Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

If you are not sure what to think about this news, may I suggest:

WE ARE SO BONED

Big name corporate investments are usually a death sentence to the smaller entity. 
what will happen. about 9months in, someone at Q-coprate will think:
"we should be making more money on this investment"
then theyll make some changes, folks will think it sucks, ( it will )
and theyll loose revenue. then several things may happen but the results are all the same relative to suck levels.
corporate may pull funding causes chaos in the smaller firm. 
doubles down on funding, but somehow produces worse code and products. 
corporate restructuring.. ( corporate fires the folks who were sorta figuring out how to make corporate objectives align with open source product development, and replace them with folks focused ob the corporate agenda, and less of an idea of what is actually going on )

in the mean time, you can look forward to binary blobs and spin off unique products 

if youve been programming embeded systems for a minute, youve seen this before, and should suspect more of the same. 

hey remeber a year ago when the opta arduino plc came out, and they originally refused to produce linux compatible binaries?
It was worse than that they actively prevented the binaries from running on linux but whatever. I asked Arduino about it, and the reason was cited as needing to protect investor interests. 
yeah, they backed down eventually, and did release linux support, but only after the product flopped. those source contributors were significantly smaller than 
MF Qualcom. 

We've seen this in paralax, Microchip, Cyprus, nxp, and 1000 other times. even a monkey would get bored after seeing the pattern play out so many times. 

the corporate investor will assure users OG company, and policies will remain intact: same great product, now with extra funding!
hey remember when net neutrality died and right before every ISP was like: we would never grant preferential treatment to corporate investors. then neutrality  died and all the promises of a fair and equitable internet vaporized. I digress. 

have fun while it lasts boys.

In that sense Qualcomm is a good fit in terms of keeping things going. For example, even though the sun has set for 2G/3G cellular, no doubt Qualcomm still have CDMA drivers out there being maintained somehow. Same for OFDMA powerline. Now this is being used in WiFi. The joint desire to make something interesting within the SBC space will be interesting to watch.

Arduino have been developing their new Zephyr-RTOS core for sometime now (still in Beta), which will work on the STM32U585 microcontroller. One aspect I like about Zephyr-RTOS is the adoption of IPC frameworks, like OpenAMP. Perfect for the Uno Q board.

That's interesting to hear. I've been playing with RP2040 on Arduino via the Earl E. Philhower core and it's FreeRTOS-based from memory. But then again, most of the Nordic stuff uses Zephyr.

But perhaps I suppose what's so unfamiliar is simply that the Uno Q board has gone from something "small and microcontrollery" to something much more like a Raspberry Pi or Beaglebone Black. Sure it's a step-up in power, but so it is also a step-up in price, complexity and (likely) power consumption. It feels very "un-Uno" but alas, I suppose people also demand "AI everything" now and having previously dabbled with Edge Impulse which is now also under Qualcomm's umbrella, I've realised that few useful models can run on even moderately powerful microcontrollers and really need SoC-grade hardware.

I'm not sure the push towards AI and "complexity" is worth the benefit it might bring for many problems ... perhaps we're moving too fast?

- Gough

AI and moving too fast? No way.   

Familiarity is the key word here.

I wonder if that's the reason they went with the Uno R3 format instead of going the Portenta route. After all, the Arduino Portenta X8 is a hybrid MPU/MCU board and that has been out for a few years now.

On the topic of Zephyr-RTOS. You can use it on the RP2040 too, although not all the functionality is available - you cannot use dual core, as yet.

I've read that the acquisition is also for Qualcomm to break into the AI robotics market by creating Linux boards suitable for that application.

I am trying to imagine the positives of this move as I rub my scars from past corporate stewardship efforts. I'm the glass is half-empty type of person. 40 years in the technology industry has made me cynical, especially when it comes to corporate intentions. I wear a few corporate scars, Oracle, Sun Microsystem and MySQL form one.

The current Qualcomm executive divination spills positive outcomes for this acquisition. When the corporate osteomancers are replaced and the new leaders throw their bag of teeth, shells, stones and bones for corporate insight, I expect they will read a different relationship from this acquisition. The new insight is usually not as positive.

I suspect the takeover deal was just to good to turn down. I've been party to those deals and they are just, to good to turn down. I seem to recall their was a fork to mysql during Oracle's stewardship in the hope of restoring the direction. That may be the path less taken for Arduino.