alt Hacker NewsThe Arduino Uno Q is a weird hybrid SBC
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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?".
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
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.
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).
This is an example of what happens when your wallet is bigger than your imagination.
Is this Arduino hobbled by the lack of JTAG debugger support? I've always stayed far away from Arduinos because of this unforgivable omission.
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.
Combining a Linux capable CPU and MCU is not new or that weird... I think a Cortex A9 and Cortex M4 appeared on a combined SoC on the IMX6 platform around 10 years ago.
Plenty of use cases in embedded!
What problem are they solving for with the hybrid approach?
I see the bean counters are still in control at QCOM
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.
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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Weird take. The Raspberry Pi Zero 2W would have seemed more like the natural comparison rather than the Raspberry Pi 4 or 5.
I find it more interesting to think of the Arduino Uno Q as a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W but with 2GB / 4GB of RAM and even lower idle power than the other options with that much RAM. That makes it intriguing as a very low power always-on headless server with GPIO as a bonus.
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.