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Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

qualcomm.com

121–130 of 553 posts

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#121

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.

Arduino made a lot of their boards closed source a while ago IIRC. I was surprised this one is supposedly going to be open source.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been out of the hardware game a minute but Qualcomm was a great partner for helping you ship products. Everything about them sucks, but they will actually send engineers to your office. They always took bug reports seriously and pretty much always delivered patches. Also they always had ample samples, both in terms of dev boards and software. I know of several products that basically shipped the sample code with…

I heard that Qualcomm can be decent to work with - if you are in a company the size of Qualcomm, or can dangle "500000 units to ship" in front of them like a carrot. But "decent" is Qualcomm at its absolute best. And Qualcomm at its worst? I'd rather chew down broken glass than work with Qualcomm.

I can add a minimal anecdote. I got some support from a couple engineers on a telecom project, and it wasn't even that big of a thing, but they were more than decent to work with. I did say to one guy, "you guys are a lot cooler to work with than some of the stuff you see in the news" and matter-of-fact he was just like "oh, yeah that's legal"

my vision of them is that the engineering side can be great to deal with when they want to be (and my personal experience is they want to be). but the other part of their business is like set the standard, and then enforce it.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#124
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

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#125
post #83

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, in…

Yep. Same here but dramatically lower quantities. Was told basically we'd have to pay for a partner's support. Not that I'm expecting better from Arduino, but the community makes up for it. You Google "dragonwing stackoverflow" and there are 604 results, but even the first few aren't remotely relevant. "Atmega328p stackoverflow" is over 14k and relevant. Arduino is 52 million. It's a nonstarter

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#127
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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,…

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.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#128
post #6

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. I…

> 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.

Note that the Arduino libraries are LGPL licensed. Unless you have a commercial agreement with Arduino, you have to distribute your firmware to your customers as object files so it can be linked to updated/modified versions of the Arduino libraries. This means that I wouldn't use Arduino for a shipping product unless you're fine with the firmware on the device being publicly available.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#129
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Even if you like the Arduino programming environment (and I do), there seems to be little reason to use Arduino hardware unless it’s for compatibility with other hardware you have? For example, there is a very nice unofficial port of Arduino for the Raspberry Pi Pico. There are also many fine Arduino-compatible single-board computers from Adafruit. The Arduino board form factor seems big and clunky in comparison. I d…

There's a wealth of easy projects that a person can get started with using an Arduino.

Without any opportunities for getting bogged down in anything extra at all, they can follow a simple recipe and quickly begin to blink an LED at the rate of their choosing.

The Arduino was developed to be a teaching tool, and it allows for a person to take little baby steps.

(Whether this placement is good or bad for Arduino as a business entity isn't something that I find particularly important.)

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#130

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…

>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?

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