Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

Puzzling move. The advertisement speaks of open source character for Makers, Educators, and Pros.  https://www.arduino.cc/en/about/ 

The Arduino Q has product glamor photos, so this has been in the works for awhile. Arduino Q with AI , signal processing , and a new IDE. 

Arduino IDE 1 & 2  to obsolescence ?   I dont want to chuck my whole inventory of Arduino compatible sensors and shields. 

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/qualcomms-buying-arduino-%E2%80%93-what-it-means-makers  sez the Arduino Q costs $45 replacing the Arduino R4 Wifi. I'm just starting to work on my first real project with the Arduino R4 Wifi, so not thrilled its obsolete already. 

Arduino Q keeps the same form factor as Arduino R4, which I despise the connectors for any project. Quick to throw together a test, but quick to fly apart unless I build a shield.  

How does Arduino Q fit in with sensor fusion and Nicla boards ? 

Alot of uncertainty in my view, and the pricing is likely to open up the purchase of cheap clones for students and hobbyists.  Pricing is fine for professionals and grad students. 

I found the Arduino Q IDE https://www.arduino.cc/en/software/   called Arduino App Lab. Im going to give it a test spin tonight. 

JoBatcliffe cstanton   maybe Newark marketing can score 50 or so Arduino Qs for Road Testing or holiday giveaways ? 

The acquisition of Arduino certainly caught me by surprise. But now I'm beginning to see why.

The MCU market has changed significantly since the early years of Arduino. It's really competitive out there and price sensitive.

Then when taking a broader look at what's changed, I've noticed that MicroPython is probably the go-to for educators rather than C/C++ and you don't need Arduino for that. In fact, Arduino only recently adopted MicroPython. Makers, in my opinion, are spoilt for choice these days in terms of the number of boards out there and I suspect the Arduino R3 form factor is no longer a prototyper's first choice. I'm guessing here, but I also suspect VS Code is probably now the go-to IDE for makers rather than Arduino IDE. So a lot has changed.

This leaves Arduino with their cloud based system, which is pretty good, and their industrial products, some of which are really good (like OPTA). Certainly, the latter demonstrates that Arduino know how set up developer-led application platforms, even in industrial markets. They're proving that they know how to adapt to market changes, and they have built a great reputation for simplifying the development process (even the toolchains have improved, IMHO, as a result of this competition) combined with some good products, which often suffer because of stiff price competition. 

Qualcomm on the other hand, are in the PC/Industrial Processor market, and automotive (EV), with their products. According to their website, they want to be an IoT player but IMO they haven't quite got there. I suppose Arduino is their magic ticket. As to whether this pleases the Arduino-led prototype developer community and attracts new customers, we'll have to see. On the negative side, I just hope this doesn't become another Intel type endeavour when they created their Galileo and Edison products for makers etc.

Interesting insight. I enjoy using Micropython for Raspberry Pi Picos and Rpi. The RPi pico form factor was similar to Arduino Nano, which is my preferred go to. I prefer the Arduino IDE for doing logicals , sequencing, and SSD1306s. Micropython is better for numbers and character manipulation, but I also bang into library incompatibilities. .I fall short in IOT, AI, and hope the new platform makes it alot easier for goofs like me to use object detection and recognition. I'd for sure would like to understand signal processing alot better too.         

As with all of these acquisition, we will have to wait to see what they do with it.

Qualcom has the resources to embellish the Arduino into new applications, but I do not know what they plan to do with it.

It wasn't too long ago (just a couple of years) that there were massive stockouts of Raspberry Pis, and I remember looking for alternatives. What I discovered when using them was that hooking up sensors to these other SBCs wasn't that simple.

It then dawned on me how much work Raspberry Pi had put into its distro's to get peripherals and sensors working properly. Something that's often taken for granted. That certainly takes a great deal of effort and money, and I'd be surprised if Qualcomm wants to invest in doing that themselves. Of course, Arduino probably has one of the best-supported sensor library ecosystems in the world, so that has to be of great value - it's been a long while since I've found a sensor that doesn't have a working Arduino library.

So, we now potentially have a new market, which combines MPU (Qualcomm AI, Edge etc.) with realtime MCU (& Arduino sensor libraries). Plus the connectivity linked with Arduino Cloud. Will be interesting to see how this pans out.

Wow. I like the idea of Arduino Q, but worry that this acquisition will focus more of "Arduino" development resources into supporting Qualcom processors.

Hopefully their plans to leverage the Arduino user base don't mess with the secret sauce behind Arduino popularity.

This reminds me of how Intel and AMD bought ALTERA and Xilinx respectively.

Something to add that awhile ago, Qualcomm recently also acquired Edge Impulse because they were trying to break into the embedded AI space with their tooling and 'push' their Qualcomm boards for inference and edge AI.

Recently, they did a live event to discuss their plans with Arduino: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYb8YzdMWbc and yes, they were ready with answers for the FAQs: https://blog.arduino.cc/2025/10/07/a-new-chapter-for-arduino-with-qualcomm-uno-q-and-you/.

It's really how much and how long of a support (drivers, docs, etc.) can Arduino provide the community with their existing and incoming boards a lot moving forward though like any hardware companies, you can only support so much boards in the long run with limited resources so priority where these support goes is key.

robogary said:

How does Arduino Q fit in with sensor fusion and Nicla boards ? 

Basically, they're entering the SBC space with Arduino Q and making a version of a Radxa board as what was also pointed out by Jeff Geerling in his video: https://youtu.be/CfKX616-nsE. I get that they want to enter the market but only time will tell if that's the correct decision for Qualcomm.

Well, on the upside, maybe we get nice Qualcomm SoCs to play with which might actually be successful unlike the Intel Quark/Intel Curie Module (Arduino 101), but the potential conflict-of-interest that being owned by a chip designer/maker is undeniable. I hope the Open Source nature of everything continues through to new Qualcomm products, and the IDE continues to be usable with other vendor's cores. But I wouldn't be surprised if this might be something that changes in the longer term.

Thankfully, we still have what we already have and that can't really be taken away ...

- Gough