Wayback-when, I used the Arduino Yun [1] for a project successfully. It took a USB web camera and streamed it via a browser with a button overlay to remotely control a robot. The OS was OpenWRT and was very limited, but just about good enough. The Arduino side was doing the tight control of the motors and reading the sensor data.
Why was the Arduino Yun cool? It allowed me to use WiFi easily in an embedded project (this was pre-ESP32). It also allowed me to interface with a native USB device.
The Arduino Uno Q has failed on multiple fronts (in my opinion):
* You cannot leverage the enormous number of Linux USB drivers for an embedded project. It needs two USB (A) ports for interfacing with interesting devices on the SBC. A single USB-C port for power, display and peripherals is crazy.
* It makes a large point about having a GUI, but does not offer a HDMI port. Why would you do that? On the HDMI output you would have a bootloader in ROM that tests the system is okay and tells you if it cannot boot. ARM systems have an awful feature of just not booting at all and providing no feedback. "No valid OS detected in main flash storage."
* No micro-SD to flash the SBC seems like a large oversight. You want to encourage people to experiment and break the OS, and have it be super simple to restore or experiment.
* 50 euros [2] is too much for what this is. It probably should have been a single-side surface mount
* If you're going to make the HDMI output a large part of your project, do away with the LED matrix. They should be asking themselves "does this add value to all users, or could it be a shield?".
$20 for something that can compete with a Pi 4 is intriguing, more so if it has a real low-power sleep state like the Pis don't. It's a gnarly chip though: 0.4mm pitch and like two dozen power rails, plus the fanout looks tight even on an eight layer board. I don't see the PMIC they're using anywhere online either... fingers crossed anyway.
I doubt this is aimed at hobbyists but looking to court developers looking for a quick and dirty hammer to drive their IoT nails. Remember those Spin scooters that were running off a Raspberry Pi? That's the market they are after. People who want a cheap low effort embedded computer that runs Linux. They can run a webthing in a container that talks to a cloud thing and bangs on some IO and you have a product.
You can buy the chip, but I'm not sure what that gets you. The only publicly available documentation seems to be the datasheet, which only covers its physical and electrical specifications. I don't see any register-level documentation or even a BSP available for it. I don't think you'd be able to actually do anything with the chip without entering some sort of contractual relationship with Qualcomm.
That display orientation and resolution is likely a carry-over from a phone project. Was probably cheap and easy for them to integrate an existing IP block from an older phone SOC.
It’s a funny state of the world that the flagship hobbyist “open source” development boards now both contain products from such hobbyist-hostile chip companies as Qualcomm and Broadcom!
That's not $20 to compete with a Pi 4, that's $20 for the bare chip. You have to buy all the supporting hardware on top of that. Hobbyists want to avoid routing LPDDR like the plague. There's also the inconvenient fact that digikey shows "0 In Stock", so this listing is just that, something you can't get your hands on as a hobbyist.
It will be interesting to see if Qualcomm end up deploying an open sourced standards compliant UEFI implementation. This would be a big deal in my eyes as the Raspi firmware solution is really a pain in the butt to deal with as it's closed source and the documentation is very fragmented and hard to comprehend if you're doing anything beyond their recommended approaches (for example, trying to use an A/B update scheme on a Raspi CM 5 with proper failed boot fallback is not straight forward without resorting to using u-boot as well).
It'd be interesting to see a setup where a Linux-capable SoC would run the Arduino application on a isolated CPU core with no interrupts handled, so you'd still have real-time guarantee for the Arduino app
It runs the Arduino app on a separate mcu stm32l4 I think. So you have the realtime as well, but what you describe is already possible with the pi and asymmetric multiprocessing using openamp and zephyr.
I think its another symptom of the problem of there not being a clear way to get from your smart brainbox which you run a proper operating system on and do heavy computation on to driving lots of motors or similar. There are options, but there's not one that everyone defaults to and you can get good information on.
I've seen multiple SoCs from China that integrate a high performance Linux core and a smaller MCU-like RTOS core into the same die. SG2000 being one example.
Pretty clear to me that they're aiming at drones, 3D printers and robots with that.
Combining a Linux capable CPU and MCU is not new or that weird... I think a Cortex A9 and Cortex M4 appeared on a combined SoC on the IMX6 platform around 10 years ago.
I wonder if the limitation of the application processor and Linux starting is mostly a default for the standard OS or an actual limitation. Typically with a hybrid SoC like this part of the point is that you can use the micro-controller as the power efficient thing that decides when the bigger application processor should boot or not. I'd be curious to see if that's possible with this one.
