Arduino has a new job selling chips for its new owner. Let's not pretend otherwise The successful, sector-defining, open source Italian embedded platform provider Arduino had a little bash in Turin recently. It made a few announcements, including a new single-board computer (SBC) with a Qualcomm system on a chip (SoC). Oh, and that it had been bought by American dragon-themed mobile chip monster Qualcomm in a …
Beginning of the end for Arduino.
Qualcom makes chips, but only as a way to double dip on royalties.
Generally they buy up companies and sell off the factory plant, assets etc, bury the product and add the IP to their portfolio. If this is different, then it's unusual.
I expect that if they can't use it as a royalties revenue stream it will be resold.
Getting swallowed by a whale is a life-changing...
You get digested and excreted when swallowed by a whale. There is, unfortunately, no other way.
Even if the whale got sick and you'd got out when the whale barfed, you'd still just become a puddle of junk left on the side walk.
Cynical article, and sadly also 100% accurate.
Worse, the supply chain hanging off the Arduine project got it in the neck by this deal too - the gazaillion little shops making things you can add to the board to do something esoteric. In one fell swoop, an entire ecosystem is hanging by a thread. Better start preserving what there is now.
Who agreed to this, and how much does he/she personally make out of this? I think that ought to be public.
Beyond the potential problems stated, also a wider concern which is that for all the EU Bluster about reducing external dependencies like the CHIPS act (supposedly €40b+ investment), etc. etc., the EU (and the UK), have no way to stop real success stories like Arduino (and the UK's ARM) from being snapped up on a whim by giant overseas corporations.
"Protectionism" is a dirty word this side of the Atlantic, but truth is until we start practising some of it, nothing will change. It would take pretty deep pockets for someone to swallow ASML, but it could still happen - if the EU is truly serious about creating a roadmap for self-sufficiency, then that path starts with keeping the ownership of companies like Arduino inside Europe.
Unfortunately for many people being successful is when you're getting noticed and bought out by an American group. Like we're supposed to be flattered that they decide to acquire us instead of seeing it like it is: a way to neutralize competition. Ultimately this is why Alstom Power was allowed to be sold to GE. Macron has a hard-on for American conglomerates, and also saw the opportunity for his former employer to get a fat cut on the transaction (he was an investment banker before)
Don't forget that Ebon was working for Broadcom at the time.
I'm not convinced that this new direction for Arduino is going to work. The RPi, for all its faults, has cemented itself as the defacto standard in the SBC scene. Not sure an arduino form factor board is going to make much of an impact at this late stage.
I think perhaps you overestimate the power Raspberry Pi had, maybe they could now but in the scheme of things Broadcom were basically humouring them because Eben worked there.
The number of units shipped was tiny compared to the number of network cards and switches with Broadcom Phy chips and all the other products
This of course is not going to end well, but I expect Arduino clones to pick up the whole market space. Since it's open source (at least until yesterday) then the "pre-acquisition" design can live on forever, with hardware produced by Chinese manufacturers and the software part community maintained. Just call it "Harder Duino"
“Qualcomm says its partnership with Arduino will make it more accessible to developers, and make its technologies more easily available to the edge”
Because it’s not “accessible to developers” already? And it’s not “available to the edge” whatever the fuck that means?
At least be honest - they are buying it to asset-strip it. There will be no Arduino in a couple of years from now. How is that “more accessible”?
And where the fuck is the EU “competition and monopolies” (or whatever they are called) dept in all this??
I thought the UNO R4 WiFi was a step away from the original value of that family but the Q is ridiculous.
Arduino already have the MKR Series for playing with bigger devices and lots of onboard widgets; the UNO's great strength is that it was simple, you can understand it quite easily (so long as you keep in mind that the second processor on the R3 is there because USB is overly complicated when all you need is simple serial and the latter is all you need when you get to having two boards talking to each other).
When you've built a project with a proper UNO, you can easily go into the next stages of replicating the entire thing on a breadboard[1] and even onto making up a PCB and creating your own embedded device - all whilst still remaining at the "artist", hobbyist or school-level: all in easy stages, no need to go any deeper than you have to and with as few black box components as possible.
Taking over the UNO form factor - which is not, and never has been, great for complex projects, ref all the people who still needlessly[2] scream at the non-standard pin spacing - like this is moving Arduino far, far away from its educational roots and making it into a way to ship more over-spec'ed parts for Qualcomm.
[1] I notice that shrimping.it is no more; that isn't suspicious (sad, but not dastardly) but it is one thing making it harder to point somebody who is ready for the next stage to a nice friendly place for breadboarding their own UNO-alike.
