliness.
Of course they are more expensive (not much more, really, compared to simillar specced ESPs) but they are western and the peripheral actually work as intended. In my projects with ESP32 i had to basically bitbang every peripheral that i needed to use beyond their simplest mode.
Built-in no, but the Pi Pico W is decent and inexpensive if the form factor isn't an issue. The RP2040/RP2350 are nice chips to work with and documentation is good. I can live with an external module, and it's certified too.
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- Silicon Labs
- Texas Instruments (soon.)
Different tools for different needs.
Power draw, and 5V.
Arduino offered tiny, inexpensive, easy-to-program computers and dominated the hobby space at first. This lasted for a few years, but then they started getting competition. The ESP8266 offered comparable performance at a fraction of the price, while the Raspberry Pi was about the same price as an Arduino but way better performance. Hard to compete when other companies are selling better hardware for a lower price.
> while the Raspberry Pi was about the same price as an Arduino but way better performance
If you are cross shopping a full single board computer (Pi) with a microcontroller (arduino/esp32 etc) for a project, it's almost always a sign you don't know what you are doing. With the exception of the recent Pi Pico, non of the raspberry pis are Arduino/microcontroller competitors - they are typically full blown linux computers with all the benefits and drawbacks that provides.
While you can absolutely solve microcontroller-style problems with full blown computers, it's rarely the best/cheapest option.
True from an industry perspective, but they're very much competitors in the hobby market.
Right but if you're a hobbyist, "cheap" isn't the priority. I mean, what's the harm of using a $40 SBC instead of a $10 one if you're going to be spending hundreds of dollars and dozens of man-hours on it?
The bigger concern is the overhead of the Linux OS in terms of interacting with it vs just flashing a microcontroller... but linux lets you run an SSH and FTP servers and wifi and a debugger on the thing easily.
So you get easier access to remotely playing with the programming of your gizmo, but you have the OS in the way of just talking to hardware in real-time. I haven't done projects like that since my undergrad, does it really make that much difference?
To me the big deal-breaker would probably be if the thing I was building was battery-powered.
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Counterpoint: prototyping and low volume production runs. Hardware is cheap - development time is expensive.
FWIIW - The new Uno Q is exactly the midpoint of your comment - a linux based computer WITH a STM32 coprocessor to confuse the heck out of everything.
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For a long time I did a lot of Arduino stuff because you could get Nano clones for less than 1 EUR - which pretty much makes them throwaway, if you mess up.
I recently was doing a few projects with the Arduino Every, which is a nice board - but it's just too expensive. I did fry a few - so now I'm just using them as development board (the additional UARTs help a lot there), and for the actual project still use Nanos where I no longer care about the serial debug output, and therefore am fine with just the one serial port.
It's still one of the best boards if you want to do stuff on "bare metal". While I agree they missed a few product innovations, it's still a product that is in demand and gets used by industry for real products.
Am I only the only one who finds ESP better in almost every way? Once I discovered ESP8266 and 32, I basically haven't touched an Arduino board
The ADCs are almost useless. But yeah otherwise for most applications they are much better in every regard.
You can make a low volume product by buying a bunch of Arduinos as your controller. You just stick them in the device. There's no license issue. While I haven't exhaustively looked, one vendor's kit I did look at explicitly stated their boards were not licensed for that kind of commercial use. Qualcomm could very well make their boards for development, test, and evaluation purposes only. And that would be my worry. It wouldn't effect tinkering at home or use in a classroom, but would mean you couldn't buy a stack of Nanos, flash them, and plug them into your project, if it is for a commercial purpose.
> one vendor's kit I did look at explicitly stated their boards were not licensed for that kind of commercial use. Qualcomm could very well make their boards for development, test, and evaluation purposes only.
Under what legal theory?
The "we have lawyers and lots of money to enforce things that are on shaky legal ground and you will likely settle instead of fighting in court" legal theory, I presume.
As far as I can tell, if they even attempted that, all they could do is deny any kind of warranty claims from you and try and stop distributors selling you any more of their brand parts.
