Can Arduino Teach Tech Giants How to Win Over Developers?

Key Points: Open-source infrastructure and strong commercial integration do not always align perfectly, but Qualcomm and Arduino hope to change that.

Concerns and Opportunities for Developers

The initial reaction from developers and makers to Qualcomm’s acquisition of the open-source electronic prototyping platform Arduino has not been positive. Qualcomm insists that Arduino will maintain an open ecosystem, operating as an independent subsidiary and collaborating with multiple chip suppliers—now with greater influence.

The concern is that Qualcomm may not invest in Arduino or misunderstand its advantages. Ironically, this is precisely why Qualcomm needs Arduino: to help it better collaborate with developers and makers.

Qualcomm’s Strategic Moves in the Developer Community

While Arduino has around 30,000 commercial customers for its industrial and enterprise Pro boards, Qualcomm is pursuing its global community of over 33 million makers and developers—not to mention its widespread presence among hardware startups that use Arduino for various purposes, from prototyping to running test systems in labs. The idea may be to upsell these existing users to more powerful computing platforms, especially for edge AI and robotics.

Arduino itself has a complex and occasionally controversial history as a company. It has long moved away from that brave academic startup, experiencing fierce disputes over trademarks and manufacturing rights, and has raised $54 million in venture capital since 2022. However, continuing open-source tools and standards requires substantial resources.

The company has never fully managed to create the promised Arduino Foundation, which was supposed to govern the Arduino IDE—the software that has become the entry point for a generation of developers into embedded systems programming. So can Arduino maintain its independence, stay open, and teach Qualcomm how to understand and support developers?

Leendert van Doorn, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Qualcomm: “Qualcomm’s acquisition of Arduino, following the integration of Foundries.io and Edge Impulse, marks a strategic shift towards empowering developers through self-service.”

“Qualcomm’s acquisition of Arduino, following the integration of Foundries.io and Edge Impulse, marks a strategic shift towards empowering developers through self-service,” Senior Vice President of Engineering Leendert van Doorn told The New Stack.

“Specifically, for the Arduino UNO Q board, all source code is publicly available and has been integrated into upstream repositories, allowing developers to build and customize software independently of Qualcomm. This sets a new standard for the company’s future Linux products.”

Cultural changes like this not only make it easier for Qualcomm to collaborate with developers but also increase the likelihood that Arduino can maintain true independence. So far, Foundries.io (acquired by Qualcomm last year) and Edge Impulse continue to support multiple hardware vendors, which proves this point. But like all cultural changes, Qualcomm will not become more open overnight.

James Governor, Co-founder and Analyst at RedMonk: “Qualcomm’s business is based on bulk sales to customers, which is indeed a change. It will be interesting to see whether and how Qualcomm maintains Arduino’s open-source spirit.”

“Qualcomm’s business is based on bulk sales to customers, which is indeed a change,” RedMonk co-founder and analyst James Governor told us. “It will be interesting to see whether and how Qualcomm maintains Arduino’s open-source spirit and whether it can help Arduino tap into new markets—namely robotics. Arduino is currently very much geared towards the hobbyist market.”

Governor believes this may require a balancing act: can Qualcomm “not overreach to the point of messing up the acquisition while actively participating in repositioning Arduino as a prototyping platform for robotics and industrial manufacturing companies”?

Connecting Two Worlds with the UNO Q Board

Arduino and Qualcomm not only announced the acquisition but have also collaborated to build a $44 development board called the UNO Q. This is a typical Arm single-board computer (SBC) that integrates a CPU, GPU, RAM, and storage for embedded applications such as IoT, industrial controllers, and robotics, powered by a budget Qualcomm Dragonwing processor running a full Debian Linux system. However, it also features an Arduino microcontroller on the back to handle the sensors and actuators needed to build the Dragonwing robot and “everyday IoT devices” recommended by Qualcomm, with the Arduino bridge library managing communication between the two.

This is not the first attempt to place Arduino and Linux on the same system, but it may be the first successful one. The Arduino Yun (which used a rather obscure Linux distribution) and the TRE, which was canceled due to litigation, did not make much impact, while Arduino’s Portenta X8 is explicitly aimed at its industrial customers.

Trends in Industrial IoT

In industrial IoT, combining sensors, controllers, and AI vision models that can work together is becoming increasingly common. However, for makers who need devices with complex user interfaces and data storage or demanding functionalities like in-vehicle AI, as well as reading sensors and controlling motors or other electronics, it often requires integrating these two systems themselves, which usually means needing additional connectivity components.

This is a problem Arduino has wanted to solve for some time. It aims to provide a product with Raspberry Pi-like capabilities, adopting the classic UNO form factor (and pin layout)—familiar to existing Arduino users—and compatible with existing shields that add features and connectivity to Arduino boards. The price will certainly be comparable to high-end Pi; performance may not match, although Qualcomm claims these systems are well-suited for running local AI models (and you also get built-in real-time control).

