Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

Ma Che Cazzo?! The end of an era.

I wonder if another big gun will swallow raspberry pi someday. the embedded field is getting more exciting these days.

End of an era...

this is bad, qualcomm hides their documentation and its not accessible unless you pay and enter into a contract

How does this work when Qualcomm hides its technical documentation?

I don't have any faith in them doing anything good. Feels like the microcontroller ecosystem is going to get replaced with a quad core application CPU running Kubernetes on Linux while a companion microcontroller runs 5 lines of c code to blink an LED.

Are we going to get datasheets or are we getting Raspberry Pi 2: nodatasheet boogaloo and the community has to spend the next 5 years reverse engineering the fuckin thing while loading binary blobs.

call me cynical but I can't imagine this ending very well. Even if qualcomm does nothing to alter the operations at Arduino, what happens if they go belly-up in a decade?

Curious if anyone’s seen actual numbers on the acquisition

This means Arduino is no longer European, but American instead. This is relevant and unfortunate as Trump has made everything American taste bitter.

Arduino lost the narrative when official Arduino boards were $35, and a clone was $5, if that.

Arduino Megas? $110 official, $12 on Ali. Extra $10 gets you a RAMPS 1.4 board for full 3d printer platform. Yeah, a whoile Marlin-capable 3d printer board for $20. Id argue that THIS is what caused the 3d printer boom.

Arduino nano? Officially? Who knows. I bought them in bulk $1.40 and were pin compatible, and breadboardable.

And this was all true back in 2012 and up. Even their "Motor Shield" official driver was a pile of crap. Used an LM298 iirc. I would just go buy an a4988 stepper driver for a whole $.99 and run steppers.

They made the ecosystem, but they haven't properly stewarded or oversaw it. And now that Qualcomm is now owner, eh, fuck it. Stick with clones or ESP. (And for those who've had the displeasure of dealing with Qualcomm, yeah, just dont.)

Let's fork Arduino, Qualcomm is a patent troll.

What I was actually hoping for.. and so far turned out disappointed, is a half-decent LTE/4/5G module that can be Arduino compatible.

Just like ESP8266 (and later -32) variant opened up the IoT over WiFi, there is a potential industry-wide opportunity space for a decent, low-cost, always-online (just bring SIM) hobby board. Without awful vendor tooling. And ideally without "modem-to-something" bridge (which almost always means AT+ and vendor tooling..)

I hope they don't enshittify Arduino. Please keep it open hardware and open source.

Not cool.

RIP Arduino

Guess the corporate development team needed to justify its existence. We've been through many dubious acquisitions in the tech sector for the last 5 years or so.

The brain/CPU of the new Arduino uses a QRB2210 CPU which is not available on digikey or mouser.

Hopefully we get something along with this to integrate into custom designs?

With their goal of 50/50 handset/non-handset revenue split by 2030, and their recent acquisitions pointing in the same direction, it stands to reason that they will do a lot of high capex investments into things like chiplet/chiplet communication for datacenters, automation/automotive, as well as edge AI. We can also observe they're baking in a lot of fpga-style configurability into a lot of these product lines - the connectivity fabric they acquired along with alphawave semi, their hexagon dsp, nuvia(oryon which they won the legal case for recently), etc,. which is another hint for the type of market they're targeting.

My opinion is that they should productize ESP [1] (no, not that one) which will be super harmonious with their goals.

Arduino acquisition, IMO, is putting one foot into manufacturing automation/automotive/sensors field. They have done similar in the past, arriver was an ADAS compute thing.

Personally I don't believe they will take the execution risk and scale up on all of these things. They will probably wait for the right time and chop off a few of these things and focus on whatever looks like it's going to be a cash cow.

Finance wise, there will be near term margin pressure but long term (IMO) they will execute superbly on a portion of their bets.

The main problem is the clock is ticking, handsets becoming commodified leading to vertical integration, licensing losing value, etc. Apple modem agreement running out soon too, and 6G modems too will not be as high margin due to diminishing improvements in telecom tech, even operator uptake at this point is looking unlikely after the 5G... debacle.

Which explains the very diverse bets they have made.

Will be interesting to see what they execute in this limited timeframe.

[1] https://www.esp.cs.columbia.edu/

Let the enshitification and cease and desists towards clones start ...

I am very very skeptical of this being a good thing for Arduino and their community.

Any article that uses 'empower' is automatically in my books bullshit and bad for downstream receivers of the news. This uses it Five times. I can see their strategy; data-center with VMware and now Arduino on the edge, but in the first case unless you have massive budget you're leaving ASAP, and really many Arduino users are precisely in that bracket, so they are 'already left'. Platform.io maybe? What are other OSS alternatives?

Thank goodness I switched to nrf + embassy before this happened

Hello world

F

This new product could be neat, but it just doesn't have even the slightest appeal that an MCU-based Arduino does to me. I would also have concerns about the enshittification of Arduino in general.

used arduino for my robotics classes. for beginners its probably the best platform. get the board, add a couple of sensors and motors then boom.

Already in their future plans I can see the seeds of enshittification. I loved Arduino and built many projects with it. Hoping I am wrong about their future.

Aw man why does everything need to be Ai. I like my arduino boards, it don't need enshittification

Well that seems like a worst case scenario. Qualcomm not known for open source legacy.

Seems natural as both Qualcomm and Arduino feel like companies that have struggled to keep up in markets they previously were at the forefront of. Maybe they can work better together.

meh... probably unpopular opinion but we should ban companies from growing to big and acquiring other companies above certain valuation... ffs

is is just me or every open source hardware product is always get acquire left and rigth????

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