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https://www.st.com/resource/en/evaluation_board_terms_of_use...
One way they could do this is grant you a patent license only for some kinds of use.
(and eg. make sure their products are useless without some patent license for some software driver or algorithm)
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They could claim copyright infringement if you distribute their SDK in your firmware without their permission.
> You can make a low volume product by buying a bunch of Arduinos as your controller. You just stick them in the device. There's no license issue.
Note that the Arduino libraries are LGPL licensed. Unless you have a commercial agreement with Arduino, you have to distribute your firmware to your customers as object files so it can be linked to updated/modified versions of the Arduino libraries. This means that I wouldn't use Arduino for a shipping product unless you're fine with the firmware on the device being publicly available.
That's not my reading of https://support.arduino.cc/hc/en-us/articles/4415094490770-L.... The LGPL is usually a requirement to publish your modifications to the LGPL licensed code, but not necessarily your binary blobs. And for some low-volume Arduino based products, the software isn't the valuable part of the project, anyway.
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If you ever wondered, how Arduino came about: The Untold History of Arduino (https://arduinohistory.github.io/).
Arduino has always been a naked cash grab disguised as a "hacker-friendly nonprofit." The gross margin on their boards is >90%, and yeah, the software is mostly a ripoff of wiring.
The software was based on Processing. It was never a secret, just open source working as intended. It doesn't look the same any more.
A non-profit is still a business. Success is necessary for existence.
Think about the number of companies that have been created to make, or heavily specialize in Arduino clones and accessories without having to pay Arduino a cent because the designs were intentionally open-sourced. It doesn't sound like a naked cash grab to me.
I have troubles calling something a "cash grab" when it's been arguably the single most influential project in the hacker/maker/DIY electronics space.
I don't doubt the boards could've been sold cheaper, but they clearly were doing something right given how much it changed the hobbyist landscape
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Hopefully it will make Qualcomm behave more like Arduino and not the opposite. Qualcomm is one of the worse companies I have had the pleasure to work with.
Their support model is hellish and they provide very little information and documentation, so usually you’ll end up doing a lot of guessing and reverse engineering. They will tell you to sign a contract with one of their “design partners”, but even they can’t get answers for basic questions.
Seriously, if they want more small cap companies working with them they have to treat them better, I worked with them as a small company and as a larger company and in both cases their support was basically non existent even if we were buying chips from them for more than 10m$ a year.
Qcom is a corporate behemoth, much like Oracle. In the immortal words of Bryan Cantrill, it is a lawnmower and if you stick your hand in it you'll get it chopped off.
At least it's not Broadcom
The title says - "Qualcomm to Acquire Arduino—Accelerating Developers’ Access to its Leading Edge Computing and AI"
Didn't have it on my bingo card that running AI on a microcontroller is what people are salivating for!
Not sure if the strategy is to cram AI into every little shoe box out there and keeping fingers crossed for the stock price to trend upwards!?
You can actually run TFlite Micro models on esp32-s3 reasonably fast, and it has a csi camera connector.
https://github.com/espressif/esp-tflite-micro
IIRC some of the ESP boards are "AI Optimised" but its like, facial and license plate recognition, not necessarily LLM stuff.
Is that what we call DSPs now?
I'm not sure how it is possible to compete against the RP2040/RP2050 at this point: quality, great programming environment, awesome hardware specs, cheap.
Yeah, I just did a project at work with an RP2040 and was really impressed with the Pico SDK. It hits a sweet spot in between ST’s insanity and Arduino’s easy-but-not-powerful tradeoff.
No crazy code generation, going from 0 to blinky is quick, but also going from blinky to DMA’s and interrupts is also a breeze.
I will say that I think the hardware peripherals in STM32’s are miles ahead, and PIO’s don’t necessarily make up the difference.
