Qualcomm, on its acquisition of maker-focused Arduino for an undisclosed amount (via Emma Roth at The Verge):

Arduino will retain its independent brand, tools, and mission, while continuing to support a wide range of microcontrollers and microprocessors from multiple semiconductor providers as it enters this next chapter within the Qualcomm family. Following this acquisition, the 33M+ active users in the Arduino community will gain access to Qualcomm Technologies’ powerful technology stack and global reach. Entrepreneurs, businesses, tech professionals, students, educators, and hobbyists will be empowered to rapidly prototype and test new solutions, with a clear path to commercialization supported by Qualcomm Technologies’ advanced technologies and extensive partner ecosystem.

“Arduino” is practically synonymous with “DIY hacker projects,” and, I’ll admit, I still think of them as just the tiny microcontroller breadboard used by hobbyists to learn electronics and programming. The company closed a $22 million fundraising round two years ago, valuing them then at $54 million, which would be a rounding error at twice that for the $182 billion Qualcomm.

This seems like an unlikely pairing, making me skeptical this will end well for Arduino, but maybe it’s just an infusion of cash, and a chance for Qualcomm to sell more of its hardware to hobbyists and tinkerers while walking them up the enterprise ladder. Still, enshittification is real, and tiny companies have a way of quietly disappearing once acquired by behemoths. Crossing my fingers for Arduino and a generation of makers.

(Arduino also announced UNO Q, a $44 USD “dual-brain platform” powered by both a Qualcomm Dragonwing processor that runs Debian Linux and a realtime microcontroller, along with the free Arduino App Lab, “a brand-new integrated development environment that unifies the journey across real-time OS, Linux, Python, and AI.” I never got into the Arduino ecosystem—I was always a software guy, so I landed on the Raspberry Pi side of the divide—but this new kit and IDE have definitely caught my eye.)