The Arduino Uno Q is a weird hybrid SBC

Posted by furkansahin 10/31/2025

The Arduino Uno Q is a weird hybrid SBC(www.jeffgeerling.com)

116 points | 76 comments

wibbily 11/3/2025|

The buried lede here is that Qualcomm is selling chips to hobbyists now?

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/qualcomm/QRB-2210...

$20 for something that can compete with a Pi 4 is intriguing, more so if it has a real low-power sleep state like the Pis don't. It's a gnarly chip though: 0.4mm pitch and like two dozen power rails, plus the fanout looks tight even on an eight layer board. I don't see the PMIC they're using anywhere online either... fingers crossed anyway.

MisterTea 11/3/2025||

I doubt this is aimed at hobbyists but looking to court developers looking for a quick and dirty hammer to drive their IoT nails. Remember those Spin scooters that were running off a Raspberry Pi? That's the market they are after. People who want a cheap low effort embedded computer that runs Linux. They can run a webthing in a container that talks to a cloud thing and bangs on some IO and you have a product.

bn-l 11/3/2025||

That actually sounds good

MisterTea 11/3/2025||

It does. But my hope is the low effort does not extend all the way through the business decision-making process and we aren't left with millions of vulnerable multi-core Linux computers connected via 5G in random gadgets.

steve_adams_86 11/4/2025|||

The next thing you know, your scooter is overheating because it's mining Bitcoin

elcritch 11/4/2025||

Tricks on them! My scooter is steam powered and uses bitcoin mining to produce the steam. ;)

Actually, now I want to build this. Maybe if these Qualcomm chips are cheap enough.

ACCount37 11/4/2025||||

We already have that. We call it "smartphones".

Narishma 11/3/2025|||

You already know it will lead to exactly that.

ndiddy 11/3/2025|||

You can buy the chip, but I'm not sure what that gets you. The only publicly available documentation seems to be the datasheet, which only covers its physical and electrical specifications. I don't see any register-level documentation or even a BSP available for it. I don't think you'd be able to actually do anything with the chip without entering some sort of contractual relationship with Qualcomm.

geerlingguy 11/3/2025|||

The use case seems limited to "respins of the Uno Q board design" at the moment, but I'm happy to see at least a datasheet with pinouts... most Arm chips with more-than-MCU-level-performance don't even provide that.

ACCount37 11/3/2025|||

Qualcomm even put up a datasheet for the chip, which is almost unheard of. No technical reference manual though, so the usefulness is limited.

dmitrygr 11/3/2025|||

> I don't see the PMIC they're using anywhere online either

Historically QC chips require QC PMICs and those are usually a profit center for QC

phoronixrly 11/3/2025|||

> something that can compete with a Pi 4

Qualcomm being as hostile to open-source as Broadcom is definitely something in common for both SBCs.

leoedin 11/3/2025|||

It’s a funny state of the world that the flagship hobbyist “open source” development boards now both contain products from such hobbyist-hostile chip companies as Qualcomm and Broadcom!

Iulioh 11/3/2025|||

i guess that you have to make compromise somewhere

The Fairphone 5 used a QCM6490, a qualcomm industrial chip with a 10y support timeline

The Fairphone 6 uses a Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 with ane stimated 3-4 years of support

At least for the 5 the compromise was motivated, in the second case i just don't feel like the low performance is a worthwhile compromise.

beeflet 11/3/2025||

perhaps the idea with the fairphone is to make the motherboard reverse-compatible with previous models, like framework? They changed the naming scheme

pjmlp 11/3/2025|||

Just like the Linux kernel has plenty of contributions from the companies that get as much hate as possible from FOSS communities.

Turns out there isn't adoption success without compromises.

teunispeters 11/3/2025|||

yeah, except Qualcomm's source and hardware is much higher quality ;) (I used to work with a lot of it at a past job).

tecleandor 11/3/2025|||

Although the graphics part is weird: 720 x 1680 @ 60 Hz

Vertical, and a bit longer than 720p? It's probably some standard size in some industry or type of device, but caught me off guard...

bradfa 11/3/2025|||

That display orientation and resolution is likely a carry-over from a phone project. Was probably cheap and easy for them to integrate an existing IP block from an older phone SOC.

tecleandor 11/3/2025||

Ah, makes sense!

trq01758 11/3/2025|||

1680 x 720 is resolution for ultrawide 21:9 aspect ratio

imtringued 11/3/2025|||

That's not $20 to compete with a Pi 4, that's $20 for the bare chip. You have to buy all the supporting hardware on top of that. Hobbyists want to avoid routing LPDDR like the plague. There's also the inconvenient fact that digikey shows "0 In Stock", so this listing is just that, something you can't get your hands on as a hobbyist.

extraduder_ire 11/3/2025||

$13.24 each if you buy 2000 of them. I remember the lead time being shorter than the 8th of December last time I checked, so I assume they're selling.