Shipping only Debian to start is fine by me. It has to start somewhere. And they seem quite responsive to making it work with other things. James Harton is plugging away at getting it working with Nerves (https://nerves-project.org) and he has it running with Buildroot already. Current repo: https://github.com/jimsynz/buildroot
I share the sentiment that I don't trust that there won't be issues with Qualcomm over time. That company does have some pretty relevant chips though so I'm hopeful this means that we see them become more accessible on SBCs and embedded boards. I feel like they've been popping up more and more.
If they value this investment in Arduino they should now have a small wing of the company that pushes for things to be more open and even if they only consider that a marketing vector, if things are opened up for that purpose, quite possibly a win. But Arduino might also be absorbed into the amorphous megablob and this is the last we see. I hope not.
I don't think this board is that weird. It is just coming from the Arduino side and moving into Raspberry Pi territory. Personally I want to run Nerves on the application processor and get some practice with Zephyr on the MCU. Seems to already be supported: https://docs.zephyrproject.org/latest/boards/arduino/uno_q/d...
Also why no mention of the LED matrix. This is something RPi devices fail at. Providing som default way of neat output. First time plugging this in it starts doing fun stuff.
Modern Qualcomm SoCs have "RPM" - a dedicated always-on ARM core for managing clocks, sleep modes and power states. And usually at least one low power DSP core that can be up when the rest of the system is down.
Good luck getting your hands on any docs on how to use any of that shit tho.
It's not exactly a big problem, but my company makes a three-axis desktop CNC machine powered by an ATMega328P that is dependent on having a Windows PC connected to it in order to run the proprietary software. Uno Q has me thinking we can eliminate the PC along with our custom PCB, making a more compact and convenient stand-alone system that would also come with a lower price tag. I may order a few to experiment with this idea, but again, it's not a huge problem and something only specific customers would care about.
I'm curious what the Maker community comes up with, provided it sticks around and remains supported, unlike the Edison.
Because then I have two seperate boards to power, house and protect. Combining those into one would make for a smaller design footprint, in our case. With this particular product, portability and compactness is ideal, since it is intended to be used on job sites to mark steel banding or tags. Often times, these guys are working out of a very dirty trailer that's already crammed with equipment, so space is at a premium for them. The machine does nothing special, so size tends to be where the competative edge is in that admittedly niche market.
It really looks like is it two thirds of what a Klipper-based 3D printer with a monitoring camera would need. It lacks the stepper controllers/power control stuff but it has the CPU/MCU duality you'd want, it could comfortably run a proper LCD panel, run an on-board slicer, even run on-board CAD.
Weird take. The Raspberry Pi Zero 2W would have seemed more like the natural comparison rather than the Raspberry Pi 4 or 5.
I find it more interesting to think of the Arduino Uno Q as a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W but with 2GB / 4GB of RAM and even lower idle power than the other options with that much RAM. That makes it intriguing as a very low power always-on headless server with GPIO as a bonus.
Wayback-when, I used the Arduino Yun [1] for a project successfully. It took a USB web camera and streamed it via a browser with a button overlay to remotely control a robot. The OS was OpenWRT and was very limited, but just about good enough. The Arduino side was doing the tight control of the motors and reading the sensor data.
Why was the Arduino Yun cool? It allowed me to use WiFi easily in an embedded project (this was pre-ESP32). It also allowed me to interface with a native USB device.
The Arduino Uno Q has failed on multiple fronts (in my opinion):
* You cannot leverage the enormous number of Linux USB drivers for an embedded project. It needs two USB (A) ports for interfacing with interesting devices on the SBC. A single USB-C port for power, display and peripherals is crazy.
* It makes a large point about having a GUI, but does not offer a HDMI port. Why would you do that? On the HDMI output you would have a bootloader in ROM that tests the system is okay and tells you if it cannot boot. ARM systems have an awful feature of just not booting at all and providing no feedback. "No valid OS detected in main flash storage."
* No micro-SD to flash the SBC seems like a large oversight. You want to encourage people to experiment and break the OS, and have it be super simple to restore or experiment.
* 50 euros [2] is too much for what this is. It probably should have been a single-side surface mount
* If you're going to make the HDMI output a large part of your project, do away with the LED matrix. They should be asking themselves "does this add value to all users, or could it be a shield?".
[1] https://docs.arduino.cc/retired/boards/arduino-yun/
[2] https://store.arduino.cc/products/uno-q
The buried lede here is that Qualcomm is selling chips to hobbyists now?
