Qualcomm Acquires Arduino: The Wheel of History Turns
Last week, Qualcomm announced its acquisition of the renowned open-source hardware platform Arduino, simultaneously unveiling the first Arduino to feature Qualcomm silicon—the Arduino UNO Q. Unlike its classic predecessors, the UNO Q employs a “dual-brain” architecture: a Linux-running Qualcomm Dragonwing processor handles high-performance computing, while an STM32 microcontroller manages real-time control tasks. Though undeniably powerful, this design quietly departs from Arduino’s founding ethos of “simplicity, affordability, and accessibility.”
Despite Qualcomm’s promises to preserve Arduino’s brand independence and open-source nature, the community’s concerns are not unfounded—given Qualcomm’s historically aggressive stance on patent licensing and its deeply commercial DNA. At $44, the board has drifted even further from Arduino’s original mission of serving educators and makers.
Intriguingly, the name “Arduino” itself seems to carry a sense of destiny. When the project was born in 2005, its founders regularly gathered at Bar di Re Arduino (King Arduin’s Bar) in Ivrea, Italy, and thus adopted its name. That Italian king, Arduin of Ivrea, once led local forces in resistance against the Holy Roman Empire, holding out for twelve years before ultimately abdicating. With his surrender, northern Italy was absorbed into the Empire’s dominion, losing its independence for nearly 850 years.
A millennium later, Arduino—named after a rebel—has similarly been absorbed into an American tech “empire” after 20 years of independence. This cyclical echo of history is both poignant and profound. Perhaps the moment they chose that name, the seeds of this fate were already sown.
Yet just as King Arduin’s defeat could not diminish his legacy—his spirit of resistance echoing through the centuries—may Arduino’s open-source ideals and maker spirit transcend mere corporate ownership, continuing to flourish and inspire across the globe.
This acquisition illuminates an enduring dilemma of the open-source world: How can one maintain idealism while achieving commercial sustainability?
Perhaps physical entities are destined to return to dust, while only the spirit endures through time.
Recent Recommendations
Do Job Silently
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OpenSwiftUI is an open-source SwiftUI implementation aimed at research and education. As the framework continues to improve, more developers are starting to pay attention and try using it. However, during actual integration, you’ll find it’s not “plug-and-play”—it requires manual handling of private framework dependencies. To address this, project lead developer Kyle Ye has written this article, detailing the complete steps for integrating OpenSwiftUI via Swift Package Manager, including handling critical aspects like DarwinPrivateFrameworks.
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Tools
Swift Profile Recorder: A Performance Profiler Requiring No System Privileges
Swift Profile Recorder is an in-process sampling profiler open-sourced by Apple, designed specifically for Swift server-side applications and used extensively at Apple for years. Unlike traditional profiling tools (such as eBPF, DTrace) that require system privileges, it runs directly within the application process as a Swift Package, enabling On-CPU and Off-CPU profiling without additional permissions. This allows it to work in restricted environments like Kubernetes and Docker containers, where performance samples can be collected with simple curl commands and visualized using mainstream tools like Speedscope and Firefox Profiler.
The project’s “zero-privilege, easy integration, cross-platform” characteristics make production performance profiling no longer exclusive to privileged environments. For deeper insights into its background and Apple’s practical experience, I recommend reading [Introducing Swift Profile Recorder: Identifying Performance Bottlenecks in Production](https://www.swift.org/blog/swift-profile-recorder/?utm_source=fatbobman weekly issue 106&utm_medium=web) by Johannes Weiss and Mitchell Allison.
RichText: A SwiftUI Component for Free Text and View Mixing
SwiftUI’s Text cannot freely embed interactive views, and its text selection experience is lacking. RichText, developed by LiYanan, achieves text and view mixing through declarative syntax, precise typesetting based on TextKit 2, with embedded views (like Button) fully retaining their interactive capabilities, while supporting smooth text selection and copying.
TextView {
Text("Hi, This is **RichText**.") // Markdown will be parsed
" Hello " // Plain string
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print("Button Clicked")
}
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}Foundation Models Playgrounds
A collection of Playgrounds built and maintained by Ivan Campos, demonstrating how to call Apple’s Foundation Models framework for conversation, summarization, creation, tool calling, and other scenarios. Examples are organized by theme: chat conversations, summary explanations, content generation, code and data, multimodal image-text, security evaluation, vertical tools, agent patterns, etc., with each Playground focusing on a specific capability.