The New App Lab Development Environment

This means you need more than just the Arduino IDE to work with the UNO Q, so a new (also open-source) App Lab development environment has been created, supporting Arduino, C++, Python, Linux, and AI workflows, using libraries and modular components known as “blocks,” without requiring developers to deal with complexities like Docker containers. If you want to build an image recognition smart lock with a USB camera on Linux using Python, and then have Arduino drive the motor to open the door when it recognizes you, App Lab provides a unified place to do that.

A clever twist: while you can run App Lab on a regular computer, it is also pre-installed on the UNO Q: just plug in a screen and keyboard, and you can program the Arduino MCU using Debian running on Dragonwing.

Arduino has already been collaborating with Edge Impulse, another company recently acquired by Qualcomm, aimed at simplifying the process from sensor data to deploying AI models. App Lab includes several pre-built AI models running on the UNO Q—such as object detection, audio classification (like recognizing “wake words” if you connect a microphone), computer vision (just plug in a USB camera), and anomaly detection. The Dragonwing GPU supports OpenCL, and developers can use App Lab or the standard Edge Impulse CLI workflow to upload or train their own models.

App Lab also uses Arduino Cloud for device lifecycle management and remote updates. If you want to use a custom Debian or Yocto image, App Lab utilizes Qualcomm’s other recent acquisition, FoundriesFactory, which provides an open-source embedded development SaaS platform (similar to AWS IoT or Azure Sphere).

How Arduino Opens Up Qualcomm’s Ecosystem

Arduino is the first platform that allows any developer to easily get started with embedded systems and is the standard for prototyping, but now it faces a lot of competition: Adafruit’s Circuit Python, PlatformIO IDE supporting multiple hardware options, ExpressIf ESP development boards, and pre-certified Matter stacks from well-known vendors like Nordic, NXP, and Silicon Labs, allowing developers to write applications and treat hardware merely as a platform. Qualcomm’s support may alleviate some pressure while also enabling Arduino to expand into the now-essential AI space.

Arduino does not have as strong a reputation in the professional manufacturing sector as it does in the maker market, especially for devices requiring compliance and interference testing. Qualcomm’s experience in the mobile and automotive sectors may help in this regard.

The idea of startups moving from prototyping with maker boards to custom designs that integrate everything with the same supplier is not always realistic, but Qualcomm may be betting that hardware startups using its chips in prototypes will stick with it to handle the AI portion of devices that cannot be replaced by custom logic boards.

To attract these potential joint customers, Qualcomm needs to learn to better support developers; and this is where Arduino can teach them a lot.

In the past, developers typically received evaluation and development kits from Qualcomm, often accompanied by specific hardware accessories for prototyping devices, or modules and reference designs—sometimes in collaboration with platform vendors like Microsoft. This worked well for Qualcomm’s typical customer device manufacturers, but it did not always resonate well with more general developers.

Ten years ago, it partnered with Arrow to launch the DragonBoard—the first Snapdragon chip development board preloaded with Android, aimed at IoT and embedded developers. But it did not make a significant impact in the market. Recently, it has faced repeated delays with the Snapdragon X Elite development kit designed by Microsoft—providing developers with a desktop box for building applications for Arm-based Copilot+ laptops—before suddenly canceling it. Qualcomm stated it did not meet its usual standards, while Microsoft hinted that due to all the delays, developers could already purchase more powerful laptops.

How Arduino Changes Qualcomm’s Delivery of Hardware and Software

The UNO Q is a more open proposition; you can view hardware information without signing terms and conditions, and you can order it from the Arduino store just like any other development board. It is open-source hardware, with the usual hardware abstraction layer, so code can be ported between different boards. Schematics, pin layouts, and CAD files are already available, theoretically allowing other manufacturers to produce compatible boards (although they would need to be Qualcomm partners to obtain the Dragonwing processor, which may also require ordering impractically large quantities).

This is the first sign that Arduino has already changed how Qualcomm delivers hardware and software. Typically, Qualcomm provides closed-source SDKs—such as the Qualcomm Neural Processing SDK, whose delayed delivery on Windows meant Arm-based Copilot+ laptops hit the market first, but were not useful to developers for several months—and support for common open-source projects.

While Qualcomm does not have a good track record of continuous open-source contributions like Arduino, it has been increasing its upstream contributions to Linux, Mesa, U-boot, and open-source AI projects that can use its chips.

Running on Dragonwing is standard Debian Linux, chosen to attract developers (for prototyping rather than production use). This is Qualcomm’s first project based on upstream Debian, continuously re-based on the latest kernel and submitting patches during the process, meaning the quality of patches must be good enough to be accepted upstream during the project rather than hoping for a quick pass at the end.

This is a developer-friendly approach that is expected to become standard practice for all Qualcomm Linux-enabled devices, allowing developers to obtain information directly without having to ask Qualcomm, let alone for licenses: they can access and make any necessary changes directly.

Document Source: Can Arduino Teach a Tech Giant How To Win Over DevelopersOriginal Author: Mary BranscombeOriginal Publication Date: Oct 14th, 2025

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