Yep the STM32 has certain advantages, even if they are usually complicated to program. With the Flipper Zero I programmed a low level timer interrupt and had to setup don't know how many registers... And the documentation is lacking. Also I love the fact that the STM32 comes in 5v variants that are great to interface it directly with things like a Commodore 64 or a Spectrum.
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With their goal of 50/50 handset/non-handset revenue split by 2030, and their recent acquisitions pointing in the same direction, it stands to reason that they will do a lot of high capex investments into things like chiplet/chiplet communication for datacenters, automation/automotive, as well as edge AI. We can also observe they're baking in a lot of fpga-style configurability into a lot of these product lines - the connectivity fabric they acquired along with alphawave semi, their hexagon dsp, nuvia(oryon which they won the legal case for recently), etc,. which is another hint for the type of market they're targeting.
My opinion is that they should productize ESP [1] (no, not that one) which will be super harmonious with their goals.
Arduino acquisition, IMO, is putting one foot into manufacturing automation/automotive/sensors field. They have done similar in the past, arriver was an ADAS compute thing.
Personally I don't believe they will take the execution risk and scale up on all of these things. They will probably wait for the right time and chop off a few of these things and focus on whatever looks like it's going to be a cash cow.
Finance wise, there will be near term margin pressure but long term (IMO) they will execute superbly on a portion of their bets.
The main problem is the clock is ticking, handsets becoming commodified leading to vertical integration, licensing losing value, etc. Apple modem agreement running out soon too, and 6G modems too will not be as high margin due to diminishing improvements in telecom tech, even operator uptake at this point is looking unlikely after the 5G... debacle.
Which explains the very diverse bets they have made.
Will be interesting to see what they execute in this limited timeframe.
[1] https://www.esp.cs.columbia.edu/
I moved to using Arduino compatibles due to the "two Arduino companies" drama a while back. I don't even recall how they resolved that dispute (or even if they did), but luckily I don't have to care as long as compatibles still work in the dev environment (or some fork thereof)
theyre going to push "AI on the edge" and "IoT" nonsense again
absolutely unbelievably cooked. anyone pushing that nonsense, short with leverage.
low latency connectivity + goliath data centres will always beat on-device inference/training.
> "AI on the edge" and "IoT" nonsense again.
I love it when my device stays dumb (or at least connect-local) and not become abadonware 6 months after release because the cloud provider felt it a chore to keep running.
> low latency connectivity
That's not exactly easy. I doubt on-device training will become much of a thing. But on-device inference is desirable in all sorts of distributed use cases. We're still a long way off from reliable internet everywhere. Especially when you want to start pushing large quantities of sensor data down the pipe.
I can't even get reliable internet on my phone in the centre of London.
Not necessarily. There are lots of use cases for on device AI inference. I run YOLO on an Nvidia Jetson powered Lenovo Think Edge, which processes incoming video at full frame rates on four channels with recognition and classification for a bespoke premises security system. No clouds involved other than the Nix package manager etc. Make sure your argument May carry more weight when you're talking about ultra low power devices like an Arduino running AI inference locally that seems like more of a stretch.
true, true, very true, but i observe you use a nvidia chip. which is perfectly logical. why would you use something that is worse in every single way, right? which is exactly what qcom offerings are...
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> low latency connectivity + goliath data centres will always beat on-device inference/training.
Except that it's not always an option...
SOOOO buy Qualcomm. The second they start talking about AI-IOT stock is gonna sky rocket.
We live in a broken world.
Low latency, low power, portable
pick two.
well actually you can't really, low latency is pretty hard to do full stop
tf are you on. just look at meta display glasses. it s all on board compute
its cool... but thats not gonna last long at all. soon theyre gonna put their own custom soc into it, just like google did.
especially for such a specific, space/power/thermal constrained platform. itd be weird if meta didnt put their own custom soc into it.
running a big tech company these days, theres enough custom work going around that basically all the big players have internal silicon teams. hell, even fintech shops with ~100 employees are doing tape-outs these days!
Realtime and offline would like a word.
privacy is a thing people care about.
> privacy is a thing people care about.
