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Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

• vluft 1y ago
  well, they'll be missed for sure.
  • buserror 1y ago
    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/shared/arduidiot_pins.h https://github.com/buserror/simavr/blob/master/examples/shar...
    • defraudbah 1y ago
      you can't say no on this website, downvoted until you change it to `yes, they won't`
• geerlingguy 1y ago
  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 https://www.arduino.cc/product-uno-q
  • c0balt 1y ago
    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.
    • joezydeco 1y ago
      Because Jetson is getting traction?
    • geerlingguy 1y ago
      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...).
      • kcb 1y ago
        Shame to still see newly released products using a 13 year old core design. How has there been such little progress on low power ARM cores that it still makes sense to build a Cortex-A53 based soc on a modern node.
        • antonvs 1y ago
          There’s been plenty of progress. There’ve been three newer generations since the A53: the A55, then the A510, then the A520. But what you think of as an old core design is in fact a mature, well-understood, well-tested, widely-supported, cost-effective core design. It also has some features such as in-order execution which none of the newer chips have. From an engineering perspective, it still can make a lot of sense in the right applications today.
• webdevver 1y ago
  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.
  • KeplerBoy 1y ago
    privacy is a thing people care about.
    • webdevver 1y ago
      beyond delusional. imagine unironically saying this in the big '25.
    • ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
      > 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.
      • dboreham 1y ago
        There's a commercial version of privacy. E.g. Company A doesn't want to send their data to Company B (a competitor) for processing.
  • ale42 1y ago
    > low latency connectivity + goliath data centres will always beat on-device inference/training. Except that it's not always an option...
• murillians 1y ago
  I only feel dread when I see a Qualcomm story on HN anymore.
  • femiagbabiaka 1y ago
    Yeah, it might as well say “Oracle to acquire $FOO”
  • webdevver 1y ago
    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.
    • fidotron 1y ago
      Qualcomm are good at radios and associated signal processing. The rest is simply integrations around that.
      • ac29 1y ago
        Yeah, there are only a small handful of companies making radios for mobile networks that I am aware of - its really hard. Qualcomm, Samsung, Mediatek, Apple?
        • userbinator 1y ago
          There is also HiSilicon (Huawei), Unisoc (formerly Spreadtrum) also exists in the ultra-low-end segment formerly occupied by Mediatek, and then a bunch of miscellaneous ones like Leadcore, Nufront, and Rockchip.
    • ivape 1y ago
      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.
• phoehne 1y ago
  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.
  • josephcsible 1y ago
    > 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?
    • geerlingguy 1y ago
      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.
    • q3k 1y ago
      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)
      • limagnolia 1y ago
        Patents are exhausted on first sale. If you sell me a board that uses your patent, I can do anything I want with that board. At least that is my understanding, IANAL and all... However, if they are distributing SDKs or something separately from the hardware, that software could have its own license that forbids commercial use.
    • 1y ago
• rwaksmunski 1y ago
  At least it's not Broadcom
• KaiserPro 1y ago
  I've not used an arduino for a number of years, I assume this means they are not going to use atmel/microchip anymore?
  • mrheosuper 1y ago
    They has added other vendors for years now. The Uno R4 uses Renesas MCU and espressif module.
  • ACCount37 1y ago
    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.
• tylergetsay 1y ago
  Espressif has been eating their lunch, the boards are way more capable and much cheaper. Why would anyone pick an Uno over an ESP32?
  • fidotron 1y ago
    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.
    • monegator 1y ago
      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.
    • the__alchemist 1y ago
      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.
      • wibbily 1y ago
        It’s a shame. Nordic’s chips blow the ESPs out of the water in terms of power consumption. You can get an nRF bluetooth dongle to run for months/years off a coin cell, almost without trying. Getting an ESP32 to behave is much harder IIRC their standalone wifi chip is pretty good even… just stick them together already c’mon.
• chpatrick 1y ago
  ESP stuff is so damn cheap and capable now I'm not sure what you would use Arduino for these days.
  • dotancohen 1y ago
    That's probably why these AI-capable Qualcomm boards are being introduced.
  • the__alchemist 1y ago
    Community inertia / maker content.
    • suyash 1y ago
      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.
      • cruffle_duffle 1y ago
        Exactly. I dunno why you’d ever use anything but an esp for “maker stuff” at this point. They are cheaper, more capable, and have the same DX (largely, setting aside 3.3v vs 5v).
        • daemonologist 1y ago
          Well you might go Nordic for the power efficiency, but I agree capital-A Arduino wouldn't even cross my mind as an option these days.
  • phoehne 1y ago
    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.
• oxxoxoxooo 1y ago
  If you ever wondered, how Arduino came about: The Untold History of Arduino (https://arduinohistory.github.io/ https://arduinohistory.github.io/).
