I saw this the other day. I’m not sure exactly what the concerns are, nor why Qualcomm deserves any shade. I don’t know much about Qualcomm, but at least on the face of it, they’re keeping Arduino alive and infusing a lot of cash and expanding the platform, and they’re also keeping the board designs fully open source. It seems reasonable (and probably necessary in today’s world) to have terms on the cloud services. Arduino’s website itself was never open source, the chips they’ve always used aren’t open source. And it was Arduino’s decision to sell to Qualcomm, right? Why should the cloud services be open source?
Arduino has four layers, only two were ever truly open:
1 Hardware reference designs (sort of open by intent)
2 Core software (open-source licensing)
3 Services and “happy path” tooling (not open)
4 Brand and governance (never open)
Qualcomm’s move is about owning layer 4 and using it to grow layer 3, while keeping layers 1 and 2 open enough to preserve credibility and community adoption.
Before I clicked I expected a single SoC with a hybrid architecture (powerful cores to run Linux, MCU cores for real time control). This is a board with two physically separate chips. They put an MCU next to the quad-core application chip.
It will be interesting to see how they make this arrangement approachable for Arduino’s audience which generally expects ease of use to be a high priority.
I bought one of these to play with when it was announced, but with all the drama I’ve been hesitant to invest any time with it. Anyone make anything interesting?
It's kind of hard to use. I considered putting it to use for a project, but, no official camera sensor boards, not even a Pi camera adapter yet, and the official ISP tuning guides are NDA'd, because, Qualcomm.
It would be worthwhile still if this had LTE on board, but it doesn't.
Nice try, Qualcomm.
Some context for people who haven't been following recent the recent Qualcomm/Arduino developments: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/arduinos-new-terms-o...
I saw this the other day. I’m not sure exactly what the concerns are, nor why Qualcomm deserves any shade. I don’t know much about Qualcomm, but at least on the face of it, they’re keeping Arduino alive and infusing a lot of cash and expanding the platform, and they’re also keeping the board designs fully open source. It seems reasonable (and probably necessary in today’s world) to have terms on the cloud services. Arduino’s website itself was never open source, the chips they’ve always used aren’t open source. And it was Arduino’s decision to sell to Qualcomm, right? Why should the cloud services be open source?
Arduino has four layers, only two were ever truly open:
1 Hardware reference designs (sort of open by intent)
2 Core software (open-source licensing)
3 Services and “happy path” tooling (not open)
4 Brand and governance (never open)
Qualcomm’s move is about owning layer 4 and using it to grow layer 3, while keeping layers 1 and 2 open enough to preserve credibility and community adoption.
Before I clicked I expected a single SoC with a hybrid architecture (powerful cores to run Linux, MCU cores for real time control). This is a board with two physically separate chips. They put an MCU next to the quad-core application chip.
It will be interesting to see how they make this arrangement approachable for Arduino’s audience which generally expects ease of use to be a high priority.
How would it stack up against BeagleBoard BeagleY-Ai, save for the lack of drama?
Let’s see where they are in a few years.
I bought one of these to play with when it was announced, but with all the drama I’ve been hesitant to invest any time with it. Anyone make anything interesting?
If you already bought it dont let the drama waste your money. You just buy different next time if you feel they no longer meet your expectations.
It's kind of hard to use. I considered putting it to use for a project, but, no official camera sensor boards, not even a Pi camera adapter yet, and the official ISP tuning guides are NDA'd, because, Qualcomm.
It would be worthwhile still if this had LTE on board, but it doesn't.
> the official ISP tuning guides are NDA'd
Oof.