Qualcomm Acquires Arduino ➹

Mixed feelings. Lots of mixed feelings. Qualcomm has been promoting quite a few new development kits over the past year or so, and of course Arduino has tremendous mindshare, but that was built upon pretty agnostic and far-reaching microcontroller support, so it will be interesting to see how this evolves.

Their first product is another “split brain” board with a Linux-capable CPU and an MCU (very much like the Radxa X4 and other recent boards, including one I’m still testing) that is still in the Uno form factor, which is good news.

But the SBC market has been stretching in all sorts of unusual directions as low-end Intel CPUs drop in price and ARM boards become cheaper (and, paradoxically, less powerful, open or flexible), so I’m chalking this up to a new possible dimension and sitting back to wait until the dust settles.

HN is pretty vocal, though.