Sadly, it seems that privacy is something that HN readers care about, but precious few others.
Look at the success of Facebook. The covers have been off that stinker for years, yet people still regularly use it; often to the exclusion of more traditional media. I have quite a few friends that I don't get invited to their occasions, because they only advertise them on FB. They invite a bunch of randos they've never met, but not those of us, they see all the time.
To be fair, if I sit down, and describe exactly what the ramifications of the "always on, always open" Facebook presence means, people will usually suddenly value privacy, but it seems that no one actually ever does that, at a level most folks can understand.
Hysterical rantings (even when well-founded), by geeks, don't get through to most folks. It needs to be done in the vernacular, and via media they actually consume.
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beyond delusional. imagine unironically saying this in the big '25.
This is desperation and I think it will go nowhere good.
Arduino has neither technical (standards, form-factor, pinouts), nor mindshare among developers that can be useful for high-speed, modern and upcoming AI-on-the-edge applications.
It sounds like Qualcomm is making a belated move towards robotics, but acquiring these assets is only going to distract them from becoming a successful player.
My takeaway from this announcement is that are going to ruin Arduino's current IDE and replace it with... something called Arduino App Lab? They didn't go into specifics as to what this is, other than it will integrate AI, somehow.
The other thing they announced is that they are going to sell at least one of their SBCs under the Arduino brand. That's kind of cool, I guess.
This announcement was very difficult to read. The whole thing sounds like it was written by chatGPT and it and it really shows. It took them roughly four pages to announce these two things and nothing else. I can't help but feel there is some level of malice to this, like they are taking out of Microsoft's playbook of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish".
well, they'll be missed for sure.
No they won't. I've seen them coming a looooong way. I even re-baptised arduidiots [0] quite a while ago. Since the "branding" fiasco I've stayed well clear of them.
[0]: https://github.com/buserror/simavr/blob/master/examples/shar...
you can't say no on this website, downvoted until you change it to `yes, they won't`
I hope this will make Arduino more suitable as a quick & easy dev tool for professional products.
I recently tried it out, with an STM32 board, but found out that the USB communication buffer is overwritten when data comes in too quickly. This is quite disappointing because the relevant communication protocol is perfectly capable of stalling transfers. Some internet searching revealed that many people are complaining about this. And the proposed solution of increasing the buffer size is of course not really a solution.
Someone should fix this. I know Arduino is marketed as hobbyist, and I can live with not being able to squeeze the juice out of my hardware to the fullest, but I was surprised to see that apparently they don't take correctness seriously.
Fucking hell.
Qualcomm is one of the worst vendors out there to deal with if you're a small hardware developer - let alone the kind of hobbyist who wants to use Arduino boards.
In a perfect world? Qualcomm would use Arduino to bring some of their chipsets and devices to public, and have the Arduino team open them up to small developers. Essentially doing what Pi Foundation is doing for Broadcom - package their unpalatable ICs into something that people actually use.
But we're not in a perfect world. We're in the kind of world where Qualcomm exists in the first place.
The pessimist in me fully expects Qualcomm to make Arduino worse rather than Arduino to make Qualcomm better.
Is arduino even relevant at all in 2025? I mean i gotta hand it to em they're getting an insane amount of life out of marketing a 20 year old chip but I haven't seriously considered using one for a decade or so because of how much better in literally every way the esp32 is. I mean it's like $10 for three of them, they're dual core, have a radio on board and you can even use the arduino IDE for em, what's the downside? I especially love the two cores because I can have a web stack and bluetooth on one core, and whatever realtime actual programming i need to do on the second core.
My first instinct to this piece of news is a five-char word starting with 'S'.
But reading through the news, it seems to be fine?
> Arduino will preserve its open approach and community spirit while unlocking a full‑stack platform for modern development—with Arduino UNO Q as the first step.
> The new Arduino UNO Q is a next-generation single board computer featuring a “dual brain” architecture—a Linux Debian-capable microprocessor and a real-time microcontroller—to bridge high-performance computing with real-time control.