I think the biggest impact to hobbyists will be cheaper clone boards made with this chip.

beeflet 11/3/2025|||

The openness of this market gives me home that we could make something like a pinephone with actually decent hardware and open-enough drivers.

officeplant 11/3/2025||

$45 to compete with a Pi3*

bArray 11/3/2025||

Wayback-when, I used the Arduino Yun [1] for a project successfully. It took a USB web camera and streamed it via a browser with a button overlay to remotely control a robot. The OS was OpenWRT and was very limited, but just about good enough. The Arduino side was doing the tight control of the motors and reading the sensor data.

Why was the Arduino Yun cool? It allowed me to use WiFi easily in an embedded project (this was pre-ESP32). It also allowed me to interface with a native USB device.

The Arduino Uno Q has failed on multiple fronts (in my opinion):

* You cannot leverage the enormous number of Linux USB drivers for an embedded project. It needs two USB (A) ports for interfacing with interesting devices on the SBC. A single USB-C port for power, display and peripherals is crazy.

* It makes a large point about having a GUI, but does not offer a HDMI port. Why would you do that? On the HDMI output you would have a bootloader in ROM that tests the system is okay and tells you if it cannot boot. ARM systems have an awful feature of just not booting at all and providing no feedback. "No valid OS detected in main flash storage."

* No micro-SD to flash the SBC seems like a large oversight. You want to encourage people to experiment and break the OS, and have it be super simple to restore or experiment.

* 50 euros [2] is too much for what this is. It probably should have been a single-side surface mount

* If you're going to make the HDMI output a large part of your project, do away with the LED matrix. They should be asking themselves "does this add value to all users, or could it be a shield?".

[1] https://docs.arduino.cc/retired/boards/arduino-yun/

[2] https://store.arduino.cc/products/uno-q

pcdoodle 11/3/2025|

Crazy, I just checked the full pinout on the bottom connectors: no USB D+ / D- pins at all. Mostly more MCU and MPU breakouts for 3 cameras...

bradfa 11/3/2025||

It will be interesting to see if Qualcomm end up deploying an open sourced standards compliant UEFI implementation. This would be a big deal in my eyes as the Raspi firmware solution is really a pain in the butt to deal with as it's closed source and the documentation is very fragmented and hard to comprehend if you're doing anything beyond their recommended approaches (for example, trying to use an A/B update scheme on a Raspi CM 5 with proper failed boot fallback is not straight forward without resorting to using u-boot as well).

my123 11/3/2025|

Qualcomm IoT likes U-Boot with UEFI compat

thomasjb 10/31/2025||

I think its another symptom of the problem of there not being a clear way to get from your smart brainbox which you run a proper operating system on and do heavy computation on to driving lots of motors or similar. There are options, but there's not one that everyone defaults to and you can get good information on.

ACCount37 11/3/2025||

I've seen multiple SoCs from China that integrate a high performance Linux core and a smaller MCU-like RTOS core into the same die. SG2000 being one example.

Pretty clear to me that they're aiming at drones, 3D printers and robots with that.

jockm 11/4/2025|||

Not just Chinese companies, Ti has done this forever with their Sitara SoCs. This is the chip in the beaglebone. The chip includes two PRUs which are microcontrollers that run at 200mhz and share memory with the rest of the system.

TIs latest version of it (AM625x) has four A53 cores, one PRU, and a Cortex M4F. It is similar in performance to the Qualcomm chip in my own benchmarks

zokier 11/3/2025|||

Feels like everyone is doing that sort of thing these days, it is very common to see Cortex M series core integrated into big SoCs. Quickly checking TI, NXP, and ST all have M4 (or similar) cores integrated to their SoCs

HeyLaughingBoy 11/3/2025|||

The reason there's no obvious default is probably because of the differing price points and complexity of the products that are being built. e.g., from some of the products that I've worked on.

- UI/database on desktop with multiple real-time processors connected via serial/Ethernet

- UI/db on Linux SoM with embedded processor connected through serial

- UI/db on Linux SoM and the SoM has an embedded ARM processor connected via shared memory

- UI on one core of an ESP32 with real time control on a separate core. This isn't something I've done, but many 3D printers and other low-cost machines are using this architecture right now.

exasperaited 11/3/2025||

Right — 3D printers, robotics, etc.; some sort of isolation of the microcontroller stage from the monitoring/apps stage.

jqpabc123 10/31/2025||

This is an example of what happens when your wallet is bigger than your imagination.

dezgeg 11/3/2025||

It'd be interesting to see a setup where a Linux-capable SoC would run the Arduino application on a isolated CPU core with no interrupts handled, so you'd still have real-time guarantee for the Arduino app

alex7o 11/3/2025||

It runs the Arduino app on a separate mcu stm32l4 I think. So you have the realtime as well, but what you describe is already possible with the pi and asymmetric multiprocessing using openamp and zephyr.

