Today Qualcomm has announced that it’s buying Arduino, which will remain an independent brand that will continue to support “a large range of microcontrollers and microprocessors from multiple semiconductor providers”, Qualcomm says in its official press release.
Arduino’s 33 million active users will, as a consequence of the acquisition, gain access to Qualcomm’s “powerful technology stack and global reach”. The new Arduino Uno Q is a next-gen single board computer with a “dual brain” architecture with a Linux Debian capable microprocessor and a real-time microcontroller. The Uno Q is powered by the Qualcomm Dragonwing QRB2210 processor running a full Linux environment, and it’s designed to “help enable AI-powered vision and sound solutions that react to their environment, ranging from sophisticated smart home solutions to industrial automation systems”, Qualcomm says.
The Uno Q maintains compatibility with the Arduino IDE and the Uno ecosystem, and it’s also the first Arduino board to work with Arduino App Lab, which offers an open-source system designed “to rapidly ideate, prototype and scale AI-powered solutions to production”, unifying the Arduino development journey across Real-time OS, Linux, Python, and AI flows. App Lab is also integrated with the Edge Impulse platform, which helps “accelerate the process of building, fine-tuning, and optimizing AI models using real-world data” for object/person detection, anomaly detection, ambient sound recognition, and keyword spotting.