[2] needlessly because there are plenty of other forms available and have been for a fair old while; although most of the screaming has been in Hackaday and their comments section is rarely a happy place
The Mega was a great design from Arduino, perfect for interfacing with older boards with 5v TTL.
They lost me with the Arduino Cloud though, the lowest tier was £7 a month, which is fine if you ended up with a proper project with lots of devices in your home linking to it, but really off-putting if you're starting out with a project, or just want to have a play with it.
1. It's not Raspberry Pi foundation, it's Raspberry Pi ltd. Foundation just own a lot of shares, but have nothing to do with product development at all.
2. The closed source firmware blob has got smaller and smaller with each generation of Pi. Nowadays on the Pi 5 it does very little. All the real work is now done in open source drivers.
3. The RP1 chip on the Pi5, which encompasses most of the Piness of the device is entirely designed and developed by Ltd, so they have complete control over it, Broadcom is irrelevant to it.
There are really 2 halves to Arduino: hardware and IDE infrastructure.
Arduino hardware side consists of their obsolete Uno/Mega designs and a host of random stabs at something else relevant. Like their highly forgettable dalliance with Renesas processors. Much of the open source community has ignored these later offerings. As such, none of their current offerings matter much at all - largely irrelevant. I doubt Qualcomm will/can change that trajectory.
But, the open source Arduino IDE is a major asset to the developer community. Yes, it is a sad little IDE - there are much better out there. But, it supports just about any processor architecture - hundreds of microcontrollers/processors. And has, literally, tens of thousands of libraries that support all manner of hardware. These libraries are, by and large, trivially portable to most of the processors supported. And, it is easy to add a new processor (core in Arduino parlance) so a new processor gains a vast set of libraries very quickly. This is the real legacy of Arduino and can escape the clutches of the big Q by the very nature of the source code being available to all.
Phil
Oracle (SW equivalent of Qualcomm?) bought Sun.
That killed Open Office (-> LibreOffice) and Hudson (-> Jenkins).
Google switched Android from Java and JVM, but Oracle sued them.
It's the end of an era. What will the Arduino fork be called?
There are really 3 parts. The core HW, the form factor/Hat connector and the IDE.
I have an Arduino form factor board. It takes Arduino "hats", but it's got a microchip PIC 18F series mpu. I looked at the Arduino IDE and didn't like it. I've programmed loads of different 16F & 18F series PIC mpus in JAL rather than Assembler, Basic or C. Though I did use C and Assembler before switching to JAL. JAL has loads of libraries. The lack of stack on many PIC 16 & 18 makes C a poor match.
I found that I the Arduino form factor was awkward so I've used either prototyping PCBs or stripboard. Any daughter boards were custom layouts decided by the module designer (GPS, mobile modem, 433 MHz OOK RX or TX, LCD module etc.
I guess Microchip got Atmel cheap. They already had various more advanced mpus and ARM core CPUs. I wondered at the time why they didn't by Arduino too, but perhaps they thought it was best left as it was.
So I've never bought any of the Arduino "hats"/perpherials and thus my Arduino form factor PIC 18F board is in a box somewhere.
This Q thing seems to be an official Arduino reboot of Linksprite's pcDuino line.
Linksprite created an ARM-based board with a built-in Arduino over a decade ago. The Q is doing nothing new.
The pcDuinos run Lubuntu/Ubuntu and came with it and the Arduino IDE preloaded on built-in NAND, so you could just connect power and a screen and you're good to go.
Depending on the model you also got Arduino compatible hardware headers, onboard full size HDMI, microSD, USB, RJ45, and even WiFi!
To get HDMI and other stuff on the Q you have to buy an add on board that costs almost as much as the Q itself. Why would you bother? You might as well buy a much cheaper Raspberry Pi.
I am an IT expert and Engineer who has been HAPPILY RETIRED for about 5 years. The number one topic of my colleagues these days is the carnage done to VMware by Broadcom. I am very happy to think to myself "no longer my problem!" Broadcom's actions are probably the most disruptive event in the IT world in 25 years.
The low numbers of students going into the sciences and engineering is a big problem. In the US it is a huge one. There are very few firms who make STEM education products. Arduino is one of the important ones. The hobbiest and education sector is probably a small part of Arduino's business. I can see Broadcom killing it. The impact of doing so would be felt for a generation.
Qualcomm just put another nail in the maker community and Arduino coffin. After what they did to the corporate VMWare market this wasn't unexpected.
News from Adafruit: Want to Fix a Bug in Arduino? First, Agree to Qualcomm’s 6,000-Word Privacy Policy https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/03/18/want-to-fix-a-bug-in-arduino-first-agree-to-qualcomms-6000-word-privacy-policy/
I recommend everyone save their code, contributions, and discussions. Hopefully someone will create a place independent of Qualcomm for it.