Looks like they want to use the brand to push out their own stuffs, which seems to be reasonable. As long as they don't touch the education/OSS part I guess it will benefit both.
> Looks like they want to use the brand to push out their own stuffs, which seems to be reasonable. As long as they don't touch the education/OSS part I guess it will benefit both.
Given the current market for Qualcomm, it honestly wouldn't surprise me if in a few years they drop that education and OSS platform in favour of a paid approach. Recent Slack news doing the same has tainted my confidence.
33 Million audrino users, you can guarantee they want a piece of their wallets.
OK that makes sense, but I guess educational arduino stuffs doesn't have a deep moat, so it was already copied else where and can be done further.
Yeah, and nothing was going to change when IBM acquired Red Hat.
Whenever a VC backed company is acquired, the press release says "nothing will change, except for all these wonderful new things that the parent company will let us now do". A year later, things start to change. Two years later, the situation is unrecognizable. Qualcomm has no immediate financial incentive to support the education/OSS portion, and so they'll let it die. That's how these things always go.
Arduino is over. In reality, as soon as they took VC funding, it was over.
>My first instinct to this piece of news is a five-char word starting with 'S'.
Am I the only one who can't figure out the word?
Did you mean four characters? Or are you including a null-terminator? Extra 'e' if you're British?
Yes! Including a null-terminator '\0'
:P thought someone is going to ask but great that people on HN figured it out already
Just like when Broadcom bought VMware. Great stuff /s.
This news is making me much sadder than maybe it should.
Arduino is what pulled me into electronics. I have such fond memories of those old chonkers blinking LEDs. It felt like magic.
Unless they've had a major staffing and leadership shakeup, there is a zero percent chance Qualcomm is going to suddenly become some kind of open, sharing, culture. The company DNA is patent troll.
The recent joint ventures are a perfect example. I got so excited by those newish super powerful penta-whatever Qualcomm chips from Arduino a few years ago.
Then learned the chips were unobtainable outside the Arduino modules.
Complete garbage move by a garbage company.
I heard the rumor quite some months ago but it was mostly speculation, altough it made sense after they acquired Edge Impulse.
I'm not sure whether to be happy or not to be fair. Main issues with Arduino while I was there was the leadership lack of vision and the unwillingness to support projects coming from the engineers. It was a company kinda coasting and unsure where to go.
If they replace leadership with people that have an clear vision and focus this might be good.
My greatest hope is that people with stocks don't get screwed over though, they used to distribute them quite "easily" at a certain point to avoid raising salaries.
Seems like a shrewd move. Historically Qualcomm products were only available to the top 5 phone vendors. You couldn't even steal a datasheet... If they're serious about opening up their products to more potential customers this might be a great way. Follow the raspberry pi model. You never know when a garage product will grow into the next multi-billion dollar socket. TI/ST/NXP/etcc could do this too and all it takes is cheap PCB's (mass produce at scale) and lots of documentation.....
Professional embedded developer and Arduino afficionado here: the amount of misinformation and hot takes here is astounding. First, Arduino is aimed at making technology usable for non-engineers. The ease of use makea them a breeze for engineers though. There's nothing wrong with making something serious with Arduino as long as the project fits within the confines of Arduino.
Arduino refers to a company as well as a hardware and software platform. It doesn't only mean an ATMega based board. You can have an ESP32 based Arduino board.
Arduino boards aren't designed for high performance or very high speed signal integrity.They are designed to be easy to use by non technical people.
I see people saying stuff like the ESP IDF and FreeRTOS are easy enough to use for most people. First, Arduino on ESP32 is built on the FreeRTOS based IDF, so people who would rather use FreeRTOS don't exactly know what they are talking about. Second, anyone who thinks FreeRTOS is easy enough to use for Arduino's core audience is delulu.
Use the proper tool for the job. Arduino is for beginners, non-technical people, and for projects with undemanding requirements. Stop pretending that it's a half baked solution for engineers; that completely misses the point of Arduino.