I remember reading about this in some blogs so here is one I found that describes just that: https://telmomoya.blogspot.com/2016/10/asymmetric-multi-proc...

minetest2048 11/4/2025||

Microchip PolarFire boards (and PIC64 chips, which is basically just the CPU part of PolarFire without the FPGA fabric) can do that with asymmetric multiprocessing: https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/fpgas-and-plds/syst...

lawik 11/3/2025||

I wonder if the limitation of the application processor and Linux starting is mostly a default for the standard OS or an actual limitation. Typically with a hybrid SoC like this part of the point is that you can use the micro-controller as the power efficient thing that decides when the bigger application processor should boot or not. I'd be curious to see if that's possible with this one.

Shipping only Debian to start is fine by me. It has to start somewhere. And they seem quite responsive to making it work with other things. James Harton is plugging away at getting it working with Nerves (https://nerves-project.org) and he has it running with Buildroot already. Current repo: https://github.com/jimsynz/buildroot

Most recently they pushed their special sauce for the bootloader and how to produce the relevant mystery binaries. https://forum.arduino.cc/t/buildroot-support-for-uno-q/14108...

I share the sentiment that I don't trust that there won't be issues with Qualcomm over time. That company does have some pretty relevant chips though so I'm hopeful this means that we see them become more accessible on SBCs and embedded boards. I feel like they've been popping up more and more.

If they value this investment in Arduino they should now have a small wing of the company that pushes for things to be more open and even if they only consider that a marketing vector, if things are opened up for that purpose, quite possibly a win. But Arduino might also be absorbed into the amorphous megablob and this is the last we see. I hope not.

I don't think this board is that weird. It is just coming from the Arduino side and moving into Raspberry Pi territory. Personally I want to run Nerves on the application processor and get some practice with Zephyr on the MCU. Seems to already be supported: https://docs.zephyrproject.org/latest/boards/arduino/uno_q/d...

Also why no mention of the LED matrix. This is something RPi devices fail at. Providing som default way of neat output. First time plugging this in it starts doing fun stuff.

jauntywundrkind 11/3/2025||

I remember back when Nvidia was aiming to aquire ARM, there was a whole thread of discourse that I think even Huang himself had spoken to, about how the acquisition would transform Nvidia, would remake who they are and what they do. ARM themselves have rarely been an exemplary citizen, with driver support for their GPUs for example having only gotten respectable in the past couple years. But ARM was still a multi-lareral company. It would have been a different NV: Nvidia as head of an ecosystem, a steward for many, versus what Nvidia has been, Nvidia as a moat keeper with only their bespoke Linux4Tegra (L4T) for example. That was going to be the big change.

Qualcomm certainly seems to be saying that they want to be a different company. That they want market-share among people building products. The example elsewhere of the e-scooters using RPi's seems like the market space Qualcomm is striving to open up.

Your middle paragraphs capture a lot of the sentiment. Qualcomm is a hard company to trust. There have been a lot of neat weird interesting things that have gotten mainlined, and it's cool to see, but most products are incredibly hard to develop for, push you into vendor Board Support Packages, and don't have docs available. This chip similarly lacks technical docs.

But it sure is exciting to think maybe Qualcomm might actually want embedded market share beyond the high end of phones, routers, and laptops. And if they do want this market share, they're going to have to change.

ACCount37 11/3/2025||

Modern Qualcomm SoCs have "RPM" - a dedicated always-on ARM core for managing clocks, sleep modes and power states. And usually at least one low power DSP core that can be up when the rest of the system is down.

Good luck getting your hands on any docs on how to use any of that shit tho.

andrewstuart 11/3/2025||

Qualcomm owning Arduino is a real mismatch as evidenced by this device.

A great pity because likely it’ll end up in the demise of Arduino which is central to the hobbyist microcontroller scene.

JKCalhoun 11/3/2025||

I think the "Arduino platform" will live on in Teensy, others.

andrewstuart 11/3/2025||

The hardware is the least important bit of Arduino.

It’s the IDE, as crappy as it is.

HeyLaughingBoy 11/3/2025|||

Not even the IDE. Those of us that care have switched to VS Code + PlatformIO. The arduino ecosystem is all that matters, and that won't die for a long time. Heck, there are many chip manufacturers building in an Uno header pinout into their dev boards so you can try them out with off the shelf Arduino shields.

extraduder_ire 11/3/2025||||

The "batteries included" nature of their IDE is remarkable for getting up and running with any random hardware that's meant to be arduino compatible.

Like, you can install support for a board or some hardware and have premade example code running on it within a few minutes. Without even reading any extra documentation.

platevoltage 11/3/2025|||

The IDE is absolute dogshit. IMO they should pivot to contributing to PlatformIO instead to keep this awful IDE going.

8cvor6j844qw_d6 11/3/2025||

I'll be always "grateful" to Arduino UNO R3 for my first foray into hardware-related stuff.

platevoltage 11/3/2025||

It was mine as well. My gateway into programming too.

brcmthrowaway 11/3/2025||

I see the bean counters are still in control at QCOM

exasperaited 11/3/2025|

It really looks like is it two thirds of what a Klipper-based 3D printer with a monitoring camera would need. It lacks the stepper controllers/power control stuff but it has the CPU/MCU duality you'd want, it could comfortably run a proper LCD panel, run an on-board slicer, even run on-board CAD.

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