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!
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.
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.
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 only feel dread when I see a Qualcomm story on HN anymore.
ESP stuff is so damn cheap and capable now I'm not sure what you would use Arduino for these days.
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.
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.
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.
Espressif has been eating their lunch, the boards are way more capable and much cheaper. Why would anyone pick an Uno over an ESP32?
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.
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.
If you ever wondered, how Arduino came about: The Untold History of Arduino (https://arduinohistory.github.io/).
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.
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!?
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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?
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
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.
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?
Curious if anyone’s seen actual numbers on the acquisition
Let's fork Arduino, Qualcomm is a patent troll.
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..)
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.
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
sigh...
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