You also now who misses the point? Qualcomm. Why? Well just read the headline qualcomm itself provides.
Guess the corporate development team needed to justify its existence. We've been through many dubious acquisitions in the tech sector for the last 5 years or so.
I love making random IOT things with the UNO R4 Wifi. I hope this means that Arduino will around (and as fun and easy) for years to come. But dang...Temo que...
The brain/CPU of the new Arduino uses a QRB2210 CPU which is not available on digikey or mouser.
Hopefully we get something along with this to integrate into custom designs?
I've not used an arduino for a number of years, I assume this means they are not going to use atmel/microchip anymore?
Arduino wasn't strictly confined to Atmel/Microchip for a while now. Their newest mainstream boards roll with Renesas chips.
And Qualcomm itself is not in the business of making mass market MCUs. Does Qualcomm want to be?
They can, they already have the kind of dies they could put into those. But they would be competing against the likes of ST, and they wouldn't have the wide ass margins they're used to.
They would also have to be writing public documentation, and dealing with hobbyists and small developers. And the impression I got from dealing with Qualcomm? They'd rather douse themselves in gasoline and set themselves on fire than acknowledge that small developers exist.
They has added other vendors for years now. The Uno R4 uses Renesas MCU and espressif module.
This is like Arduino checking into a hospice.
Arduino is an open-source platform — both its hardware and software are open to everyone, right?
The first Arduino I built cost me just $5. I assembled all the parts on a breadboard, and it worked perfectly with the Arduino IDE, just like the ESP32 does nowadays.
Is Qualcomm basically paying for the brand? I didn’t even realize Arduino was a brand at first.
Every time I tried to use something from Qualcomm, the experience sucked.
I wonder if they will learn from Arduino or destroy it.
Can someone explain why Arsuino is attractive to Qualcomm? I mean is it a gateway drug to Qualcomm chips?
The brand. All of their other stuff is essentially open, so they're just going to start adding new features that aren't open to force people to use their brand and probably claim ownership of any code that is published through their app or something, or make it so that builds will only work on their qualcomm chips.
Oh, and likely there will be telemetry and user data acquisition in the arduino app so they'll probably also get some juicy user data to sell along the way.
They'll sell a few more chips while they're at it.
I'm glad there's nothing I need to do that an ESP32 or ESP8266 can't do.
Currently, no. But currently, the only gateway drug to Qualcomm chips is being a large enough company that your company can beat Qualcomm into submission.
Qualcomm may want to change that? But if Qualcomm's treatment of small developers remains the usual Qualcomm scorn, they'll get nowhere.
This reminds me of Intel and Samsung's brief forays into the microcontroller world (Edison and Artik, if anyone's wondering what to Google). Maybe Qualcomm is in it for the long haul though. IoT is going to grow, and Intel and Samsung just lost focus.
Interesting, but I do wonder if Arduino is close to the peak of its market share. Basically every hobbyist already knows about them - opportunities for growth would seem limited. Still exciting though!
I'm a bit baffled by this. For those of you who were paying attention there was a big controversy when Arduino split with Arduino and filed a lawsuit[1]. That made it hard to get hardware and resulted in a bunch of open source folks who had been contributing to redouble their efforts to insure that all of the copyrights and licenses were FOSS so that this couldn't happen again.
And that makes me wonder what Qualcomm "bought." Was it the trademark? The form factor? Presumably this won't affect things that leveraged the infrastructure like platform.io ? Was there money involved? Who got it and how much?
Part of me wonders if this is in response to Qualcomm being unable to acquire the Raspberry Pi foundation, and given their focus on the new 'Q' and "Linux-Debian"[2] its not much different than a Raspberry Pi[3]. So many questions and "We heard you liked AI so we put some AI in your AI" kinds messaging?
This is really baffling to me.
[1] Arduino, LLC v. Arduino S.R.L. et al -- https://dockets.justia.com/docket/massachusetts/madce/1:2015...