  • pclmulqdq 1y ago
    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.
    • crumpled 1y ago
      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.
    • theon144 1y ago
      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
      • pclmulqdq 1y ago
        Great businesses can still be cash grabs. In fact, many of them are. Very few of those dress themselves up as a nonprofit (aside from Arduino and OpenAI).
• ACCount37 1y ago
  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.
• mrtksn 1y ago
  Okay, IIRC the sum wasn't disclosed. I wonder what was the ask.
• phantom32 1y ago
  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.
• chimpontherun 1y ago
  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.
• b00ty4breakfast 1y ago
  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?
  • oytis 1y ago
    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.
    • ssl-3 1y ago
      > 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.)
  • silvanocerza 1y ago
    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.
• porridgeraisin 1y ago
  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/ https://www.esp.cs.columbia.edu/
• xinayder 1y ago
  I hope they don't enshittify Arduino. Please keep it open hardware and open source.
• silvanocerza 1y ago
  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.
• magtux 1y ago
  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.
  • ACCount37 1y ago
    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.
    • nrclark 1y ago
      afaik, Raspberry Pis move around 7M units annually. Based on their first announced product (https://www.arduino.cc/product-uno-q 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.
  • joezydeco 1y ago
    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 https://store-usa.arduino.cc/collections/pro-family
  • 1y ago
• ferguess_k 1y ago
  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.
  • dessimus 1y ago
    Yeah, and nothing was going to change when IBM acquired Red Hat.
  • bilekas 1y ago
    > 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.
    • ferguess_k 1y ago
      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.
  • mrheosuper 1y ago
    Just like when Broadcom bought VMware. Great stuff /s.
  • mtlynch 1y ago
    >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?
• greatgib 1y ago
  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.
  • yaro330 1y ago
    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.
    • userbinator 1y ago
      That's pretty useless when they won't release the documentation for their SoCs.
      • yaro330 1y ago
        https://docs.qualcomm.com/ https://docs.qualcomm.com/ is pretty open.
        • greatgib 1y ago
          I don't know your definition of open, when I reach this page, the only thing that I can see is a signup form because a "qualcomid" is needed...
          • fragmede 1y ago
            It doesn't seems unreasonable for them to want an email address before giving you PDFs of their stuff. They do want additional verification to get more detailed docs, but on the spectrum between available on the open Internet to all as a 1, vs only available on a hardwired line on a LAN on a military base at a 10, I'd give Qualcomm, I dunno, maybe 4?
• 8cvor6j844qw_d6 1y ago
  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".
• leoh 1y ago
  This does not bring joy
  • lesser-shadow 1y ago
    [dead]
• yalogin 1y ago
  Can someone explain why Arsuino is attractive to Qualcomm? I mean is it a gateway drug to Qualcomm chips?
  • BizarroLand 1y ago
    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.
  • ACCount37 1y ago
    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.
• babl-yc 1y ago
  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
• Gelob 1y ago
  this is bad, qualcomm hides their documentation and its not accessible unless you pay and enter into a contract
• mtoner23 1y ago
  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
• estimator7292 1y ago
  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.
  • ricw 1y ago
    Curious what the better frameworks are these days? Are they tied to specific hardware like arduino was? And what language do they use?
    • bschwindHN 1y ago
      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.
    • estimator7292 1y ago
      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
      • theon144 1y ago
• dzonga 1y ago
  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.
• micromacrofoot 1y ago
  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.
• zoobab 1y ago
  Let's fork Arduino, Qualcomm is a patent troll.
  • cosmicgadget 1y ago
    What's Arduino's IP look like?
    • drivers99 1y ago
      They have the PCB files and schematics linked from here: https://store-usa.arduino.cc/products/arduino-uno-rev3 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-Licensing-for-products-based-on-Arduino https://support.arduino.cc/hc/en-us/articles/4415094490770-L...
      • cosmicgadget 1y ago
        Thanks! That doesn't seem like a tempting target for patent trolling (which wasn't your assertion).
  • relaxing 1y ago
    There's plenty of forks already. See Adafruit, Sparkfun, and tons of others.
• elAhmo 1y ago
  Sad day for education. I would be surprised to find any user who is happy about this.
• codingclaws 1y ago
  RIP Arduino
• antirez 1y ago
  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.
  • wrigby 1y ago
    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.
    • antirez 1y ago
      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.
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
• blastersyndrome 1y ago
  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".
• cuttothechase 1y ago
  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!?
  • 05 1y ago
    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 https://github.com/espressif/esp-tflite-micro
  • protocolture 1y ago
    IIRC some of the ESP boards are "AI Optimised" but its like, facial and license plate recognition, not necessarily LLM stuff.
    • consp 1y ago
      Is that what we call DSPs now?
• pcdoodle 1y ago
  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?
