The Arduino Uno Q is a weird hybrid SBC

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/arduino-uno-q-weird-hybrid-sbc

by furkansahin • 9 months ago

116 76 9 months ago

jqpabc123• 9 months ago

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

thomasjb• 9 months ago

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.

exasperaited2• 9 months ago

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

ACCount374• 9 months ago

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.

zokier• 9 months ago

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

jockm• 9 months ago

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

HeyLaughingBoy4• 9 months ago

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.

ThrowawayR22• 9 months ago

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.

sarmadgulzar• 9 months ago

RP Zero 2W is $15 and Uno Q is $44

ThrowawayR22• 9 months ago

The Uno Q has 4 times the RAM plus 16 GB of eMMC built in so what's your point? Its idle and max power consumption and CPU benchmarks are more in line with the Zero 2W.

utopiah• 9 months ago

Depends on which dimension, e.g. https://www.jeffgeerling.com/sites/default/files/images/ardu... from https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/arduino-uno-q-weird-h...

Havoc• 9 months ago

What problem are they solving for with the hybrid approach?

oytis• 9 months ago

The problem of showing "synergy" between Arduino and Qualcomm.

phoronixrly2• 9 months ago

Thank you for pointing this out. RIP Arduino.

0xEF4• 9 months ago

It's not exactly a big problem, but my company makes a three-axis desktop CNC machine powered by an ATMega328P that is dependent on having a Windows PC connected to it in order to run the proprietary software. Uno Q has me thinking we can eliminate the PC along with our custom PCB, making a more compact and convenient stand-alone system that would also come with a lower price tag. I may order a few to experiment with this idea, but again, it's not a huge problem and something only specific customers would care about.

I'm curious what the Maker community comes up with, provided it sticks around and remains supported, unlike the Edison.

bonzini• 9 months ago

Uno Q has me thinking we can eliminate the PC along with our custom PCB

If you know how to eliminate the PC, why not replace it already with a Pi?

HeyLaughingBoy4• 9 months ago

Take a look at the MKS-DLC32 board. It's a (documented, but poorly!) ESP32-based 3-axis 3D printer controller board. It runs grbl on one core so it can understand g-code, and it has a local UI with web and BLE connectivity on another core. The source code is on github, although it takes a bit of digging to find it (that poorly documented part!).

I don't know how complex your Windows code is, but it's an interesting architecture to study. I bought one of the boards (they're all over Amazon) since it had everything I needed for a motion-control project, but I ended up with a simpler solution.

brcmthrowaway• 9 months ago

I see the bean counters are still in control at QCOM

lawik• 9 months ago

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.

ACCount374• 9 months ago

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.

jauntywundrkind• 9 months ago

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.

wibbily• 9 months ago

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.

tecleandor2• 9 months ago

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...

trq01758• 9 months ago

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

bradfa2• 9 months ago

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.

phoronixrly2• 9 months ago

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• 9 months ago

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!

teunispeters• 9 months ago

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

beeflet2• 9 months ago

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

ACCount374• 9 months ago

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

imtringued• 9 months ago

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_ire3• 9 months ago

$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.

ndiddy• 9 months ago

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• 9 months ago

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.

MisterTea2• 9 months ago

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.

arresin• 9 months ago

That actually sounds good

officeplant• 9 months ago

$45 to compete with a Pi3*

dmitrygr• 9 months ago

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

dezgeg• 9 months ago

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• 9 months ago

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• 9 months ago

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...

exasperaited2• 9 months ago

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.

smiler• 9 months ago

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!

zrail2• 9 months ago

Heck, the Raspberry Pi 5 does this. GPIO is handled by an MCU that is effectively a Raspberry Pi Pico.

shadowpho• 9 months ago

Does it let you run any code on the small MCU?

bradfa2• 9 months ago

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• 9 months ago

Qualcomm IoT likes U-Boot with UEFI compat

tomsonj• 9 months ago

Nice integrated LED matrix

extraduder_ire3• 9 months ago

The UNO R4 WiFi already has that, and launched in the middle of 2023. It uses an onboard esp-32 for wifi and bluetooth.

andrewstuart2• 9 months ago

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• 9 months ago

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

andrewstuart2• 9 months ago

The hardware is the least important bit of Arduino.

It’s the IDE, as crappy as it is.

8cvor6j844qw_d6• 9 months ago

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

platevoltage2• 9 months ago

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

bArray• 9 months ago

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• 9 months ago

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...

howard941• 9 months ago

Is this Arduino hobbled by the lack of JTAG debugger support? I've always stayed far away from Arduinos because of this unforgivable omission.

The Arduino Uno Q is a weird hybrid SBC

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