Arduino Celebrates Turning 21 with the VENTUNO Q, a High-Performance SBC for Robotics and More
Company lifts the lid on its big secret, which will be showcased during Embedded World in Nuremberg this week.
Arduino has announced a new board, ahead of its formal unveiling at Embedded World in Nuremberg this week: the Arduino VENTUNO Q, a Qualcomm Dragonwing IQ8-series single-board computer designed for intelligence at the edge, robotics, and actuation work — and to celebrate Arduino's 21st anniversary.
"'Ventuno' means twenty-one in Italian. The board happens to come out in the year of our 21st anniversary (which we'll celebrate with you during Arduino Days at the end of this month!), and while it still maintains a connection to the iconic UNO we feel it marks a true coming of age for us," the Arduino team says of the new board. "VENTUNO Q is the natural evolution of our mission to make complex technologies simple for all, because it makes advanced robotics and AI accessible to every developer, educator, and innovator."
Like the Arduino UNO Q, the first single-board computer in the Arduino UNO family, the Arduino VENTUNO Q is built around a Qualcomm system-on-chip — the Dragonwing IQ-8275, which bundles a 64-bit Kryo CPU with eight cores running at up to 2.35GHz with an Adreno 623 graphics processor, and a Hexagon digital signal processor (DSP) with on-board acceleration of machine learning and artificial intelligence workloads of up to 40 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of minimum-precision compute, plus a generous 64GB of on-board storage and 16GB of RAM. Like the Arduino UNO Q, the VENTUNO Q uses a "dual-brain" architecture with an STMicroelectronics STM32H5F5 microcontroller for real-time workloads.
"It eliminates multi-device complexity by delivering synchronized perception, decision, and action on a single board," the Arduino team claims of the benefits to this approach. "The main processor runs Linux Ubuntu or Debian, while the real-time microcontroller runs the Arduino Core on Zephyr OS, ensuring deterministic behavior for time-critical tasks."
The Arduino VENTUNO Q also benefits from work done on the Arduino UNO Q, the Arduino team says, including the recently-introduced integration with Edge Impulse Studio — allowing for on-device machine learning models to be trained and deployed from with the Arduino App Lab, an integrated development environment that can target both "brains" simultaneously. On the hardware side, the board includes full compatibility with existing Arduino UNO-compatible shield add-ons, Modulino node and other Qwiic-compatible devices, and Raspberry Pi Hardware Attached on Top (HAT) add-ons.
Arduino is set to showcase the device, which will be launching soon via the company's official store and its reseller network, soon, at an as-yet unconfirmed price point; more information is available on the Arduino website.