[2] I always chuckle at distro specific Linux as a 'thing.'
[3] "Hey look we have this computer that runs Linux and has a connector on the board so you can plug I/O devices into the top of it! Isn't that neat and unique?"
Sad day for education. I would be surprised to find any user who is happy about this.
Interesting how Arduino is now planning to release a SBC, while Raspberry Pi also has a microcontroller lineup. Now using a RPi or an Arduino board in a project won't mean much when their products are nearly the same.
me, 13 years ago, a contractor at Qualcomm: how will QCE compete against Arduino?
the then-CEO in a rare f2f in Seattle: oh that's a toy
me, today: God speed, you crazy diamonds; I'm glad you cashed out, you are doomed.
Why would any large corporation need Arduino for strategic pruposes. They could simply and easily create any board they want. I guess they just want to take and slowly destroy the brand
Seems natural as both Qualcomm and Arduino feel like companies that have struggled to keep up in markets they previously were at the forefront of. Maybe they can work better together.
Okay, IIRC the sum wasn't disclosed. I wonder what was the ask.
Hope good things come out of it.
My favorite thing from Arduino was the UNO R3, highly versatile for "hardware" stuff at way back then.
I heard Espressif / ESP32 was its spiritual "successor".
This does not bring joy
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Uno Q... zero docs available for this dragonwing part from qualcomm, I'd say I'm shocked but... par for the course.
I wonder how this will effect Arduino moving forward.
I wonder if another big gun will swallow raspberry pi someday. the embedded field is getting more exciting these days.
rpi is owned by broadcom since the begining the moment they stop selling them their closed source firmware’s cpu, be the end of rpi project anyway, rpi is just a PR stunt to push brand recognition among nerds, so they buy real business broadcom products for real profits
I wonder how Qualcomm's extremely closed culture will play with this acquisition. I am worried.
End of an era...
qualcomm are pos.
after more than a decade of releasing CPUs for Linux based Android they released Snapdragon X CPU with Windows only support, intentionally not providing Linux drivers, to chum up with M$.
it was one of the rare opportunities to break the AMD / Apple duopoly for PC CPUs/SoCs.
this is bad, qualcomm hides their documentation and its not accessible unless you pay and enter into a contract
Ma Che Cazzo?! The end of an era.
Well that seems like a worst case scenario. Qualcomm not known for open source legacy.
I don't have any faith in them doing anything good. Feels like the microcontroller ecosystem is going to get replaced with a quad core application CPU running Kubernetes on Linux while a companion microcontroller runs 5 lines of c code to blink an LED.
Are we going to get datasheets or are we getting Raspberry Pi 2: nodatasheet boogaloo and the community has to spend the next 5 years reverse engineering the fuckin thing while loading binary blobs.
How does this work when Qualcomm hides its technical documentation?
call me cynical but I can't imagine this ending very well. Even if qualcomm does nothing to alter the operations at Arduino, what happens if they go belly-up in a decade?
IDK, what kind of innovation we need from Arduino now? Arduino IDE exists and is open source. Arduino Uno exists and is open source. Arduino cores, both from Arduino itself and third-party exist and are open source. Not sure how they made money recently, I hope they are up to something good with Qualcomm.
> Not sure how they made money recently,
That's an easy riddle to answer: Nothing sold by Arduino is particularly inexpensive. They've got room for profit margin. It's easier to make money when the things are several times more expensive than the competitors.
To pick an example: I can get a sketchy-feeling ESP32 board that was manufactured by some nameless entity and sold by a company that calls themselves "QQQMFXFDCX" or something. It'll probably generally work, but the pins will be in whatever order, labeled however, and I might have to spend some time documenting its unknown [mis]features. It will cost me a few dollars.
Or, I mean: I can get one from Arduino with their name on it (and with a ublox-branded module) in their Nano form-factor for ~$20. It will work fine. The pins will be [mostly] in numeric order, and labeled on both sides of the board. It will cost me about $20.