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/qualcomm/QRB-2210...
$20 for something that can compete with a Pi 4 is intriguing, more so if it has a real low-power sleep state like the Pis don't. It's a gnarly chip though: 0.4mm pitch and like two dozen power rails, plus the fanout looks tight even on an eight layer board. I don't see the PMIC they're using anywhere online either... fingers crossed anyway.
I doubt this is aimed at hobbyists but looking to court developers looking for a quick and dirty hammer to drive their IoT nails. Remember those Spin scooters that were running off a Raspberry Pi? That's the market they are after. People who want a cheap low effort embedded computer that runs Linux. They can run a webthing in a container that talks to a cloud thing and bangs on some IO and you have a product.
You can buy the chip, but I'm not sure what that gets you. The only publicly available documentation seems to be the datasheet, which only covers its physical and electrical specifications. I don't see any register-level documentation or even a BSP available for it. I don't think you'd be able to actually do anything with the chip without entering some sort of contractual relationship with Qualcomm.
Qualcomm even put up a datasheet for the chip, which is almost unheard of. No technical reference manual though, so the usefulness is limited.
The openness of this market gives me home that we could make something like a pinephone with actually decent hardware and open-enough drivers.
Although the graphics part is weird: 720 x 1680 @ 60 Hz
Vertical, and a bit longer than 720p? It's probably some standard size in some industry or type of device, but caught me off guard...
That display orientation and resolution is likely a carry-over from a phone project. Was probably cheap and easy for them to integrate an existing IP block from an older phone SOC.
1680 x 720 is resolution for ultrawide 21:9 aspect ratio
> something that can compete with a Pi 4
Qualcomm being as hostile to open-source as Broadcom is definitely something in common for both SBCs.
It’s a funny state of the world that the flagship hobbyist “open source” development boards now both contain products from such hobbyist-hostile chip companies as Qualcomm and Broadcom!
Just like the Linux kernel has plenty of contributions from the companies that get as much hate as possible from FOSS communities.
Turns out there isn't adoption success without compromises.
i guess that you have to make compromise somewhere
The Fairphone 5 used a QCM6490, a qualcomm industrial chip with a 10y support timeline
The Fairphone 6 uses a Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 with ane stimated 3-4 years of support
At least for the 5 the compromise was motivated, in the second case i just don't feel like the low performance is a worthwhile compromise.
That's not $20 to compete with a Pi 4, that's $20 for the bare chip. You have to buy all the supporting hardware on top of that. Hobbyists want to avoid routing LPDDR like the plague. There's also the inconvenient fact that digikey shows "0 In Stock", so this listing is just that, something you can't get your hands on as a hobbyist.
It will be interesting to see if Qualcomm end up deploying an open sourced standards compliant UEFI implementation. This would be a big deal in my eyes as the Raspi firmware solution is really a pain in the butt to deal with as it's closed source and the documentation is very fragmented and hard to comprehend if you're doing anything beyond their recommended approaches (for example, trying to use an A/B update scheme on a Raspi CM 5 with proper failed boot fallback is not straight forward without resorting to using u-boot as well).
Qualcomm IoT likes U-Boot with UEFI compat
It'd be interesting to see a setup where a Linux-capable SoC would run the Arduino application on a isolated CPU core with no interrupts handled, so you'd still have real-time guarantee for the Arduino app
It runs the Arduino app on a separate mcu stm32l4 I think. So you have the realtime as well, but what you describe is already possible with the pi and asymmetric multiprocessing using openamp and zephyr.
I remember reading about this in some blogs so here is one I found that describes just that: https://telmomoya.blogspot.com/2016/10/asymmetric-multi-proc...
I think its another symptom of the problem of there not being a clear way to get from your smart brainbox which you run a proper operating system on and do heavy computation on to driving lots of motors or similar. There are options, but there's not one that everyone defaults to and you can get good information on.
I've seen multiple SoCs from China that integrate a high performance Linux core and a smaller MCU-like RTOS core into the same die. SG2000 being one example.
Pretty clear to me that they're aiming at drones, 3D printers and robots with that.
Right — 3D printers, robotics, etc.; some sort of isolation of the microcontroller stage from the monitoring/apps stage.
This is an example of what happens when your wallet is bigger than your imagination.
Combining a Linux capable CPU and MCU is not new or that weird... I think a Cortex A9 and Cortex M4 appeared on a combined SoC on the IMX6 platform around 10 years ago.
