Things were different back in the early part of the 20th century. There was a much stronger do-it-yourself culture, with people routinely building and repairing things themselves. It was an age of makers before the term “makers” was even a thing.
For example, my friend Rick Curl once showed me one of his grandfather’s scrapbooks, filled with DIY audio, radio, electrical, and mechanical projects cut from the local newspaper. This was in Birmingham, Alabama, circa the 1920s and 1930s. Some of these projects were surprisingly sophisticated, involving mind-boggling mixes of mechanical, electromechanical, and vacuum tube-based electronics.
The key point I wish to make (no pun intended) here is that “people doing stuff” was so commonplace that projects like these appeared in a regular newspaper.
By the early 1970s, when I was a lad, the shelves at the local newsagent were jam-packed with hobbyist magazines of all types, including myriad electronics and DIY offerings. I know that many of my friends and I devoted an inordinate amount of time to making things (some of which even worked).
Those were the days of “can do!” As we read in Steve Leibson’s The Rise and Fall of Heathkit column, Heathkit’s GR-2000 25-inch DIY color TV was the first television anywhere to feature on-screen channel numbers and the time, and they sold 47,000 of them in one year.
And then things started to change. Rather than build things, it became easier to buy them, and rather than repair things, it became cheaper to replace them. By the time we jumped (or staggered) over the threshold into the new millennium, it seemed as though hobby electronics and DIY computing were on their last legs (a little tear is rolling down my cheek as I remember my feelings of doom and despondency).
During the early 2000s, I feared an entire generation was destined to grow up without ever knowing the joy of building something themselves. And then… and then… just when I least expected it, I threw open my metaphorical bedroom curtains to see what 2005 would bring, and I was delighted by the first issue of MAKE magazine. Also, the Arduino open-source hardware and software company leaped onto center stage with a fanfare of flügelhorns (once heard, never forgotten).
It wasn’t long before Maker Faires started sprouting like mushrooms, makerspaces began manifesting themselves everywhere, and a new generation discovered that making things themselves could be just as much fun as buying them ready-made.
Since I spent my formative computing years in the golden age of 8-bit microprocessors, I took to the 8-bit Arduino Uno microcontroller development platform like a duck to water. I still enjoy the challenge of working within its limitations, like its 16 MHz clock and only 2 KB of RAM. In fact, even today, most of my hobby projects are based on the Arduino Uno R3.
For example, just yesterday (as I pen these words), I powered up my current Chronological Contraption project for the first time. This bodacious beauty’s task is to count down to the commencement of my 100th birthday celebrations. As shown in the image below, I’m using 14 vacuum fluorescent display (VFD) tubes to display the years, months, days, hours, minutes, and seconds remaining until this auspicious event.
First test of the Chronological Contraption (Source: Max Maxfield)
An individually addressable RGB light-emitting diode (LED) sits under each tube. These will let me implement some very cool effects. In this image, they’re all glowing yellow, but we can control them individually to produce a wide range of colors and special effects.
I’m showing this image for two reasons. The first is that I’m inordinately proud of this little scamp (“Look Ma, it works!”). The second is that a trusty Arduino Uno is controlling everything, as seen in the upper left-hand corner of the image. But we digress…
Since those early days, the folks at Arduino have introduced a bewildering array of development boards in all shapes and sizes, sporting everything from 32-bit processors and high-speed clocks to copious quantities of flash memory and SRAM. And yet, they keep returning to the name and form factor that started it all: the Arduino Uno.
In June 2023, for example, they introduced the Arduino UNO R4 and the Arduino UNO R4 WiFi. While retaining the familiar footprint of its predecessor, the R4 replaced the R3’s 8-bit AVR processor with a 32-bit Arm Cortex-M4-based Renesas RA4M1 running at 48 MHz. It also boosted the SRAM from 2 KB to 32 KB and the flash from 32 KB to 256 KB.
In October 2025, Arduino unveiled the UNO Q, and this little rascal was a different kettle of transistors altogether. The UNO Q is interesting because it represents a fundamental change in what the word “Arduino” can mean. Beyond being a traditional microcontroller for interfacing with and controlling the real world, it boasts a powerful microprocessor that can run a full Linux operating system, complete with hardware acceleration for graphics, vision, and AI.
And as if all this weren’t exciting enough, the day Arduino announced the UNO Q—October 7, 2025—Qualcomm announced that it had entered into an agreement to acquire Arduino. The deal closed later that month, bringing Arduino under the Qualcomm umbrella.
But wait, there’s more! Earlier this year (just before Embedded World in March), the guys and gals at Arduino announced the Arduino VENTUNO Q, which they described as an “upcoming project.” Well, the “upcoming” part is here: they started taking pre-orders last month and began shipping the first units this month.
I was just chatting with Marcello Majonchi, Qualcomm’s Chief Product Officer for Arduino. Marcello explained that he thinks of the Arduino story as unfolding in three distinct phases. The first, beginning with the original Arduino project in 2005, was about democratizing electronics and computing. The second, which Marcello dates to roughly the mid-2010s, expanded this mission to encompass connectivity and the Internet of Things (IoT). Now, he says, we’ve entered the third phase: democratizing artificial intelligence (AI) at the edge, which is where the “internet rubber” meets the “real-world road” (I added the “rubber-road” part myself).
The common thread running through all three phases is taking whatever complex technology is transforming the industry at the time and making it accessible to the widest possible audience of developers. In this latest phase, the technology in question includes high-performance computing and neural acceleration at the edge. In fact, Marcello says this desire to make such capabilities available to a much larger audience was how Arduino’s relationship with Qualcomm originally began.
The opening salvo in this third phase came in 2025 in the form of the Arduino UNO Q. This introduced what Arduino calls a “dual-brain architecture,” combining a microprocessor (MPU)—think Raspberry Pi—with a microcontroller (MCU)—think traditional Arduino—on the same platform. The MPU can run Linux and handle computationally intensive tasks, while the MCU handles real-time interaction with the physical world that microcontrollers excel at.
Why bother with two brains? As Marcello explained, neither an MPU nor an MCU is inherently better than the other; they are simply good at different things. Microcontrollers excel at deterministic real-time computation. They can perform relatively simple tasks at precisely controlled times, which is why they’re widely used for things like programmable logic controllers (PLCs), motor control, actuators, and robotic arms. General-purpose microprocessors, by comparison, are wonderful at running operating systems and juggling complicated workloads involving graphics, networking, databases, and AI, but they aren’t optimized for deterministic real-time control.
Putting both processor types on the same platform gives us the best of both worlds, but this raises another question: how do the two brains talk to each other? The answer is remote procedure cal