There's a lot more potential profit margin in a $20 sale than there is in a $3 sale.
(Do they add enough value to make me want to spend $20 instead of $3? Not necessarily, but I'm pretty cheap.)
Arduino wasn't in the best shape some months ago to be fair, quite some people took offers to lower their working hours with a lower salary too.
Curious if anyone’s seen actual numbers on the acquisition
Let's fork Arduino, Qualcomm is a patent troll.
There's plenty of forks already. See Adafruit, Sparkfun, and tons of others.
What's Arduino's IP look like?
They have the PCB files and schematics linked from here: https://store-usa.arduino.cc/products/arduino-uno-rev3 It says "Arduino Uno is open-source hardware! You can build your own board using the following files"
Found some licensing info here: https://support.arduino.cc/hc/en-us/articles/4415094490770-L...
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Arduino lost the narrative when official Arduino boards were $35, and a clone was $5, if that.
Arduino Megas? $110 official, $12 on Ali. Extra $10 gets you a RAMPS 1.4 board for full 3d printer platform. Yeah, a whoile Marlin-capable 3d printer board for $20. Id argue that THIS is what caused the 3d printer boom.
Arduino nano? Officially? Who knows. I bought them in bulk $1.40 and were pin compatible, and breadboardable.
And this was all true back in 2012 and up. Even their "Motor Shield" official driver was a pile of crap. Used an LM298 iirc. I would just go buy an a4988 stepper driver for a whole $.99 and run steppers.
They made the ecosystem, but they haven't properly stewarded or oversaw it. And now that Qualcomm is now owner, eh, fuck it. Stick with clones or ESP. (And for those who've had the displeasure of dealing with Qualcomm, yeah, just dont.)
I hope they don't enshittify Arduino. Please keep it open hardware and open source.
is is just me or every open source hardware product is always get acquire left and rigth????
This means Arduino is no longer European, but American instead. This is relevant and unfortunate as Trump has made everything American taste bitter.
Any article that uses 'empower' is automatically in my books bullshit and bad for downstream receivers of the news. This uses it Five times. I can see their strategy; data-center with VMware and now Arduino on the edge, but in the first case unless you have massive budget you're leaving ASAP, and really many Arduino users are precisely in that bracket, so they are 'already left'. Platform.io maybe? What are other OSS alternatives?
What I was actually hoping for.. and so far turned out disappointed, is a half-decent LTE/4/5G module that can be Arduino compatible.
Just like ESP8266 (and later -32) variant opened up the IoT over WiFi, there is a potential industry-wide opportunity space for a decent, low-cost, always-online (just bring SIM) hobby board. Without awful vendor tooling. And ideally without "modem-to-something" bridge (which almost always means AT+ and vendor tooling..)
I like https://www.makerfabs.com/maduino
It uses Simcomm modules...
RIP Arduino
Let the enshitification and cease and desists towards clones start ...
I am very very skeptical of this being a good thing for Arduino and their community.
Came here to post this word. Sums it all up.
Thank goodness I switched to nrf + embassy before this happened
used arduino for my robotics classes. for beginners its probably the best platform. get the board, add a couple of sensors and motors then boom.
This new product could be neat, but it just doesn't have even the slightest appeal that an MCU-based Arduino does to me. I would also have concerns about the enshittification of Arduino in general.
Not cool.
Hello world
F
Already in their future plans I can see the seeds of enshittification. I loved Arduino and built many projects with it. Hoping I am wrong about their future.
Aw man why does everything need to be Ai. I like my arduino boards, it don't need enshittification
meh... probably unpopular opinion but we should ban companies from growing to big and acquiring other companies above certain valuation... ffs
the downstream effect of that is less startups
Hmm... maybe not less, but IMHO majority of the startups now focus on "discrupting the market" and colleting enough VC money that they could survive to be bought up by the bigger player.
The whole landscape is put on the head - instead of promoting creating something new that could survive on its own and be useful and provitable for the creator we are now in the market of creating a fodder for the BigCorp
sigh...
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