Arduino lost its independence - but not its philosophy? - with its takeover by smartphone processor giant Qualcomm.
Just a few days after making news with a new generation of Snapdragon-based mini-PCs - prototypes for the time being - American company Qualcomm is showing just how ambitious it is these days. The Italian company Arduino is set to join the Qualcomm galaxy if the deal goes through. We don't know exactly what process has yet to be completed, but Qualcomm is more than optimistic, declaring that it " has reached an agreement to acquire Arduino, a leading company specializing in open source hardware and software ".
The Arduino Uno Q © Qualcomm, Arduino
This agreement adds another string to Qualcomm's bow, and not just any string: that of the community of tinkerers of all kinds, for whom Arduino is synonymous with open, largely malleable products. On paper, Arduino products appear to be quite similar to what Raspberry Pi can offer, with single-board nanocomputers that are, however, closer to the microcontroller of a pure computer like a Raspberry Pi. The marriage between Qualcomm and Arduino should, again on paper, not change the philosophy of the Italian brand, as Massimo Banzi, co-founder of Arduino, points out: the agreement will enable us to bring " cutting-edge AI tools to our community, while remaining true to what has always mattered most to us ".
One product has already been announced by Qualcomm and Arduino, the Uno Q. As you can see from the photos, it again looks a lot like a Raspberry Pi, taking the form of a 68.85-mm-long by 53.34-mm-wide board. The board features a Qualcomm Dragonwing QRB2210 processor with four Cortex-A53 CPU cores and an Adreno GPU. Two versions of the Uno Q have already been announced: the ABX00162 with 2 GB RAM and 16 GB eMMC flash, priced at 39 euros and scheduled for release on October 25, and the ABX000173 with 4 GB RAM and 32 GB eMMC flash, which will be priced at 53 euros when released at the end of the year.
