Qualcomm’s decision to buy Arduino, together with the launch of the Arduino UNO Q, may herald a new playing field for hobbyist and edge-computing boards. For Raspberry Pi owners, it’s not so much an existential threat as a splash of cold water in the face: faster innovation cycles, more sprawling software options, and fresh price-performance equations might change which board you pick up for your next project.
What changes for your projects with new Arduino boards
The immediate takeaway is optionality. Arduino UNO Q features include a Qualcomm Dragonwing QRB4210 system-in-package featuring a 4-core Kryo CPU up to 2.0 GHz, an Adreno 702 GPU, and a Hexagon V55 DSP + Tensor Accelerator; as well as on-board LPDDR4 (2 GB) and eMMC (16 GB) storage with surface-mount edges for headless applications over Wi‑Fi. More details about the hardware:
- Processor: Qualcomm QRB4210 with Kryo 490 cores up to 2.5 GHz arranged in a quad-core cluster
- Graphics: Adreno 642L
- DSP / AI: Low-power Hexagon 684 DSP with vector accelerator
- Connectivity support: VoLTE and Voice over Wi‑Fi
- Qualcomm Dragonwing Platform suited to building innovative Android applications
- Unique 8×13 LED matrix
- 47 digital I/O pins with six analog inputs
- Listed preorder price of around $44 through a leading distributor
Having made it onto the SBC spec sheet despite a listed preorder price of around $44 through a leading distributor, this board bests plenty of highly ranked SBCs on raw compute-per-dollar yet also remains accessible to makers who are curious what the chip allows.
That translates to tasks you might have relegated a Pi to—simple edge inference, snappy UIs, media-filled dashboards—may now also be trivial on this new Arduino board. But it is not an all-or-nothing switch. Raspberry Pi continues to offer a mature ecosystem, has wide accessory support, and hosts a sound Debian-based OS with great documentation. None of that is immediately deprecated if you already have a Pi 4 or Pi 5 humming away with a GPIO HAT in place, the camera module installed, NVMe via the M.2 HAT+, and so on.
Ecosystem and software implications for makers
Qualcomm’s hardware changes the software equation. As far as graphics go, the open-source Mesa “Freedreno” driver stack for Adreno GPUs has come of age; a refreshing change from days gone by with closed multimedia stacks on some SBCs in the past. That has the potential to make out-of-the-box acceleration for UI frameworks and 3D that much better, a practical benefit for kiosks, robotics dashboards, or browser-based control panels.
The other big lever is tooling. Arduino’s massive community — which they say totals over 30 million active users — resides in welcoming workflows (the Arduino IDE, PlatformIO, and a vast selection of examples). If Qualcomm supplements that with strong Linux images, mainline kernel engagement (through something like the work it coordinates via Linaro), and documented paths for camera, ISP, and DSP features — it just smooths things out a bit for makers and educators. Elsewhere, the Raspberry Pi OS project continues as the gold (if not only) standard in beginner-friendly Linux with substantial libcamera support, GPIO via libgpiod, and an educational ecosystem led by the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Edge AI is the wildcard. While Qualcomm’s lineup does have NPUs and DSPs in robotics kits like the RB5, the UNO Q spec as posed really centers on CPU/GPU, not a dedicated NPU. If Arduino boards leverage Qualcomm AI accelerators in next-generation designs (possibly with SDKs and containers to make this easier), prepare for the entry-level projects of tomorrow when it comes to object detection, wake-word spotting, and sensor fusion. That would force the Raspberry Pi to continue expanding its own acceleration narrative, be it via PCIe add-ons, GPUs, or partner NPUs.
Pricing, supply and a competitive push in SBCs
Scale matters. Big Q’s turnover is in the tens of billions of dollars; Raspberry Pi’s last published annual numbers are somewhere in the mid-hundreds of millions, and Arduino’s history has been but a fraction. In a way, the deep-pocketed parent can financially subsidize developer kits, fast-track reference designs, and wrangle for better shipments of components — all things that cause pressures on price and availability throughout the segment.
Raspberry Pi has also managed to survive some supply shocks and build back toward strong retail availability, with the company’s public filings outlining ambitions to keep ramping production. But if Arduino can deliver a $44 Qualcomm-powered SBC with integrated storage and radios like clockwork, that changes expectations. Probable Pi reaction: keep working on I/O (PCIe bandwidth), storage (NVMe), wireless (Wi‑Fi 6/6E), and multimedia pipelines — all areas where competition is good for the customer.
Complement, not replacement: using both boards together
In reality, many makers will run both. A Raspberry Pi can schedule containers, databases, and Home Assistant or Node-RED flows while an Arduino — classic microcontroller or new UNO Q — takes care of the deterministic I/O, motor driving, battery-sipping sensing. Lash them together over I2C, SPI, UART, or Ethernet and you’ll get the best of both worlds: pure Python where you want it, auxiliary microcontroller co-processing when you need it. With so many GPIO and analog input channels, the UNO Q is a natural front end for robotics and industrial monitoring with the Pi as brain and storage.
Expect accessory ecosystems to adapt. HAT, camera module, and power solution suppliers will chase whatever platforms get mindshare. If the Qualcomm reference designs fix the batteries-with-everything problem and keep a stable kernel ABI, cross‑platform lightpen HATs or shields should be a snap to both develop and support. That’s a boon for classrooms and makerspaces dealing with mixed fleets.
What to do next as a Raspberry Pi user and maker
Continue with existing builds — there is not enough urgency to switch away from this. Ensure that your Pi is “pruned,” keeping up to date with the latest updates, particularly firmware and the kernel. Consider how you could containerize workloads to make them more portable. For new projects, stress‑test cross‑platform libraries (libcamera, OpenCV, Qt, SDL) and rely on protocol bridges like MQTT or gRPC so you can change boards later without rewriting everything.
Look for three signals:
- Software images: how polished Arduino/Qualcomm Linux releases are
- Upstreaming: kernel and Mesa activity toward long‑term support
- Peripheral reliability: cameras, Wi‑Fi/Bluetooth sanity, and GPIO latency
If those appear strong and price holds at volume at $44, you can expect a shake-up near the low end of the SBC market. Either way, Pi owners win — competition has a way of delivering better documentation, faster roadmaps, and boards that are more feature-rich for the same price.