Plenty of use cases in embedded!
Heck, the Raspberry Pi 5 does this. GPIO is handled by an MCU that is effectively a Raspberry Pi Pico.
I wonder if the limitation of the application processor and Linux starting is mostly a default for the standard OS or an actual limitation. Typically with a hybrid SoC like this part of the point is that you can use the micro-controller as the power efficient thing that decides when the bigger application processor should boot or not. I'd be curious to see if that's possible with this one.
Shipping only Debian to start is fine by me. It has to start somewhere. And they seem quite responsive to making it work with other things. James Harton is plugging away at getting it working with Nerves (https://nerves-project.org) and he has it running with Buildroot already. Current repo: https://github.com/jimsynz/buildroot
Most recently they pushed their special sauce for the bootloader and how to produce the relevant mystery binaries. https://forum.arduino.cc/t/buildroot-support-for-uno-q/14108...
I share the sentiment that I don't trust that there won't be issues with Qualcomm over time. That company does have some pretty relevant chips though so I'm hopeful this means that we see them become more accessible on SBCs and embedded boards. I feel like they've been popping up more and more.
If they value this investment in Arduino they should now have a small wing of the company that pushes for things to be more open and even if they only consider that a marketing vector, if things are opened up for that purpose, quite possibly a win. But Arduino might also be absorbed into the amorphous megablob and this is the last we see. I hope not.
I don't think this board is that weird. It is just coming from the Arduino side and moving into Raspberry Pi territory. Personally I want to run Nerves on the application processor and get some practice with Zephyr on the MCU. Seems to already be supported: https://docs.zephyrproject.org/latest/boards/arduino/uno_q/d...
Also why no mention of the LED matrix. This is something RPi devices fail at. Providing som default way of neat output. First time plugging this in it starts doing fun stuff.
Modern Qualcomm SoCs have "RPM" - a dedicated always-on ARM core for managing clocks, sleep modes and power states. And usually at least one low power DSP core that can be up when the rest of the system is down.
Good luck getting your hands on any docs on how to use any of that shit tho.
Qualcomm owning Arduino is a real mismatch as evidenced by this device.
A great pity because likely it’ll end up in the demise of Arduino which is central to the hobbyist microcontroller scene.
I'll be always "grateful" to Arduino UNO R3 for my first foray into hardware-related stuff.
I think the "Arduino platform" will live on in Teensy, others.
I see the bean counters are still in control at QCOM
Nice integrated LED matrix
What problem are they solving for with the hybrid approach?
The problem of showing "synergy" between Arduino and Qualcomm.
Thank you for pointing this out. RIP Arduino.
It's not exactly a big problem, but my company makes a three-axis desktop CNC machine powered by an ATMega328P that is dependent on having a Windows PC connected to it in order to run the proprietary software. Uno Q has me thinking we can eliminate the PC along with our custom PCB, making a more compact and convenient stand-alone system that would also come with a lower price tag. I may order a few to experiment with this idea, but again, it's not a huge problem and something only specific customers would care about.
I'm curious what the Maker community comes up with, provided it sticks around and remains supported, unlike the Edison.
> Uno Q has me thinking we can eliminate the PC along with our custom PCB
If you know how to eliminate the PC, why not replace it already with a Pi?
Because then I have two seperate boards to power, house and protect. Combining those into one would make for a smaller design footprint, in our case. With this particular product, portability and compactness is ideal, since it is intended to be used on job sites to mark steel banding or tags. Often times, these guys are working out of a very dirty trailer that's already crammed with equipment, so space is at a premium for them. The machine does nothing special, so size tends to be where the competative edge is in that admittedly niche market.
It really looks like is it two thirds of what a Klipper-based 3D printer with a monitoring camera would need. It lacks the stepper controllers/power control stuff but it has the CPU/MCU duality you'd want, it could comfortably run a proper LCD panel, run an on-board slicer, even run on-board CAD.
Weird take. The Raspberry Pi Zero 2W would have seemed more like the natural comparison rather than the Raspberry Pi 4 or 5.
I find it more interesting to think of the Arduino Uno Q as a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W but with 2GB / 4GB of RAM and even lower idle power than the other options with that much RAM. That makes it intriguing as a very low power always-on headless server with GPIO as a bonus.
RP Zero 2W is $15 and Uno Q is $44
Depends on which dimension, e.g. https://www.jeffgeerling.com/sites/default/files/images/ardu... from https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/arduino-uno-q-weird-h...