Unless you have been living under a rock, you would have heard this week that Qualcomm announced it will acquire Arduino. I have mixed feelings about it. Probably one of the most celebrated Open source companies gets bought by one of the most closed source hardware chip company ever!
It says Arduino keeps its brand, tools, and open-source mission. But knowing Qualcomm, I don’t have high hopes. They technically have been one of the worst offenders when it comes to putting detailed specs of devices out there. Their documentation is poor, it is always under NDAs, and they have this unspoken rule of not responding to folks who have a non-business ID when you reach out via mails. I desperately hope they prove me wrong this time with Arduino.
Along with this news, they also shipped an Arduino UNO form factor board “UNO Q”. It has a Debian-running Qualcomm Dragonwing QRB2210 application processor with an STM32U585 microcontroller for doing the low level IO. You get 2 GB RAM, 16 GB eMMC, Wi-Fi 5, Bluetooth 5.1(WCBN3536A – Qualcomm Chip), and video output over USB-C. Processor-wise, performance seems to be in the RPi-3 range of things. It’s supposed to be in the “AI for Edge” specific applications. QRB2210 has quad-core 2.0 GHz A53 CPU, Adreno GPU and Dual Camera ISP so can be good for Robotics and Vision IoT stuff. But not sure if it’s a right move when RPi already dominates this range.
It seems to have a new software IDE called Arduino AppLab which is a hybrid for doing Python development for the DragonWing and Arduino sketches for the STM32. Will need to try it out once the board arrives. Anyway, I checked the website documentation, schematic of the board is available (Layout Gerber is available but not the design files). As usual, nothing on the Qualcomm chip used on the board. Hopefully they make this chip atleast available to the public.
I just long for a day when I can read up and buy a single unit Qualcomm chip from a reseller without signing an NDA or reaching out to a sales rep. Then I will believe that this acquisition was different!
0 Comments
Comments are closed.