• coupdejarnac 1y ago
  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.
  • vollbrecht 1y ago
    You also now who misses the point? Qualcomm. Why? Well just read the headline qualcomm itself provides.
• zhravan 1y ago
  Is this some sort of strategic acquisition? What is Qualcomm gaining from this?
• keyboards 1y ago
  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...
• st3fan 1y ago
  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.
  • travisgriggs 1y ago
    Came here to post this word. Sums it all up.
• MountDoom 1y ago
  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.
  • TheJoeMan 1y ago
    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?
  • xg15 1y ago
    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.
• RicoElectrico 1y ago
  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.
• calibas 1y ago
  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.
  • guywithahat 1y ago
    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.
  • giobox 1y ago
    > 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.
    • calibas 1y ago
      True from an industry perspective, but they're very much competitors in the hobby market.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • ACCount37 1y ago
      Counterpoint: prototyping and low volume production runs. Hardware is cheap - development time is expensive.
    • 1y ago
• ozguroz 1y ago
  Curious if anyone’s seen actual numbers on the acquisition
• sleepybrett 1y ago
  Well that seems like a worst case scenario. Qualcomm not known for open source legacy.
• beambot 1y ago
  End of an era...
• lastdong 1y ago
  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.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• nekusar 1y ago
  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.)
• drzaiusx11 1y ago
  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)
• kazinator 1y ago
  This is like Arduino checking into a hospice.
• bfrog 1y ago
  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.
• synergy20 1y ago
  I wonder if another big gun will swallow raspberry pi someday. the embedded field is getting more exciting these days.
  • Aleklart 1y ago
    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
• sarmadgulzar 1y ago
  Thank goodness I switched to nrf + embassy before this happened
• amelius 1y ago
  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.
• RyJones 1y ago
  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.
• EasyMark 1y ago
  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.
  • MountDoom 1y ago
    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.
  • rossdavidh 1y ago
    Google bought Android, but did not kill it. Same with YouTube. But, I admit, there are a lot more examples of the other way...
    • JohnFen 1y ago
      > Google bought Android, but did not kill it. True, but they are currently in the process of further locking hobbyists out of it.
      • olyjohn 1y ago
        Yeah it's not totally dead. But they definitely killed what made Android great. Now it might as well just be iOS. Same boring ass phones that do nothing well but install spyware apps, consume content and scroll through social media. Just more trash for the landfill.
        • a_victorp 1y ago
          Spot on!
• ChuckMcM 1y ago
  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/1:2015cv10181/167131 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?"
• MisterTea 1y ago
  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.
• 0xTJ 1y ago
  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.
• phendrenad2 1y ago
  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.
• tonyhart7 1y ago
  is is just me or every open source hardware product is always get acquire left and rigth????
• anymouse123456 1y ago
  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.
• CommenterPerson 1y ago
  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.
• palata 1y ago
  Every time I tried to use something from Qualcomm, the experience sucked. I wonder if they will learn from Arduino or destroy it.
• phlipski 1y ago
  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.....
• LordGrignard 1y ago
  Hello world
• hoppp 1y ago
  Aw man why does everything need to be Ai. I like my arduino boards, it don't need enshittification
• bvan 1y ago
  Ma Che Cazzo?! The end of an era.
• hartjer 1y ago
  F
• qdotme 1y ago
  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..)
  • jhallenworld 1y ago
    I like https://www.makerfabs.com/maduino https://www.makerfabs.com/maduino It uses Simcomm modules...
• andrewstuart 1y ago
  How does this work when Qualcomm hides its technical documentation?
• angry_octet 1y ago
  Lady Ada is not impressed: https://blog.adafruit.com/2025/10/07/qualcomms-latest-ai-play-turning-maker-dreams-into-shareholder-value/ 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.
  • relaxing 1y ago
    That post is written by Mr. Lady Ada, Philip Torrone (nevertheless an authority matters of open source hardware.)
• reflexe 1y ago
  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.
  • robert_foss 1y ago
    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.
• z3ratul163071 1y ago
  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.
• finnjohnsen2 1y ago
  This means Arduino is no longer European, but American instead. This is relevant and unfortunate as Trump has made everything American taste bitter.
• werdl 1y ago
  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!
• thot_experiment 1y ago
  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.
• pbandhoney 1y ago
  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?
• jwr 1y ago
  I wonder how Qualcomm's extremely closed culture will play with this acquisition. I am worried.
• ktosobcy 1y ago
  meh... probably unpopular opinion but we should ban companies from growing to big and acquiring other companies above certain valuation... ffs
  • zild3d 1y ago
    the downstream effect of that is less startups
    • ktosobcy 1y ago
      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
• Iridiumkoivu 1y ago
  Not cool.
• SuperSandro2000 1y ago
  sigh...